Speeches by Hinds.

“Indeed. Sorry, my memory is not perfect, but there were different stages in the passage of the Bill, and there were clauses that people anticipated were going to be in the final Online Safety Act that were not, in the end.”

“Yes. Media and whatever they called it—content of democratic importance—were always going to be exempt. The question is more what they were going to be exempt from. In the final version of the Online Safety Act—sorry, we are not here to discuss the Online Safety Act, but some of the clauses were not in the final Act. I…”

“Okay, let’s talk about newspapers. If I make prominent a little snippet of text that I have just copied from thetimes.com, The Times gets no remuneration for that at all, because nobody has any need to go to The Times website or app or what have you; I have just consumed my news and no journalist has been paid. How man…”

“Okay, let’s talk about newspapers. If I make prominent a little snippet of text that I have just copied from thetimes.com, The Times gets no remuneration for that at all, because nobody has any need to go to The Times website or app or what have you; I have just consumed my news and no journalist has been paid. How man…”

“What do you say, Helen?”

“To be fair, they also were not what I asked about. I don’t think people would put religious programming in the same bracket as lifestyle programming, or gameshows or quizzes.”

“The BBC can put an algorithm on the iPlayer—that is easy to manage. Notwithstanding the great stats for the iPlayer, most people are not on it for a large part of their day. They are on commercial social media platforms.”

“I want to talk about prominence, as promised. Some parts of this are more uncontroversial than others. In Committee, we have talked about enhancing prominence for children’s PSB TV content, for example, which I think most people are on board with. With news, I think most people accept that in a world of disinformation,…”

“Indeed. Sorry, my memory is not perfect, but there were different stages in the passage of the Bill, and there were clauses that people anticipated were going to be in the final Online Safety Act that were not, in the end.”

“Helen, you anticipate my next question. Of course we all want to see local newspapers having prominence, and everyone could probably agree on a small number of publications. I have just looked this up: we abolished licensing of the press on 3 May 1695. In the modern world, who would decide, “This is a real newspaper, b…”

“We are going to talk about prominence later in the session. I am trying to assess, from your compadres in the academic world and the people you all mix with, are people thinking about the owned platforms as we know them today, or is it something more ambitious?”

“You say that you have never been a snob, and I certainly will not accuse you of being a snob, but that is about what counts within public service broadcast content. There is another question about whether something else on Pinterest, or any other platform that one might think of, has an equal call on people’s time and …”

“So it is not really about the data used; it is about what you are controlling and what you are optimising for, which is some variety, not just time spent.”

“Yes, but I was specifically not talking about the things at that end of the spectrum. However, I am done. Thank you”

“Finally from me in this little segment, when people talk about a public service algorithm, do they just mean on iPlayer or on ITVX, or is the ambition a little bit deeper? Let us take Instagram, as it is the more extreme version because YouTube is fundamentally about videos, even though they are often quite short. If y…”

“Yes. Media and whatever they called it—content of democratic importance—were always going to be exempt. The question is more what they were going to be exempt from. In the final version of the Online Safety Act—sorry, we are not here to discuss the Online Safety Act, but some of the clauses were not in the final Act. I…”

“Could you say that again? That sounded brilliant. There is a way to define the media without defining it. You should be drafting legislation. That is brilliant—if we can figure that out.”

“My word! My hon. Friend puts it in very striking terms. [Interruption.] I see the Minister indicating that he has heard her question, so I think it is right that I defer to him to say a word about the matter when he makes his speech. As the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst and other colleagues have said, this is …”

“As the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst (Clive Efford) did, I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate. I pay tribute to him for securing it and for all his work with the all-party parliamentary group on haemophilia and contaminated blood. He puts an awful lot of work into it—it is not like…”

“If you are. Do we have evidence that audiences are being acquired on YouTube and then converting to iPlayer?”