On 6th July 2023, during the first day of the report stage on the Online Safety Bill, the Bishop of Oxford spoke in support of amendments targeting the spread of misinformation and disinformation online, particularly with regard to the risk posed to children:
The Lord Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I too welcome these amendments and thank the Minister and the Government for tabling them. The Bill will be significantly strengthened by Amendment 172 and related amendments by putting the harms as so clearly described in the Bill. I identify with the comments of others that we also need to look at functionality. I hope we will do that in the coming days.
I also support Amendment 174, to which I added my name. Others have covered proposed new subsection (9B) very well; I add my voice to those encouraging the Minister to give it more careful consideration. I will also speak briefly to proposed new subsection (9A), on misinformation and disinformation content. With respect to those who have spoken against it and argued that those are political terms, I argue that they are fundamentally ethical terms. For me, the principle of ethics and the online world is not the invention of new ethics but finding ways to acknowledge and support online the ethics we acknowledge in the offline world.
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