Sub-Committee on Disinformation

When we look at the potential application of technology, the problem is only set to get worse, given the phenomenon of deep fake content. That is when someone takes a recording of your voice—I am sure they would not do it in your case, Mr Gapes—and creates a fake video image of you, then writes their own words and has them played out through your mouth in the film. We are all familiar with those grainy films that emerge during political campaigns whose production quality is not great because they are often shot on someone’s smartphone. Imagine the capability to do that easily in a totally fake way and to release a film of a politician supposedly saying something malicious or misleading during the final days of an election campaign. That capability exists, and we need the tools in place to fight back against it.

Since we published the Committee’s report in February, we have seen other events that lead us to believe that this is an ongoing and growing problem. We were all shocked and appalled at the way in which harmful footage from the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, was livestreamed on Facebook and shared continuously on social media platforms around the world, and particularly YouTube, for a number of days afterwards.

We are also concerned about the role of organisations that spread news and information about political events in this country—this is particularly linked to Brexit—but that we do not know much about. The Committee’s inquiry identified an organisation called Mainstream Network, which was contacting people through social media with adverts and asking them to lobby their MP to vote in favour of a hard Brexit and to “Chuck Chequers”—to use the expression at the time—and not support the Prime Minister’s negotiating strategy.

People have a right to a political opinion, and there is nothing wrong with that, but when they are being targeting by an organisation and they do know who is doing that, who is providing the money or who is supporting that organisation, that becomes a problem. In our campaigns as politicians, we have to put legal imprints on our leaflets, posters and flyers to make it clear who they are from, but people do not have to do that online, and those loopholes are being exploited. We have also seen campaigns and organisations other than just Mainstream Network, such as We are the 52% and Britain’s Future, where large amounts of money are being spent to target people with messaging, but we do not know who is doing that. That is going on all the time and on a growing scale.

The purpose of the Sub-Committee is to provide an institutional home for the Select Committee to build on the work of its initial inquiry, to look at new incidents of disinformation campaigns, where they lack transparency and where they are deliberately misleading, and to recognise that this is a form of harmful content that needs to be addressed. We look forward to the publication of the Government’s White Paper on online harms, which I believe will happen early next week, so that we can see what ideas they propose and understand more about their response to the Select Committee report, which covered many of those issues. The Sub-Committee will look at the issues arising from the White Paper and at the areas where the Government are looking for a response and consultation.