Online Anonymity and Anonymous Abuse

Before I call Siobhan Baillie to speak for about 10 minutes, may I inform everybody that, from then on in, we are on a three-minute limit? For those who can participate for less than three minutes, you will be doing a favour to colleagues who are lower down on the call list.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered online anonymity and anonymous abuse.

In recent weeks, we have been rightly concerned about safety in our towns and cities, yet people face danger and harassment not just in the physical world, but on the dark cyber streets and alleyways of the internet. Cowardly keyboard warriors stalk these streets and lurk in our phones. They bully with abandon, they spread racist and misogynistic abuse, they attack looks, weight, age, race, gender, disability, success as well as failure and the young and old alike. No one is safe from their violent hate. Anonymity provides the shadows where these people can hide. It facilitates and encourages online abuse.

My own experience of hate came after the birth of my daughter last year. The outpouring of venom because I took four weeks’ maternity leave was a shock. Attacking somebody for being a mum or suggesting that a mum cannot do the job of an MP is misogynistic and, quite frankly, ridiculous. But I would be lying if I said that I did not find it very upsetting, especially at a time when I could barely move and needed to work out how to feed my new baby. Other people have suffered more—from death and rape threats to all forms of intimidation and harassment in between. Nobody should have to put up with that. Seeing the bravery with which others have confronted this menace has prompted me to campaign for change, and I am not alone.

The racism and abuse levelled at footballers is no longer from the terraces. Many England players who will run out for us tomorrow night have suffered unspeakable racist abuse. I fully support Harry Maguire’s calls for verified identification. I have spoken to the FA’s excellent Kick It Out, which has superb goals for social media companies to create robust and swift measures to take down abusive material, and for investigating authorities swiftly to identify the originators.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing today’s debate on this incredibly important issue. Will she join me in paying tribute to Katie, who is my constituent? She is a mum battling for her disabled son who is often abused online. Her petition makes the very sensible proposal to end online anonymity. No one has a right to a cloak to conceal their actions of harm. Both Katie’s petition and my hon. Friend’s own great work in this area deserve the support of the whole House.

I thank my hon. Friend; it was very kind of him to set up a meeting between me, Katie and her mum Amy. We talked about her experiences of the trolls. What they have been through is absolutely heartbreaking. Harvey has been subject to the most vile abuse, which I actually cannot bring myself to say. This has gone on his whole life. The strength with which he and his family have endured these issues is remarkable. Any mother would want to protect her children and we must arm parents with the tools to do just that.

In Stroud, a robust military veteran has had years of deliberate online attempts to ruin his business and reputation. It has nearly broken him mentally at times. The Facebook page that attacks him has a spare one in case the first gets taken down. Another constituent has endured years of stalking and harassment. She is a retired social worker. She has found the police ill equipped to deal with such fast-moving tech, and even when the perpetrators put a picture of her garage door up online—indicating they knew where she lived—she still felt unprotected. A Gloucestershire journalist was recently told by an anonymous loon that she is single because she

“is self absorbed and looks like a slut”.

I have done enough domestic violence work as a lawyer to know that such attitudes and language are a short hop, skip and a jump to violence.

Of course, not all online nastiness is anonymous. One named man said of me on Facebook last week:

“She should be banished from our lovely Stroud…years ago she’d have been shot on the spot for her arrogance and hypocrisy…yet people voted for the ass licking vile piece of slime.”

Lovely—and I could go on and on. I do not have enough time to properly address other reports of dangerous antisemitism, fake news, vaccine misinformation, deliberate reputation ruining and online fraud. That is on top of the daily legal but harmful harassing-type behaviour, plus posts that have the veneer of a justified challenge but are really just deliberately spiking pile-ons and hate.

It may be of use if I go through some of the timings for the rest of the debate and the afternoon. The wind-ups will start at 4.21, with six minutes for John Nicolson. We will then have Jo Stevens at 4.27 and the Minister, Matt Warman, at 4.35. At 4.43, Siobhan Baillie will have a couple of minutes to wind up the debate.

The time limit is three minutes and I must ask hon. Members to observe it very strictly, because otherwise colleagues will simply not be able to get into the debate. They will be doing colleagues a favour if they can even manage to deliver their speeches in less than three minutes.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on securing this debate.

Legislating on online harms gives us a vital opportunity to call a halt to the extremism, misinformation and avalanche of harmful abuse that has become commonplace on social media. Whether on big platforms such as Twitter or fringe platforms such as Telegram, harmful content is now all-pervasive. Recently, another tsunami of racist abuse was directed at the footballers Marcus Rashford, Lauren James and Anthony Martial. Sometimes, the perpetrators can be identified, but too often those responsible do not reveal who they are. In the past, we argued that online anonymity supported open democratic debate; I am now convinced that anonymity encourages online harm that is not just hateful in itself but is used to spread lies about individuals and aims to undermine their credibility and so shut down their voices. Far from nurturing democratic debate, anonymity undermines democracy.

My work challenging Jew-hate reached a climax last autumn, with the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission report into antisemitism in the Labour party. Community Security Trust found that my public comments at that time led to 90,000 mentions on social media. The vast majority were abusive, racist and misogynistic.

Let me share just a few; some are very offensive.

“I hope she dies soon. Dumb bitch”;

“nothing but a couple of shit-stirring…cum buckets, bought and paid for by Israel.”

I was told I was a “Mossad agent”, a “Zionist stooge”, a wrinkly “pedo-lover”. “Traitor.” “Snake.” “Rat.” “Shill.” “Nazi”. This abuse is aggressive, harmful, yet sometimes I have no idea who said it.

Ending anonymity for those who promulgate hate or harm is key to effectively combating it. We must compel social media companies to be able to identify all users. We know that is easily done. Take the online payment company PayPal. Everyone using PayPal must provide their identity when setting up an account. Users’ identity is not public, but it can be traced if required. If social media companies acted similarly, those who use online anonymity for good, such as whistleblowers, or victims of child abuse or domestic abuse, could continue to do so, but those who use anonymity to spread harmful content would be identifiable, and could be dealt with by the appropriate authorities. Knowing that would, at a stroke—

I am sorry; we will have to leave it there. Time is up.

How deeply upsetting for everybody to hear that very powerful speech by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). It is humbling to follow it. I congratulate her on what she said and the bravery she has shown. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on securing this debate and thank the Committee for granting it.

Of course plenty of people are anonymous without ever being abusive and, God knows, plenty of abuse comes from people who are perfectly open about who they are, but there is something of a media hierarchy in human nature. I think we all recognise that there are many people who would say things to someone on the phone that they would not say in person, who would put things in email that they would not say on the phone, would put things on Twitter that they would not write in an email, and yes, will post anonymously something they would never want to see their name written next to.

I do not want to ban anonymity, any more than my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud would. People have long sought its sense of freedom, its disinhibiting effect, its privacy and occasionally its hilarity and enjoyment, and there is nothing wrong with any of that. As long as there is no harm to anybody else, it is no business of the state. It is also important, of course, for activists in oppressive regimes, or for people seeking advice on sensitive issues, to discover a community out there, to know that they are not alone. But while in one context anonymity can give voice to the voiceless and empower the oppressed, in another it can coarsen public discourse and facilitate abuse. Surely it is possible for us to have the one without having to have the other. In this debate we will hear, indeed have already heard, about some really nasty abuses—in many cases, criminal abuses, where the issue with anonymity is really one about registration; it is about the impediments to enforcement action. Many of those cases will be about people in the public eye.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on securing today’s debate. There are two issues that I want to touch on briefly in relation to anonymity regarding online accounts.

The first issue is impersonation online, which I experienced in 2019 just prior to the general election as I gave up my Twitter MP handle. Within an hour, someone had stolen it and followed a number of my colleagues, and began to tweet out as though they were me with my Twitter name DrLisaCameronMP. It was not a parody account, which we can all relate to, but one which I believe to have been made in malice to impersonate an MP. We all know how many constituents contact us initially through social media with crucial private issues who would have been affected by this individual acting with impunity.

When we reported it, we were originally told that there was nothing that breached standards. However, this is a serious matter not just for public figures but for those who come in confidence to seek our help. My situation could not be rectified until I contacted the CEO of Twitter. Following the election, I even had difficulty getting my own handle back, as I was initially advised that it belonged to someone else. No one was held responsible and it would have taken a police investigation to find out. It should simply never be allowed to happen. Where it does, there should be some means of recourse due to the adverse impact on our most vulnerable constituents.

The second issue relates to my role as vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism. Sadly, and as we might expect, antisemitism and extremism are a key concern in relation to online anonymity. Disguising one’s identity is not new for extremists, as the Antisemitism Policy Trust pointed out in its briefing on online anonymity. The Ku Klux Klan and others have long sought to cover their faces in order to carry out extreme acts. The internet now offers anonymous abusers and spreaders of radical and violent ideologies a degree of protection by allowing them to hide their identities. According to the Community Security Trust’s incident statistics for October 2020, nearly 40% of reported antisemitic abuse online during that month came from fully anonymous and partially anonymous users. That is an extremely worrying trend.

Placing sensible checks on anonymity and incentivising against harm from anonymous accounts can help victims regain a sense of control and confidence, and would surely disrupt what are presently significant levels of abuse. I urge that restrictions be applied to online abusive actions, much more so than they currently are. Existing legislation urgently needs to be updated through the proposed online safety Bill.

We should not have to tolerate online abuse targeting individuals with dehumanising language and threats of injury. Anonymity on social media has provided some people with a platform to abuse others in this way. There are clearly two parties at fault: the person who creates the hateful content, and the platform that both lets them do it and allows what they have posted to remain visible. Making people reveal their true identity to a tech company when creating a social media account would, I believe, make it more likely that they will treat other users with respect. These tech platforms also need to co-operate more effectively and transparently with investigations into the behaviour of their users.

Social media companies too often mistake harmful hate speech for legitimate freedom of expression. A recent report by The Guardian revealed internal moderator guidelines at Facebook, reportedly leaked to the newspaper, that say that public figures are considered to be permissible targets for certain types of abuse, including calls for their death. More needs to be done not just to take down harmful content, but to ensure that social media companies do not amplify it in their systems. No one has a freedom of expression right to be promoted on TikTok’s “For You” page or the Facebook news feed. An internal company report in 2016 told Facebook that 64% of people who joined groups sharing extremist content did so at the prompting of Facebook’s recommendation tools. Another report from August last year noted that 70% of the top 100 most active civic groups in the USA are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinformation, bullying and harassment.

The business model of social media companies is based around engagement, meaning that people who engage in and with abusive behaviour will see more of it, because that is what the platform thinks they are interested in. When we talk about regulating harmful content online, we are mainly talking about that model and the money these companies make from all user-generated content as long as it keeps people on their site. Content that uses dehumanising language to attack others is not only hurtful to the victim but more likely to encourage others to do the same.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on securing this important debate. Like the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), I had one of those difficult conversations this week, which I am sure many Members across the House have had, when I saw reports that the Facebook moderators had said that death threats towards members of the public who are in the public realm were acceptable. It is never easy, getting a death threat or a rape threat. I first started getting them in 2013, when I helped the campaigner, Caroline Criado Perez, to campaign to put Jane Austen on banknotes, and in the past eight years the situation has gone from bad to worse. Back then, it felt shocking. It was unusual. It was definitely a matter for the police. Now it is all too commonplace.

One of the things we have to recognise is that this it is not an equal experience. Women, particularly women of colour, and people from non-binary backgrounds are especially at risk of being abused online. Some 82% of women politicians from around the world report experiencing psychological violence, and half of them have had rape or death threats. In the 2017 election, MPs who were women of colour were particularly targeted, receiving 35% more abuse than their white colleagues, with my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) receiving half of all the abuse online during that election. It is little wonder that by 2019, many colleagues from across the House cited the abuse that they had faced as the reason they were standing down.

This is not just about people in the public domain. It is also about the experience of women and people of colour across our country, and we know that that has got worse during the pandemic, with a 50% increase in the abuse, according to Glitch!, which has been monitoring this. It is not just the words; it is the sheer volume of abuse we get. And it is not just online any more; it is leaching into our offline world, and it is increasingly not anonymous, with people feeling emboldened to use abuse as it becomes commonplace. Every year that we delay enacting this legislation is another year when we see voices being removed from our public domain, so let us kill the idea that this is about free speech. It is not free speech when 50% of the conversation is living in fear of what someone might do, or of being found or being terrorised, and it is not free speech when we are not hearing those voices—that diversity of voices that improves our debates and discussions.

I want to begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), not just on securing this debate but on what she said. In this debate there is one central question, which is how we are to keep online anonymity available for those who need and deserve it and yet ensure that it cannot be used as a shield by those who do not. Of course, some will argue that anonymity online is part of freedom of speech, and that the freedom to hold opinions without interference, which is included in article 19 of the universal declaration on human rights, implies a right to anonymity, but I do not think it is that simple.

Human rights are often about a balance of rights. The right to anonymity in what someone says has to be balanced against the right of the people they abuse to speak freely themselves and the need to hold them to account for making their speech less free. These are of course difficult balances to strike, but if we care about everyone’s freedom of speech, we cannot avoid them.

Freedom of speech is not unrestricted in other arenas, and it should not be unrestricted on social media either. That restriction often comes via the criminal law, including online, but there is much we should not tolerate that falls short of criminal behaviour, damaging individuals and damaging us all. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) that in addressing anonymous abuse of an individual, we perhaps should start, counter-intuitively, by looking not at the merits of anonymity, but at the merits of verifiable identity. Whether it is in online banking, shopping or combating deep fakes, it will increasingly help to be able to demonstrate who we are, and if we can establish reliable ways of proving identity, we should be able to choose to interact online only with others whose identity can be verified or who are willing to reveal it. However, anonymous content that damages us all, from disinformation to extremism, is a different problem. Here I think we should consider the disclosure of identity only with judicial sanction, in the same way as other intrusions into privacy such as search warrants or phone tapping, which require the authority of a judge.