Ministers need to act more quickly to combat fast-changing threats from technology such as deepfakes, the technology secretary has said, as she warned about the risks women and girls face online.
Liz Kendall said on Monday that technology was developing at such a pace that it was outstripping the government’s ability to regulate it, even suggesting there could be regular annual reviews of regulations as happens at the budget.
The technology secretary was speaking to the Guardian after hosting a roundtable with tech companies including Meta, Snapchat, Reddit, Match Group, Google, TikTok and OnlyFans, during which she urged them to do more to tackle online misogyny.
She said: “It took eight years for [the Online Safety] Act to come in, and the technology has developed so rapidly it hasn’t kept pace. Every year MPs have a finance bill to deal with the budget. In a world where technology is developing so quickly, we’ve got to be prepared to look at this much more, much more quickly.
“As a government and as a parliament, we can’t have a situation where you only legislate once every eight years to deal with some of these issues, and that’s something I am acutely aware of.”
Kendall recently launched a consultation into banning social media for under-16s, which is expected to report in the summer.
She said on Monday that the government would seek to pass new laws after that consultation, though added this could be done without allowing MPs a chance to amend them.
Campaigners for a ban believe Keir Starmer is likely to back their cause, but worry that ministers will implement a relatively weak ban that they will not be given a chance to strengthen in parliament.
“They’ll get a vote in the Commons,” Kendall said, though added: “It could be secondary.” Unlike government bills, secondary legislation does not allow time for MPs to amend it.
Kendall also recently announced that AI chatbots would be brought under the remit of the Online Safety Act so that companies could be penalised for content posted by AI tools as well as by humans.
This followed a controversy around users of Elon Musk’s X using its Grok chatbot to create artificial sexualised images of real people – a capability that X shut down in the UK after pressure from Starmer and other ministers.
Kendall said: “The public is right to put pressure on the government to say we want our kids to be safe, as women, to take these awful images down. Grok started spreading those appalling images, we stood up and stood firm and said it’s against our values, it’s against the law and we won’t be bullied by anyone in protecting women and girls, and then X acted.”
“I hope what we did on Grok shows how utterly determined the prime minister is and I am too.”
Children’s online safety will be debated in parliament on Wednesday when MPs on the Commons science, innovation and technology committee will hear from the eSafety commissioner from Australia and health campaigners and parent groups on whether social media access should be banned for under-16s.
