Part of Online Safety Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 4:00 pm on 13 December 2022.
I will come back to some of the earlier points. At the end of the day, when platforms change their terms and conditions, which they are free to do, they will be judged by their users and indeed the advertisers from whom they make their money. There are market forces—I will use that phrase as well as “commercial imperative”, to get that one in there—that will drive behaviour. It may be the usability of Facebook, or Twitter’s terms and conditions and the approach of its new owner, that will drive those platforms to alternative users. I am old enough to remember Myspace, CompuServe and AOL, which tried to box people into their walled gardens. What happened to them? Only yesterday, someone from Google was saying that the new artificial intelligence chatbot—ChatGPT—may well disrupt Google. These companies, as big as they are, do not have a right to exist. They have to keep innovating. If they get it wrong, then they get it wrong.