20:02 Lucy Powell (Labour)

The third issue is disinformation. The war in Ukraine has unleashed Putin’s propaganda machine once again. That comes after the co-ordinated campaign by Russia to discredit the truth about the Sergei Skripal poisonings. Many other groups have watched and learned: from covid anti-vaxxers to climate change deniers, the internet is rife with dangerous disinformation. The Government have set up a number of units to tackle disinformation and claim to be working with social media companies to take it down. However, that is opaque and far from optimal. The only mention of disinformation in the Bill is that a committee should publish a report. That is far from enough.

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21:15 Saqib Bhatti (Conservative)

I am a great believer in the good that social media has done over the last few decades. It has transformed the way we interact, share ideas and stay connected. Social media has allowed a global conversation about global challenges such as climate change, poverty and even the conflict that we are witnessing in Ukraine. However, there is a dark side to social media, and I would be surprised if there were any Member of this House who had not experienced some form of it. The online world has become like the wild west: anything goes. Indeed, it was just last year when the whole country was gripped by the success of our football team in the Euros, and as I sadly watched us lose another penalty shoot-out, I turned to my wife and said, “You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you?” And it did. The three players who missed penalties, all young black men, were subjected to disgusting racist abuse. Monkey emojis were used to taunt them, and were not taken down because the Instagram algorithm did not deem that to be racism. Abuse on Twitter was rife, and the scale of it was so large that it restarted a national conversation, which I am sad to say we have had many times before.

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