Speeches by Narayan.

“Yes, that is a really critical question. From a personal point of view, I would be very interested in having norms and conventions that apply. As I am sure everyone on the Committee has experienced, I have a sense that politicians are increasingly willing to contravene what would have been reasonable corridors of how w…”

“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.”

“Offences as a whole are being tested in part in a live case in the courts, as you will be aware, so I am reluctant to comment on it here. The main thing I would say is that I approach it with a genuine degree of curiosity over how recent it is and therefore what the lessons are. I would not pre-empt the judgment on thi…”

“We have to look at that carefully. One of the challenges, particularly when it comes to very sophisticated state actors, is the ability of those actors to be able to move and use legitimate VPN technology to evade most tags on location, which is pretty significant. The two areas I am very interested in are the ability …”

“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 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.”

“You will be more aware than me given all your experience. We will be consulting on a range of ways in which we can best protect individuals’ rights without contravening appropriate free expression values when also tackling digital replicas. We will do that as a precursor to then being able to take action on the appropr…”

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

“I do not ask for data on their internal compliance with the law. The instances of non-compliance and the overall compliance with the legislation are something that Ofcom is responsible for. Of course in this instance, I know they have been in front of you, and I hope they were asked this. I am happy to ask them again i…”

“I speak to them on a regular basis, and so does the rest of Government.”

“I will get in particular trouble with the whips if I commit to a legislative vehicle for a hypothetical regulatory action.”

“Sorry, that is an independent thing.”

“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…”

“If I recall from memory it has been about four months or so at the very least.”

“On prescription, I feel a very strong urge that we need to turn up the volume on this and I will continue to push for that wherever it is feasible and appropriate.”

“We are seeing a live instance of the offence being operationalised through a court case at the moment, so I will not pre-empt the answer as to whether the offence is sufficient or not. I very much welcome the Committee’s thoughts on it. As I mentioned, the specific threshold evidentially is to have reasonable grounds t…”

“Ofcom has had a very significant expansion of its budget in light of its new duties over the course of the last year. The Secretary of State and I have met Ofcom consistently to press it on whether that resourcing has been sufficient to carry out its duties. We have heard nothing to suggest there is a resourcing challe…”

“I am very interested, as I mentioned previously, in how we can make sure there is research transparency so that we have a greater understanding of data as well as algorithms in the content that we see. I am also interested not just in transparency but user control and agency over the algorithms that drive the content t…”

“We should absolutely do everything to stop disinformation and misinformation persisting on these platforms. Some is in law at the moment through the foreign interference line of attack and some is through measures that we want to continue to take and empower users against it. To answer the crux of the question: it is a…”

“We meet the platforms relatively regularly to talk about online safety as a whole, including very much foreign interference. Some data is public but we are happy to point the Committee to the engagement disclosures that we have made in this context.”