Speeches by Narayan.

“The fundamental thing that we are looking at, as I mentioned in the consultation, is personality rights born out of this feeling over the manipulation of individuals’ rights to their own personality online. It applies more acutely to public figures and politicians but it applies broadly too. It is a definite problem an…”

“Sorry, that is an independent thing.”

“Thank you, Chair, and thank you in particular for both the inquiry that you are conducting as a group and for that generous opener. The fundamental thing I would say is that you will know more than any other part of Parliament that we are in a totally new geopolitical paradigm. AI is the central question in terms of ca…”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Foreign interference as an offence is very much owned by the Home Office. There are some aspects of deepfakes that I am involved in. The question of personality rights, for example, is a question that is very much in scope for my role.”

“As an offence, it is owned by the Home Office.”

“The only thing I would add is that in the Defending Democracy Taskforce, we have been talking about election preparedness for the elections ahead, well before the short campaign start as well.”

“I might start with where DSIT sits so that I can then talk about how we are aggregating the Defending Democracy Taskforce. DSIT’s role is focused on disinformation policy very specifically and looking at the impact of that on UK domestic audiences, agnostic to who the actors are in the conduct of any disinformation cam…”

“It is cross-departmental. If I remember correctly, is it MHCLG or Home Office?”

“I try to limit it but of course I do, yes.”

“There is a very large number of questions there. Let me answer directly the one that I feel most strongly about. I do not feel satisfied with the scale of response we have in this country, and have had for some time, on the threat of foreign misinformation and disinformation campaigns and what they are doing to our dem…”

“There are two separate questions here. One is the question of who is responsible. You have rightly answered that yourself in that context: Ofcom is responsible for the implementation of the law. There is a separate question from responsibility, which is are the thresholds appropriate at the moment? First, as I mentione…”

“Platforms have a responsibility to comply with the Act. I suspect there are many cases where they have done so. We do not ask platforms to report every single instance where they have taken action.”

“I am very happy to write to the platforms and ask them for data.”

“It is called the labelling taskforce. We are looking at the labelling of pieces of content.”

“I am aware that Ofcom engages very consistently on reviewing risk assessments and compliance of the platforms’ duties, especially illegal content duties, which is the subject here. I am not aware of data on prosecutions or referrals that it has made in the light of illegal instances in this context.”

“It is a really important question you raise. On the question of funding, of course that is separate. There is a live case under the foreign interference offence that you will be aware of in the courts, so I will not comment on that. That is outside the online space. In the online space, as I mentioned, I will absolutel…”

“Yes, I am happy to write to Ofcom.”

“Yes, exactly. My expectation is that an interim report on that will be out by the autumn and we want to make sure that we are moving fast on that. We are also looking at a digital replicas consultation to ensure that where fake replicas are made of individuals—that has a very significant impact partly on those individu…”

“As the Minister for AI, I am never complacent about the level of investment that we have in AI. We definitely need to do more and I will continue to make the case for it.”