Lord Williams of Oystermouth.

Q46 The Chair: Welcome to our evidence session today. We have an outstanding set of witnesses. In our first session, we will hear from Lord Williams of Oystermouth, who was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, and therefore is giving fascinating evidence to us as a religious leader, academic and teacher.

Lord Williams, you know the basis of our inquiry into freedom of expression online. Thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today. This session will be broadcast online and a transcript will be taken. Can you start off with some words of introduction of your own, about yourself and the subject? Can you give us your perspective on the issues we are looking at around freedom of expression online? We will then take questions from members of the Committee.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: It is a great privilege to be able to take part in this discussion, although it is somewhat out of my area of expertise, to put it mildly. As you have said, I was for a while Archbishop of Canterbury. I have been a teacher of theology and philosophy and ethics for quite a long time. In particular in the last few years, I have continued to do some work and lecture a little on the foundations of human rights in general terms. That is a subject on which I have published a couple of articles in the last decade or so and lectured here and in the United States.

I am certainly very interested in freedom of expression insofar as it relates to the broader issue of human rights. I am also interested in the borderline between what is appropriately regulated by law and what is appropriately regulated by culture. It seems that there is no culture that values unrestricted freedom of speech in the sense that there is always a cultural expectation that we make sense to one another, that we observe fundamental civilities towards one another and so forth. The question of how far and in what sense law protects that, or indeed seeks actively to further it, is a very interesting one in this as in other areas.

I have two very broad observations, just to start off before we get into questions. One is that part of the deep background of this question of the right to freedom of expression is the sense that we inherit, ultimately from the classical world as well as, in a slightly different way, the early Christian world, that freedom of speech in the sense of frankness and candour—that is, speaking without anxiety to one another—is part of a virtuous life. To be able to speak with that kind of frankness, and to speak without fear of reprisal or conversation being cut off by the more powerful party, is a mark of both a courageous and virtuous person, but also a virtuous society. Part of what we are talking about ought to be the value of openness of speech and honesty in a moral society and a moral life.

That is where things become complicated because the second issue, which I am sure we will talk a lot more about, is the way in which online communication hovers uneasily on the margin between public and private communication all the time. The very current question of the sense in which online platforms are a form of publishing just brings that home. I just put those two broad considerations out there as part of the framework within which I am trying to think my way forward on these issues.

The most general thing that I would say at this stage is simply that I am looking at this very much in the context of the relation between the discourse of human rights and the discourse of public ethics, which do not simply map on to each other. I am trying to become clearer about that fundamental question of what the law is protecting, what the law should actively advance and nurture and what the law has to leave to other social actors and courses to achieve.

The Chairman: Those are some very interesting perspectives. Let us unpick and start to explore those issues.

Q47 Viscount Colville of Culross: Good afternoon, Lord Williams. Thank you very much indeed for coming. You have said that a good democracy is an argumentative democracy and a good form of pluralism is an interactive one. In many ways, online expression does just that. It seems to democratise and give a voice to millions of people in a way that no medium has ever done in history. You talked about online as hovering on the border between public and private conversation. Could you explain to us how free expression online, which has the ability to amplify and polarise, can be viewed differently from offline forms of expression?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: It is a very large question. One of the issues of debate at the moment, which many here will be far more familiar with than I am, is the question of net neutrality; that is, whether the supposed democratisation of communication in the online setting is exactly what it has been presented as. The net neutrality principle, or what is sometimes called the dumb pipe principle, is that this is simply a means of communication, and no communication is privileged above others. As soon as online communication becomes harnessed to diffusion of the preference, expansion, intensification or amplification of certain views above others, and as soon as it becomes involved, as of course it inevitably is, with advertising and the particular way in which algorithms work, it is no longer quite the neutral channel that it is sometimes said to be.

That is where the moral difficulties come in. The good moral case for online communication as part of communication is that, as you say, it is presented as a democratising factor. It increases the number of voices. In practice, for all sorts of reasons, it has become possible for that to be an engine of the diffusion or amplification of certain views. It has become something much more like a publishing process. That is to say it is not just a matter of views being expressed, but views being diffused.

The question, about which I have some serious anxieties, is whether we can indefinitely hold off the recognition that this is a form of publishing. There is quite a lot of pressure around that. If it is a form of publishing, then certain different factors come into play. Certain new kinds of legal liability come into play.

Viscount Colville of Culross: If it is a publisher, what sort of legal liability should come into play?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: It is rather clearer, for example, that issues around libel, privacy, and incitement become rather more focused. I know that there are already possible controls on some tweets, but there will certainly be much more weighty considerations once the Rubicon is crossed of talking about this in terms of publishing.

There was an article in last week’s New Statesman talking about the privilege of publishers without the costs. A growing number of people are beginning to think of this. That is the kind of anxiety that is around. That is what gives this a particular currency and urgency, as we have seen more examples, especially lately, of the active promotion and diffusion of actively dangerous views and comments, apparently without new forms of control.

To talk about forms of control immediately gets you into the quagmire of rights of freedom of expression. I am not suggesting that is an easy bridge to cross, but that is where we are at the moment. Debates in the last couple of weeks, not least over the suspension of President Trump’s Twitter account, have brought this very much into the headlines.

Viscount Colville of Culross: Thank you very much indeed. That is very interesting.

Q48 Lord Storey: Good afternoon. Thank you for coming along and sharing your thoughts with us. Does reducing the reach of harmful content without removing it infringe the right to freedom of expression?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: My instinctive answer to that is no. If what we have just been talking about—the difference between a means of simply expressing and communicating and a means of diffusion and amplification—is a valid distinction, then limiting the reach of certain kinds of material is something compatible with recognising the basic freedoms of expression. We are not talking about what you might call a right to assisted publicity. That is one of the thorny issues in this whole area.

I could conceive of a legal framework in which certain things were regarded as unacceptable, certain things as of limited diffusibility and certain things as of more general diffusibility. It does not tread on the fundamental principle unless you see that fundamental principle as not only the right to expression but the right to the assistance in the spread of that expression.

Q49 Lord McInnes of Kilwinning: Good afternoon, Lord Williams. You mentioned and referred to the dissonance between public rights, statutory support in protection for freedom of expression and public ethics on the other side. As you know, the law protects freedom of expression through the Human Rights Act 1998, the ECHR and common law, but within each of those it is caveated. I wanted to explore the boundaries around which you believe some things are unacceptable. Which online freedom of expression do you think should not be protected?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: I have a two-pronged answer. One is the obvious things, as in the other areas that the Act currently deals with. That is incitement, violence, a diffusion of information about criminal activities, conspiracy, paedophile networks and all of these things that are already current law. There should not be any debate about the applicability of that online.

The more complex areas that are perhaps more specific to the online world are, for example, bullying—I am thinking of the problem of cyberbullying, which many young people endure—and the dissemination of private information about non-consenting parties, such as the addresses of people who are controversially in the public eye and that kind of thing. Although I could not begin to give a complete catalogue, that is the sort of thing that I would see as perhaps rather more peculiarly involved in questions around online communication than the other sorts of communication.

There is a bottom line where it is relatively straightforward with incitement, illegality, et cetera. The slightly more nebulous but still problematic area is something like bullying or certain kinds of revealing of information.

Lord McInnes of Kilwinning: Just to follow up, would those more nebulous or nuanced areas always require statutory expression in terms of banning? Is that more a matter for others to moderate?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: That is a very good question. It should not automatically be statutory, but that raises the question of what a regulatory covenant is in the law. A recent piece by the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, discusses what kinds of regulatory covenant or agreement are comparable to the sort of thing that business regulations involve, and what voluntary agreements on that could cover some of this so as to strengthen the hand of those who wanted to push this out. No, I do not want to rush to statutory, but I want to look at that area.

Q50 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: Lord Williams, it would be strange if we were to invite you as a witness and not ask you anything to do with religion or religious belief, so here it comes. In thinking about this question, I have been very puzzled about the relationship between belief, opinion and faith. I wonder whether you feel that there is any special kind of protection that is or should be available to what we might generally speaking refer to as faith; that is to do with commitment to a particular body of, say, religious beliefs, though it might include other things. What is the difference between that and belief and opinion? It seems that we do not make that distinction quite clearly enough quite a lot. On the other hand, it is generally thought that certain kinds of speech that direct themselves at religious belief are regarded as more heinous than other kinds of offensive or provocative speech. I wondered if you could give us your thoughts on that.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: Some of this, of course, has already been debated in the context of the repeal of blasphemy laws. A great deal of what was sorted out there is probably applicable in this setting as well. There is in this connection no particular unique heinousness, to use your own word, about attacks on religious belief, but we have to consider very seriously what kinds of social impact, possible incitement, et cetera, might be involved in such attacks.

A few years ago, I was involved with the working party that Baroness O’Neill established as an advisory group for the EHRC precisely on some of these topics. Although that work was never published, there should be records of it somewhere that consider whether the current legal framework we have in this country adequately protects religious communities from attack and undermining. On the whole, our conclusion was that it was not a great legal problem, but there was a considerable problem with misinformation about religious belief, custom and practice, which sometimes fuelled unhelpful recourse to legal or regulatory frameworks.

In brief, the answer would be, first of all, to revisit what was being discussed and turned over during the debates about blasphemy legislation; possibly to look at some of the discussions that particular working party undertook; and then to look at that broader question, which relates to other aspects of discussion this afternoon, of how people are educated to avoid simple misrepresentation. You cannot legislate against misrepresentation.

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: If I have understood you correctly, your view is that, particularly in the wake of the repeal of blasphemy laws in this country—they do still exist elsewhere, of course—there is no special kind of protection that would attach to people who hold certain religious views in terms of what they should be protected from. What about the people who hold those views expressing them in ways that are perceived by others as being aggressive, excluding or stigmatising on the basis of their beliefs?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: If one begins from the principle that the law protects citizens as citizens—that is the absolute bottom line of the rule of law—then it is important that others be protected from aggressive, demeaning, and threatening behaviour from religious people, as well as religious people being protected from that from others. It is, as we have seen, quite a fine line to draw. It is one of those areas where certain kinds of religious activist will often cry foul and say that they are being prevented from expressing their convictions.

What applies there is again a cultural rather than a legal set of protocols. That is an understanding that there is such a thing as a threatening expression of pure belief, and that has to be thought through and restricted because of its active threat to others. It is very hard to get it right.

I know that, particularly on questions of gender and sexuality, this is about as hot a topic as exists in the frontier between the religious and secular worlds. It seems that, in principle, it ought to be possible for a conservative Christian, or for that matter an Orthodox Jew, to say, “My religious tradition does not give any positive evaluation of same-sex behaviour”, without instantly being assumed to be promoting violence against homosexual persons. Because very often that comes over as part of a—forgive the word in this context—crusading programme, it can be experienced as hostile and threatening. These are very much cultural things rather than legal, but I go back to that point that the law protects a citizen as a citizen. A religious person is protected by that; others are also protected against the aggressive promotion of views that they may regard as demeaning.

I could say, as a religious believer, that I take great personal offence when some prominent secularists tell me what an idiot I must be for believing what I believe. I would prefer some of them to be less ignorant and abusive about it, but I do not expect to take them to court over it, unless they are saying, “This is a view that ought to be exterminated in every rational society”, in which case I might well put my hand up and say, “Just a moment”. There is something about likely effect, likely incitement and that basic principle of protection.

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: Thank you. That is very helpful.

Q51 Baroness Rebuck: This is such a fascinating discussion. You touched on education in your last answer. My question is about human behaviour online. One of our witnesses said that, because social media is a relatively recent phenomenon, few norms of behaviours have been established. I was thinking about you mentioning fundamental civilities in your introductory remarks; one might see that as a norm of behaviour. We have had calls for digital literacy to be taught as part of the national curriculum in schools and calls for digital citizenship education for adults. However, other witnesses have been more sceptical about adult education and argue that individual behaviour is influenced by the design of platforms, which encourage challenging behaviour. The platforms create what one witness called a noxious echo chamber. I would be very interested to hear your perspective on the best ways of promoting digital citizenship online and better, more tolerant behaviour.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: I am less sceptical about the educational possibilities here and a bit less inclined to blame the medium. The medium certainly encourages, and to some extent rewards, abrasive, confrontational styles. Those styles of discourse do not come from nowhere. We would not have quite such a problem with abrasive and confrontational styles online if we did not have some underlying problems about what the proper forums are in society generally to exchange and learn civility, so it is not just the nature of the platform. There are some things about Twitter and comparable vehicles that, as I have said, encourage, and to some extent reward, some kinds of behaviour, but let us not assume that the problem is in the technology rather than the attitudes. If it is in the attitudes, there are things that can and should be done, such as education. I am rather in favour of asking what kinds of education, in not only digital literacy but the promotion of certain kinds of digital culture, ought to be built into a school curriculum.

Baroness Rebuck: What about adults? We would all agree that we would like that built into the curriculum, but then it might be several generations until we get better behaviour online. Do you have any thoughts about how this adult education, to be able to behave in a more civilised way or to have more civilised debate online, could be encouraged?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: I wish I had a magic bullet for that. As with other forms of adult education, magic bullets are in short supply. I wonder what is possible with something that has been talked about a bit: constructing online communities with stricter moral protocols about what counts as good discourse, where to sign up would be to commit yourself to a fairly demanding code. What could be done by platforms offering such voluntary covenants of behaviour? It would not tackle some of the underlying problems. It might just spread slightly the possibility of good practice. I do not know; I am rather at a loss as to how one tackles this.

Baroness Rebuck: Some of those suggestions are really helpful, so thank you very much indeed.

Q52 Baroness Buscombe: Thank you, Lord Williams, for speaking to us today. I am going to push this a little further. One issue we have is that we are playing catch-up, in the sense that the introduction of social media, with everything that has developed on the internet, is so recent. We have rejoiced in the democratisation, in some ways, of communication. Anyone trying to rein back some of the more intemperate aspects of this—I in the past have been one—has found it incredibly difficult. People like me have been accused of being incredibly old-fashioned, difficult and racist. It does not matter what we have tried to say. I am going back to when I was trying to talk about online harms for children; I go back to 2000, 2001 and 2002. We could see it happening; it was in the headlights. Yes, the law protects, but it does not change hearts and minds. We are talking here about a shift, if we can, in culture, are we not?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: We are.

Baroness Buscombe: The reality is that, when you are a publisher, you have much stricter rules to abide by. You have to say who you are. You have to say where you live. You have to expose yourself, in a sense, in a way that is not necessary on social media. Can I push a little further on this? Forgive me for using this opportunity to say that perhaps the church could be a fantastic conduit—not just one church but all religious communities—for helping us to think about how we can bring different groups together online, but in a much more positive way. Maybe what we are going through now with Covid lends itself to that, because people are crying out for positive engagement with each other, however they can, to combat loneliness and so on. Perhaps this is an opportunity.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: Yes, indeed. I will try to build out a little from what I was trying to think through in answer to the last question. If we were to try to build online communities of good practice, I should hope and pray that religious communities would be in the forefront of supporting the system in any such aims. It remains true that, in certain circumstances, what I call the convening power of religious bodies remains a very significant thing, where people are trying to get beyond a mere conflict of interest and ingrained partiality. There are certainly questions we ought to be looking at there.

Some of the things you noted there reminded me of that very complicated moral issue around anonymity, which haunts this debate. Anonymity as a form of protection against power has become anonymity as a tool, very often, of power and impunity. There is a difference between protection and impunity. It often strikes me as very ironic to hear enormously well-placed and widely diffused voices complaining about being silenced when there are any criticisms levelled. Anonymity can be a way of exercising leverage. It can be a way of concealing profound dishonesty and misrepresentation. We have to ask a bit about that.

As you say, we are playing catch-up. Some very insightful work has come recently from Tim Wu of Columbia, who was one of the architects of defining net neutrality some years ago. He wrote an article not so very long ago in which he said, if I can remember the point made, that a lot of the discussion about online ethics and protocols looks back to a time when there was a scarcity of information and free flow of exchange. What we now see is the very opposite; that is a flood, not a scarcity. Somehow, our thinking about this has to take on board the fact that the problem is not now a lack of access to information on the part of individuals; it is an overabundance of access to information to individuals.

There is a flooding, often a very deliberate flooding, of both information and encouragement to participate, to move further, to sign up to the next level. Although that is an irreversible move, it is no good talking about this in the bland terms of the early days of internet communication as if it were all a simple matter of the neutral transfer of information. We do not have an information famine; we have an information glut. That should also be reflected in how we are thinking.

Tim Wu’s work is really interesting on this, because he is one of the best-informed people in the field and has, to my mind, nailed something that I have not seen nailed elsewhere. That is the sheer turning around of that culture of information over the years.

Baroness Buscombe: I should have prefaced my remarks by saying that, as a lawyer, I do not think the law works, in a sense, in this. It is too pedestrian and not flexible. Thank you for that recommendation. I will certainly read his papers.

Q53 Baroness Bull: Thank you, Lord Williams, for being here today. I have a question going back to something you said right at the very beginning. I think I am quoting you relatively accurately as saying that there is a cultural expectation of observing civility to one another, when you spoke at the beginning about what is regulated by law and what is regulated by culture. I wanted to probe a little about how that works in an online environment, and indeed in the global environment that we live in, where there are significant cultural differences about what may be considered as civil or civic behaviour.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: I wish I had more time to think about that. It is a most interesting point. The point I was trying to make was a rather general one, which you are quite right to press me on. The generality is that there are no cultures of any kind that are without some protocols of, let us say, mutual recognisability. The problem is that online, accentuated by this anonymity and global diffusion, there is no particular obligation to be recognisable to your interlocutor and to speak in a way that can be heard. It is not unique to online communication. There are plenty of instances offline in ordinary converse.

My worry is a situation where people have stopped expecting to be listened to by anybody except their own immediate cohort. If you stop expecting to be listened to—that is stop expecting to persuade, modify or move forward—instead of online communication becoming a tool for advance, it becomes a tool for stasis; it freezes everybody. It is an area where I would like to think further. That is just a comment off the top of my head. It is a very important thought, so thank you for the challenge.

Q54 Baroness Quin: Thank you, Lord Williams, for being with us today. I want to pick up on the issue of anonymity, which you referred to just a few minutes ago, and explore the complexity of that a little. It certainly seems that it has both advantages and disadvantages. I have noticed that in some of the evidence sent to us. For example, there were two pieces of evidence from women’s organisations, where women had been particularly targeted online. One was arguing very strongly for anonymity because she felt it protected her when she was using the internet and putting forward views. The other evidence talked about how bad anonymity had been in that respect in allowing abusive people online to shelter behind it. Do you have any further thoughts about the balance to be struck here? Are there any specific measures that you feel would be useful in improving the situation?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: You are quite right to see those two perspectives. They are particularly acute in a lot of the areas around gender and the vulnerabilities that go with debates about gender online. I wonder whether, if one were to pursue a bit further what I call the regulatory covenant model, there could be any way of spelling out in that context what the rationale of anonymity would be, if somebody wished to make use of it. Quite clearly there are a lot of circumstances in wider society where a measure of protective anonymity has to be guaranteed, in whistleblowing procedures and the like. I ask myself whether there is any wisdom or any direction to be learned from looking at that sort of consideration.

We are back to this question of anonymity as a means of power rather than a defence against unjust power. I would be interested in seeing what might come up in terms of setting up a justification for anonymity in certain circumstances and what circumstances those might be. That might be quite impossible to prescribe and detail, but it is the kind of question I would want to put.

Baroness Quin: That is something that we ought to explore. I know that there have been a few ideas put forward about how to allow people anonymity but nonetheless for them to be able to be verified in particular circumstances. I know this is a very wide question, but obviously there is also a big difference in the way we look at some of these issues depending on whether you are in a democracy or a dictatorship or an autocratic country where freedom of opinion is not allowed. We have not mentioned that international dimension much. I wondered, particularly given the persecution that people of faith may experience in particular countries, if you have any further thoughts to add.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: That comes back to some of these basic points about what the law should be protecting. Quite clearly, the reason freedom of expression is an issue in ethics of law is that it is one of those things that tyrannies habitually suppress. The attempts of government to close off certain kinds of communication are quite effective. What do they call it? The great firewall of China. There are ways in which communication can be cut off. Those are things that need to and should be challenged. I come back to this question of what the rationale is for anonymity. It seems to me that political vulnerability, rather like gender vulnerability, is a very good ground. I am not sure I would want to give much moral houseroom to anonymity simply as something you would like to hang on to in order not to be held accountable for possibly being aggressive, demeaning or threatening.

Q55 The Chair: I want to pick up briefly on a few of the issues you have raised. It seems to me at the heart of the problems we face is the nature of our discourse. It is not the media; it is the way we engage and talk to each other. At the moment, it seems to me a real fundamental problem is the polarisation of the positions that we all take on virtually every subject. As you described, people who are perfectly decent, thoughtful, kind people, who take a socially conservative position on issues of sexual orientation, for example, are accused of being hateful. They are not hateful people but they are accused of being hateful. That drives everybody to a polarised position.

It is the same on broad political issues, where people who take a position are accused of being far left or far right, when indeed they are not far left or far right; they are probably somewhere close to the middle. We are abusing our language. There are no words left for when we find somebody from the far right or the far left with extreme views intruding into our politics, because we have used them to describe the people who are taking mainstream, moderate positions. How do we get this genie back in the bottle?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: I wish I knew the answer. It is a real problem. As you say, there is a kind of cheapening of the currency here. If everybody is a fascist, nobody is a fascist, so to speak. You do not have the language left to identify the real atrocities that threaten us. It will not do just to reach for those stereotypes.

I have been doing a bit of work on just this subject for the last year or two, looking at the contexts in which people learn, effectively, that the other person will not go away. A great deal of our oversimplified discourse works on the assumption that if we shout loud enough and hang on long enough, the others will disappear. What if they will not? What if you have to go and occupy a living space—a highly problematic and challenging living space—with people you disagree with, if as in the Covid pandemic, you have a challenge that does not read maps or political textbooks? It just affects everybody. That is a very sharp crystallisation of what really affects us right across the board. Others are not going away. There is a challenge for all of us.

I have often talked and thought about precisely those contexts in which people learn that—the contexts of local democracy and local involvement. That might be the management of a school governing body or a community action organisation of some sort. Although it is not a panacea, it is one of the ways in which we begin to see that the political process, in the broadest sense, is one of accepting that others will not go away, identifying the problems that we have in common and the strategies that we are all prepared to live with. That cannot be done in the abstract and it is very difficult indeed to do online. It goes back to the question of education and of engaging and nourishing local democratic habits. It is a long job but it is not impossible.

The Chair: That is a very optimistic thought. The Lord Bishop of Worcester suggested that we invite you to give evidence and said that you would give us excellent insights, and indeed you have. I will invite him to ask the last few questions.

The Lord Bishop of Worcester: Thank you, Rowan, for a very stimulating session. I am very grateful to you, as I am sure all other members of the Committee are. I have the final question, of which you will have received notice: what would you like the result of this inquiry to be? I would like to ask a couple of supplementaries arising from what has been said so far before that final question, which might colour the answer to that. One of the things it seems to me we have established is that the technology itself is morally and ethically neutral. It is like water; we need water to live but we can drown in it. The trouble is, at the moment, to continue the water analogy, we are in danger of being swept away down rapids by this new technology and trying to keep up with it.

We have talked about the difference between cultural expectations and statutory limitations. One of the difficulties is that the big platforms range right across the world. If we try to tackle something in this country, it will not work elsewhere. We have talked a lot about the importance of education, but one of the ways we learn is by example. If we think of a certain President of the United States, the example we have been set in the last four years is not one that is conducive to civilised debate. That rather worries me.

The big question at the moment—our inquiry turns out to be extraordinarily relevant—is whether platforms should be considered publishers. If they start making the decisions, as has begun to happen, that will overtake any attempts by individual Governments to legislate for what is proper and what is not. Do you have any broad thoughts? There are those who have been very supportive of Trump being banned from platforms, but it has been said by one of the CEOs that it sets a very dangerous precedent. If we acknowledge the limitations of the statutory, are we in bigger danger if we hand responsibility over to platforms by treating them as publishers?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: There is a danger here if that is simply a handing over to the companies without some kind of regulatory framework and transparency about the criteria they are going to use. I would quite like to see some more negotiation around that question of the openness of any criteria that might be used to ban contribution. It is a bit ad hoc at the moment. Back to the regulatory covenant language, there are ways of filling that out a bit and perhaps looking to something that is a bit more of a partnership between government and the actual administrators of these platforms.

That is certainly one thing that I hope might come out as something to be explored in the light of an investigation like this one. While there are those who are, frankly, relieved at President Trump’s suspension, there are others who, rather more realistically, say, “Just what tools are you putting into the hands of those who make those decisions? Exactly what are the criteria? It is not just that this is a deplorable and embarrassing person to have stampeding around the enclosure. What are the specifics?” There could be answers to that. There is certainly a case for saying that there was active incitement by the President and so on, but you need to have that out in the open. If you are clarifying legal liabilities and possible status of online platforms as the publishers, you also need to do them the justice of agreeing some criteria that can be scrutinised, appealed to and worked on in that way.

Of course, behind that is the very substantial question of the virtual monopoly in online communication by a very small number of people and agencies. That is a bigger question that we cannot cope with in the next few minutes.

The Lord Bishop of Worcester: At the risk of lowering the tone, you mentioned the President. There is a wonderful sketch that you can google about Donald Trump being President of the United States being a bit like there being a horse in a hospital. Nobody knows what is going to happen next, least of all the horse.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: I have seen that.

The Lord Bishop of Worcester: It is wonderful. Bearing all that in mind, and the ramifications of anything we might recommend, can I ask what you would suggest the outcome of this inquiry might be?

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: As I have hinted, I would like to see the issue of recognition of online platforms as publishers pursued. I would like to see the regulatory structures that might make that work fairly spelled out further. I would like to see a commitment to transparency as that is done. I would certainly like to see some consideration about the broad social and educational framework that might slightly shift the culture in the next five years or so. I say five rather than five to 10 years because things move so rapidly. The response has to move quite rapidly and very intelligently.

The Chair: That is a very useful summary of the quite complex issues that we need to address. Can I thank you very much on behalf of the Committee for the very thoughtful and useful evidence you have given us? There is a bit of a reading list and some references too, which we will enthusiastically take up. We appreciated you giving your time to be with us today, Lord Williams. Thank you very much indeed.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth: Thank you and thanks to all the members of the Committee. It has been a real education for me to have to think about this and to engage with the very searching and important questions that have been put, so I am most grateful.