[Relevant documents: First Report of the Petitions Committee, Online abuse and the experience of disabled people, HC 759, and the Government Response, HC 2122.]
I draw hon. Members’ attention to the fact that our proceedings are being made accessible for people who are deaf or hearing impaired. The interpreters are using British Sign Language, and parliamentlive.tv will show a live simultaneous interpretation and live subtitling of the debate.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered e-petition 190627 relating to online abuse.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. The petition was started by Katie Price following the abuse of her son Harvey online. The Petitions Committee set up an inquiry into the subject, throughout which we have been led by the experiences of disabled people. We held an event in Westminster to listen to their experiences and scope out our inquiry, as well as six further events around the country. We took formal evidence from the police, technology companies, charities, the Minister and disabled people themselves, and we published draft recommendations and consulted on them. I think we were the first Select Committee to do so, and we held further events around the country to make that work.
I place on record my thanks to all the people who gave so generously of their time to engage with us, and to the Select Committee staff, who not only worked extremely hard on the inquiry but travelled widely throughout the country to do so. That engagement was very important to us because, despite the fact that other Select Committees have done excellent work on both hate crime and internet safety, we found that the voices of disabled people were often not heard, and that became even clearer to us as the inquiry proceeded.
We found that rather puzzling; after all, disabled people are more likely to be in contact with a range of services—from council services to the Department for Work and Pensions and the health service. They therefore should be easy to contact, although, as one of our witnesses said:
“We’re not hard to reach, only easy to ignore.”
That leads to a misunderstanding of what disabled people are facing online, and what their problems really are.
When we asked both the technology companies and the Minister questions about disabled people, we often got answers about children. The Government’s Green Paper on internet safety said very little about the experiences of disabled people. When we raised that with the Minister, she kindly wrote to us in April last year saying that the Government planned to hold a roundtable with disability organisations and social media companies. The only problem with that is that the inquiry closed in December 2017.
Most disabled people are not children; they are adults who are able to make their own choices and decisions, and they deserve to have their voices heard. What we found out when talking to them was truly shocking. Disabled people are less likely to use the internet than the majority of the population but, among those who do, many are avid users. To be frank, the internet has been a boon to many disabled people. It has allowed them to connect with others with similar conditions, which is very important, especially if they have a rare condition. It has allowed them to widen their social circle, progress in their careers, organise, campaign and challenge stereotypes. However, while doing that, they face the most horrendous abuse—not occasionally, but day in, day out.
Such abuse is, frankly, a stain on our society. Disabled people are regularly told that they should have been aborted. They are targeted with requests for explicit images—the implication being that disabled women, in particular, ought to be grateful for any attention. They are told that they are benefit scroungers or fraudsters, and a drain on our society. That leads to a culture of fear among many disabled people who post about their lives online.
I thank the Chair of the Petitions Committee for giving way. She and I worked together on the report, and I commend her for the speech that she is making. Almost all of us in the Chamber know that people say things online that they would never say directly to someone’s face. However, one of the most distressing aspects of the report—this was shared with me during one of the outreach events that we held in Newcastle—is that the abuse that disabled people receive online often reflects the abuse that they receive out and about in their daily lives in the real world. Does my hon. Friend agree that, as is set out in a conclusion of the report, the Government need to amend hate crime legislation to ensure that disability hate crime is dealt with on a par with other hate crime offences, to send a very clear message?
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend is exactly right, and I will come to that point later in my remarks.
Online, those with visible disabilities are often mocked for how they look. Those with learning difficulties are targeted for sexual or financial exploitation. Some of the terms used—I will repeat them only to show how vile they are—such as “mong”, “retard” and “spastic”, are as vile as the worst terms of racist abuse; yet they are often not treated in the same way. People even join Facebook groups that disabled people use for support so that they can steal images and transform them into so-called jokes or memes online.
My hon. Friend is entirely right; the disabled people we spoke to were very clear that the abuse that they get online reflects attitudes in society. That is why our report called for more education. We found that 21% of young adults would avoid speaking to a disabled person. Unless we break down those barriers, things will not change. I am sorry that the Government were rather dismissive of that recommendation in their response.
Disabled people were also clear that the abuse had increased since 2010, when certain politicians started to ramp up the rhetoric about benefit fraudsters and scroungers, despite knowing that, even on the worst estimate, benefit fraud is only 1% of the spending. In many estimates, it is less than that. That should be a reminder to everybody that such rhetoric has an impact on real people living their day-to-day lives.
We were clear that part of the way to counter the abuse is to promote more positive images of disabled people. After all, they are 20% of the population, and 19% of the working-age population. They are our friends, neighbours and work colleagues; yet they are seldom visible, either in the media or Government campaigns. That is why we recommended that the Government ensure that there are positive images of disabled people in all their campaigns, events and advertising.
The Government’s response says that they used a picture of a disabled person in a campaign on transport because disabled people often have problems with transport. It would be an understatement to say that that comprehensively misses the point. We do not want always to see pictures of disabled people who have problems—indeed, sometimes they themselves are seen as the problem. We want to see pictures of disabled people going about their everyday lives at work, at leisure and contributing to society, as they do.
That kind of misunderstanding is everywhere. It leads to a situation in which disabled people who report abuse are often told to go offline. That is as unacceptable in the 21st century as it would be to tell a black person or a disabled person not to go down the high street in case they get abused. When that happens, disabled people face a double whammy: first, their health is damaged by the constant abuse—Members of this House ought to know how that feels—and then they are denied opportunities that would improve their health, in volunteering or in work, and their social circle is narrowed. For those who are in work, constantly having to change their details to avoid abuse leads to loss of employment opportunities or promotion.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech and is setting out some really unbelievable issues that need to be taken on board and tackled to protect disabled people online and offline. Does she agree that some of the issues result from the fact that the legislation that covers these crimes is so old? I see from the Library briefing that the most recent applicable legislation is from 1997, and some of it goes back to 1861. That is not to say that it is not good or appropriate legislation, but it is clear that our legislative guidelines are so out of date that they cannot take into consideration the modern world and the challenges that disabled people face online.
Helen Jones
The hon. Lady makes a very valid point. I will move on to legislation shortly.
Our inquiry has led us to conclude that social media companies do not employ enough moderators, or enough suitably trained moderators, to deal with this abuse. Given how much profit they are making, that is frankly scandalous. We also found that there is a lot of confusion about what is the responsibility of social media companies and what is the responsibility of the police. That confusion is often fed by the social media companies themselves.
I thank the hon. Lady for making a very passionate and capable speech. Does she agree that perhaps we need someone to be a spokesperson for disabled people online, in a similar way to what has been done for racism and hate crime? Does she feel that perhaps the online companies should set aside a figure such as 1% of their earnings to address the issue? Maybe it is because online abuse as a result of racism and hate seems to be—I use the word very loosely—“sexy”, whereas abuse of disabled people is not. We need someone to be a spokesperson; does the hon. Lady agree that we should set somebody aside for that purpose?
Helen Jones
Whether there should be a particular person charged with that is one issue, but I think disabled people are well able to speak for themselves about this, and have been doing so when people choose to hear them.
Social media companies should certainly do more. For example, we found that Twitter talks about dealing with threats of violence by removing an offending tweet or suspending an account, but nowhere does it say that threats to kill are a serious criminal offence and should be reported to the police. That in itself is breeding confusion. We often found that the police were having to pick up things that should really have been dealt with by social media companies. We think it quite wrong that police resources should have to be used in that way because the social media companies are failing.
Social media companies need clear rules, policies, mechanisms and settings that are accessible to all disabled people. They also need to be much more proactive in removing hate speech from their sites and reporting potential criminal offences, including the theft of images, which was one of the worst things that we found—particularly images of children that were used to create so-called memes or jokes.
Rightly, the Government’s White Paper on online harms commits to imposing a duty of care on social media companies and making them responsible for harmful or illegal content on their sites. However, the document refers repeatedly to
“children and other vulnerable users”.
We must understand that many disabled people resent the categorisation of all disabled people as vulnerable. They are not. Like the rest of us, some are vulnerable and some are not. Mostly, they are disadvantaged by how society treats them, rather than by the intrinsic nature of their condition. I hope that the Minister’s reply will reassure us that those things will apply to all kinds of abuse.
What is very clear is that self-regulation has comprehensively failed disabled people in the same way that it has failed many other people who use the internet. Unfortunately, so has the law, as the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) pointed out. The Government tell us constantly that what is illegal offline is illegal online. That is true as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. There are potentially 30 statutes that could apply to online offences. Some offences, such as the theft of images or instigating pile-ons, can occur only online.
The fact that, as one of our witnesses put it,
“not all the pieces of the jigsaw join up”
is leading to a low rate of prosecution in this area. If the law cannot deal with the creation of fake child pornography to mock a disabled child and his family, as happened in the case of Harvey Price, it is simply inadequate. We need a new law that is fit for the digital age, which is why we have recommended that the Government bring forward legislation as a matter of urgency and consult disabled people before doing so.
My hon. Friend is being generous with her time. From the most appalling case in my constituency—the abuse and murder of Lee Irving—I know that so-called mate crime is an enormous danger, particularly for people with learning disabilities. The phrase does not adequately describe in any way the serious financial, physical and often sexual exploitation faced by far too many disabled people at the hands of those they are led to believe are their friends. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that although many disabled people can feel isolated in the real world, the friendships that they develop on social media platforms can actually pose a real danger and harm? Social media companies do not have a grip on this, and the legislation does not reflect the seriousness of such offences.
Helen Jones
I agree. We say in our report that
“mate crime is hate crime”,
and it should be treated as such. There is a real risk to people from the activities of those vile individuals who target them for exploitation.
We have been asked, and were asked in the petition, whether we thought that a separate register of offenders was necessary for online hate crime. We came to the conclusion that there is no need for a separate register if our suggested changes to the law and to disability hate crime legislation are to be instigated, because those crimes would show up through a normal Disclosure and Barring Service check. We should make it very clear that at the moment, they do not. Often it records the offence but not that it was motivated by hatred of a disabled person. In organisations that are employing someone to deal with disabled people, there is a problem with being unable to check whether they have a record of not instigating any hate crime. That is a real problem, which we think needs to be addressed by changes in the law.
The other thing that we encountered and felt very strongly about during our inquiry was the fact that disabled people do not feel adequately protected by the law, as I said. We were so concerned that we recommended in our report that the Government should commission an overarching review of disabled people’s experiences of the law, including their experiences of reporting crime and giving evidence.
Disabled people are already marginalised by society. They are being marginalised even more by being abused or driven away from one of the key tools of the 21st century: the internet. That really cannot carry on, and I hope the Minister will commit to consulting disabled people on the proposals in the White Paper, just as I hope she will commit to ensuring that internet and social media companies consult them on their policies, settings and so on. In my view, saying simply that that is an example of good practice is not strong enough. We need to ensure that it will happen, because time and again it is clear that disabled people are not heard when they raise issues that concern them. They are not heard when they talk about this kind of abuse, which they get all the time on the internet. It is time that they were fully heard, and that we grasped this issue and did something about it. I hope the Minister will commit to doing that today.
I welcome this debate and am grateful to the Petitions Committee for ensuring that it happened. I endorse a great deal of what the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones), the Chair of the Committee, said. I know that she and her fellow Committee members have pursued this issue with great diligence on behalf of the petitioners.
My interest in the matter is that Katie Price, who organised the petition, is a constituent of mine, as is Katie’s mother, Amy, who is watching the debate from the Public Gallery. I have just met Katie and Amy again, having had a number of discussions with them about what motivated them to bring the issue to public attention. The terrible online bullying of Katie’s disabled son, Harvey, and the effect it had on him and on Katie and her family, made her determined to raise the profile of the issue. She was told that, as a public figure, she should expect to take the rough with the smooth, that she should have a thicker skin, that she had asked for trouble through many of the things she had said, and that she therefore had no justification for raising the issue. That seems to miss the point entirely. Whether someone is a public figure, or members of their family are public figures, and whether they have been brought into the public eye by accident or design, it is never justifiable to bully a young person. It is especially unjustifiable to bully a young disabled person who cannot answer back and might be particularly vulnerable to such bullying.
This issue is so important because it draws attention to a new form of bullying and a new means of enabling bullying. Bullying has been around as long as the human race, but it has been enabled, amplified and in many ways made a great deal worse by social media. We all recognise that the law, and the way we deal with the issue, has not kept up with the growth of the problem in our society in recent years. As recently as two decades ago we simply would not have been talking about this as an issue. Online bullying has exploded because of the prevalence of social media. There is a common recognition that we must do something about it; the real question is what?
It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I will take a few minutes to talk about the absolutely wonderful work of a rather new organisation called Glitch, which draws attention to the absolute blight of online abuse that my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) spoke about so powerfully.
Glitch has highlighted some of the facts that demonstrate how urgent a matter online abuse is. As we all know, last year’s consultation from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport found that four in 10 people had been affected by abuse and that globally, women are 27 times more likely to be affected by abuse, while women of colour face yet more abuse on top of that. Glitch was founded by Seyi Akiwowo, who I am proud to call a friend. I have known her for about 10 years, and first met her at her sixth-form college. She did work experience in my office, and with that experience, become the youngest local councillor in Newham. I am proud to say that she now regularly visits Parliament to talk to us about her experiences and what she does, and also visits other Parliaments and the United Nations.
Glitch was founded because of Seyi’s personal experience and the experiences of many others who have suffered abuse online. Such abuse could easily have driven them out of online spaces entirely; destroyed their mental health; and ended their careers before they had even started. To be honest, that could have happened to Seyi when she first put a tentative toe in the waters of politics. A video of her speaking at the European Parliament was reposted on Twitter and became a magnet for really vile racist and sexist abuse.
Seyi is an amazingly talented young black woman who dared to participate, and she was abused online in such an appalling way. She was called the n-word. Obviously, there were death threats. There was appalling misogyny. The trolls absolutely delighted in referring to female genital mutilation, rape, and even lynching. Of course, Seyi was distraught, but being who she is, she decided to do something about it. That was when she learned how poor the support for people who are being abused can be and how long it can take for anyone to do anything about it.
Much social media abuse is organised in secret and closed groups. The trolls then dogpile and harass people, and it sometimes takes a physical form, when employers are contacted, for example. The police do not have specialist teams or the legal force to deal with that. Should that not be taken up as part of the legislation?
My hon. Friend is right. When I was shadow Minister of State for Policing, I visited police forces that raised that issue, and they talked about how they just do not have the resources to deal with it. They also talked to me about how that type of abuse is totally organised and is not something that just happens randomly. There are little offline cabals of bad people who collude and conspire together to troll and show hatred, misogyny, racism, you name it—the kind of things that our communities can well do without. Yes, we absolutely need to fund our police and give them the tools that they need to enforce our laws.
Glitch also argues that the prevention of abuse should be put first, which means a digital citizenship education. That is something that Glitch is involved in, to empower young people to interact positively and safely with others online. There is evidence of the impact of that strategy in Australia and from organisations such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. If the Minister is interested, there is proper evidence out there, and all we have to do is look at what has worked elsewhere, so that we can import the best of it. Frankly, we need it.
Finally, Glitch is one of more than 100 organisations that are campaigning for just 1% of the new digital services tax to be used to support the work of diverse civil society groups. An extra £4 million for that work would not change the face of the internet overnight, but I am sure that we all agree that it would build capacity and world-leading expertise. I honestly think that that would be a great investment in a flourishing digital economy, in healthier communities and in a healthier democracy. I hope that the Minister will respond to those three requests specifically.
Amazing young people like Seyi have grown up with the internet, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North rightly said in her excellent contribution, online spaces are too often filled with abuse that simply would not be tolerated in other public spaces. By treating the online world like the wild west for so long and refusing to get to grips with the difficult questions about regulation, we in this place have let those people down. Online abuse has to stop and we have to stop it.
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We cannot do anything about this problem until we start to understand it, but people do not. For example, we became aware during our inquiry that a lot of the abuse related to football, with people using disability terms as insults. Shockingly and appallingly, they were using the name of Harvey Price, who is a child and a football fan, to insult someone on their ability as a footballer. We wrote to the footballing organisations—the Professional Footballers Association, Kick It Out, the Football Association, the Premier League and the English Football League—but only one replied before our inquiry concluded. The Premier League’s reply was about access to football grounds and abuse at the grounds—it just did not get it. It is shocking that some of those organisations did not reply at all; it is shameful, in fact, because clubs and footballers have a great influence on their fans. I hope that in future they will use their position to call out hatred of disabled people in the same way that they have rightly called out racism associated with the game.
It is that lack of understanding that leads to disabled people being categorised as children and to their voices not being heard. We have therefore recommended that in future the Government should consult disabled people explicitly and directly on all matters that concern them—not those who claim to speak on their behalf, but disabled people themselves.
We were bemused about why social media companies have failed to engage with people who could be among their strongest advocates. What engagement there has been has come too late and has often been too little. For example, where people with learning difficulties are concerned, Facebook told us that it thought its how-to videos made easy-read guidelines unnecessary, while Google said that it thought its community guidelines met the easy-read guidelines. Disabled people disagreed: they do not.
Twitter told us that it thought that simplifying its policies would make them harder to understand, yet easy-read versions are frequently produced of complex documents such as health consultations, tenancy agreements and even—dare I say it—Select Committee reports. It is not that the guidance and expertise needed to produce easy-read versions are not available; it is that social media companies have never thought to seek that guidance and act on it.
We also found that most disabled people, like the rest of us, were confused by the fact that policies are called different things on different sites. Even more importantly, reporting mechanisms are often not accessible to disabled people. Shockingly, we heard again and again that when disabled people have reported hate speech, often nothing has been done.
The Government should make disability hate crime an offence in the same way that crime against someone due to their race or religion is an offence. At the moment, it is only an aggravating factor at sentencing, and it is necessary to prove that someone committed a crime because of hostility to someone due to their disability, which is a very high threshold. Both the Crown Prosecution Service and Detective Inspector John Donovan of the Metropolitan police’s online hate crime hub pointed us to the research by the University of Sussex, which shows that disability hate crime was under-reported and under-prosecuted due to the current state of the law.
In their White Paper, the Government include hate crime in a list of harms that they say are clearly defined. I am afraid that it is not clearly defined on disability hate crime, and it urgently needs to be. As our inquiry proceeded, it became clear to us that disabled people do not feel adequately protected by the law, and do not feel that they are heard when they report crimes. People not being heard properly was a recurring theme throughout our inquiry.
Some good work has been done at senior levels of the police and the CPS, but the law will not work properly unless that percolates down through the organisations, and unless the person on the desk in the police station or the officer who comes out to see people understands it. That is why we have recommended more training for police officers, including in dealing with people who have learning disabilities or autism, so that they are not automatically pigeonholed as being unreliable witnesses.
There are four areas that we must look at, accepting that the problem is very great indeed—we do not need to discuss whether it is or not. The Law Commission has said that
“in 2017 28% of UK internet users were on the receiving end of trolling, harassment or cyberbullying.”
That is a huge proportion of the population. The question is: how can we deal with it, particularly when it does not cross the line between activity that is clearly criminal and activity that is sub-criminal but nevertheless needs to be dealt with?
Although the Law Commission’s November 2018 report stated that
“we do not consider there to be major gaps in the current state of the criminal law concerning abusive and offensive online communications,”
it then gave the very important caveat that
“there is considerable scope to improve the criminal law in this area”.
It made a number of recommendations on how offences, particularly those relating to grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false communication, should be tightened up. I hope that the Minister will explain how the Government intend to respond to those recommendations.
The Law Commission noted that there are several practical and cultural barriers to enforcement. That is the second issue. The first is whether the law itself is adequate. Even if the law is correctly framed to deal with online abuse—as I have said, there are areas where it needs improving—the real question is whether it is being effectively enforced. There is little doubt that the law enforcement authorities have struggled with how to deal with the huge explosion of social media. The Law Commission noted:
“the sheer scale of abusive and offensive communications, and the limited resources…a persistent cultural tolerance of online abuse”—
I will come to that—the need to balance protecting individuals from harm and freedom of expression; technical barriers that make it difficult to prove the identity of perpetrators; and jurisdictional issues in a highly globalised world. Those are all reasons why it might be hard to enforce the law, but that does not mean that we should not make greater efforts to do so.
I want to raise the question of whether the police are adequately structured, and whether the resources are sufficiently following the need for them to deal with this activity. There is no doubt that crime is changing—this is a very good example of that. The police always need more resources, and I am aware that the Government have recently been increasing police resources, but does the current structure of policing make it easy for individual forces to deal with issues such as online crime? Would this kind of crime be better dealt with through some kind of collaborative police activity, or even some radically new police organisation at national level? Is it an example of a kind of crime that should make us look again at the structure of policing, even while we maintain individual police forces across the country for other forms of volume crime? It is worth looking at that, because I think there is a capability issue in relation to how the police deal with these problems, as well as a resources issue.
The second point, therefore, is that we must enforce the existing law more effectively, and it must be enforced just as much online as it is offline. The police and prosecutors often have difficult decisions to make about where the line should be drawn and when it is in the public interest to prosecute. They must make those decisions after having investigated these crimes properly. We cannot have a general absence of investigation simply because the issues are so great that the police feel unable to deal with them.
The third area where we need more action is the responsibility of social media companies to police their own platforms. That is clearly today’s zeitgeist. Gone are the days when those companies could simply say that they are merely publishing platforms and that they do not have the ability or the responsibility to deal with offensive conduct. They do. Although much of the focus is on material that poses a serious threat to the public—it is quite proper that social media companies are under enormous pressure to deal with that—they should also not tolerate hateful content any more than a conventional publisher would in their organs.
We are entitled to expect social media companies to do more to deal with the persistent trolling of people and to ensure that reports of such activity are investigated effectively. We must face down those who say that there should be free speech in this area, that we should all have broad shoulders, and that it is not the role of social media companies to act as police officers. Actually, they do have a responsibility in this area. We cannot allow the world wide web to be some kind of wild west where anything goes. The way these platforms are being used is doing great harm, particularly to young people’s mental health and happiness.
Those who are making money out of these immensely popular social platforms—we all use them, and they do bring a lot of pleasure and happiness to millions of people—must also recognise the ways in which they can be abused. They must take action to deal with that. The action they take must address conduct that is not just criminal and dangerous, but hateful. They have a responsibility to act, big though the problem is. The Government’s online harms White Paper is a step in the right direction. I reject those who say that it represents too much interference in free speech. It is about ensuring that the companies behave like responsible publishers and in a way that we would expect newspapers to behave.
The fourth area—I will conclude on this—is talked about less. It relates to civil society itself and our responsibility to encourage a discourse that is civil, respectful and not hateful. All those who lead in society, not least Members of Parliament, must say that there are ways of speaking to people that are no more acceptable simply because it is in an online discussion than they would be if it were a face-to-face discussion. We appear to be living in an angrier society, in which it is acceptable to abuse people, and in which licence is taken with a lot of angry outbursts on social media. It may be true that public figures should have broader shoulders, but when such comments spill over into bullying, particularly of younger people, they should not be tolerated.
We must take action collectively; we cannot just leave it to law enforcement. We cannot just toughen up the law and demand more of law enforcement agencies and social media companies. Those things must happen, but we also have a responsibility in society to take a step back and say, “Actually, some of the ways in which we are discussing issues has gone too far; it is too angry and hateful, and language should be moderated.” People who use excessive language and do not behave in a civilised way should be called out. If we ourselves are not behaving in that way, we cannot call out those who are doing that.
Those are the four areas where action is needed. Action in one area will not be sufficient. This really is not just about changing the law, important though some changes will be. It is not just about law enforcement; it is also about the responsibility of the social media companies and society at large. We will tackle this problem only by acting across the board. Let us not lose sight of the importance of dealing with it.
I pay tribute to Katie for having the courage to raise the issue, for facing down those who have criticised her for doing so, and for securing the Petition Committee’s investigation and report into online abuse. I hope that she keeps going and recognises that she is making progress. Her concern is, although we talk a lot, what progress will be made? That is a legitimate question for any member of the public to ask. We have these debates, but what will actually happen as a consequence?
I will finish by quoting words from Katie’s petition, which are powerful and speak for themselves:
“Help me to hammer home worldwide that bullying is unacceptable whether it’s face to face or in an online space.”
Surely we can all agree with that.
I remember clearly the day that Seyi rang me to let me know what was happening. I remember her calling and telling me how she felt violated and let down. She was so angry, but proud. I remember how I felt: I was absolutely furious, and I was so much more furious about being completely and utterly impotent when I tried to get the abuse taken down. I am a vocal, committed, determined and clear MP. Anybody who has heard me advocate on behalf of constituents knows that I can be clear, yet I could not get that abuse taken off the internet, and it went on for days. My office and I repeatedly phoned Twitter to try to get the trolls taken down.
Seyi was rightly determined not to let that keep happening to others unchallenged, so she founded Glitch and has helped to ensure that the issue that we are discussing is recognised as urgent and receives an urgent response from the Government. Glitch has some clear and sensible asks, three of which I will highlight.
First, Glitch points out that although legal reform through the White Paper on online harms and beyond is welcome, no law will do the job unless it can be enforced. We therefore need a sustained commitment to training and funding our police teams properly so that they can expand the work that they do currently.