Social Media and protecting the Vulnerable

The Health Secretary has written to social media companies demanding that they take action to protect children and young people from harmful content online.

Key facts:

Following the suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell in 2017, her parents have raised concerns about the role of social media in her death.
  • Lots of parents feel powerless in the face of social media. But we are not powerless – both Government and social media providers have a duty to act. 
  • Providers have already taken some important steps to remove harmful content, but more action is urgently needed. It is appalling how easy it still is to access this content online – it is time for internet and social media providers to step up and purge this content once and for all. 
  • We are developing a Government-wide White Paper to address all online harms, which will be consulted upon soon. We want to work with internet and social media providers to ensure the action is as effective as possible, but will introduce new legislation where needed. 
  • The Culture secretary has confirmed that one option under serious consideration is to impose on social media providers a duty of care towards the health of young and vulnerable users.

Why this matters:

It is incumbent on all of us to tackle the risks new technology brings. We want to make the UK the safest place to be online for everyone, and ensure that no other family has to endure the torment that Molly’s parents have had to go through

Comments

Jim said…
Eh? me may be thick, but me not understand a word of that.


8:01 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
OK lets try this form of words

Social media companies need to make sure that the algorithms they use to send their customers online content which may be of interest to them do not direct depressed teenagers, or any other depressed and vulnerable person, towards websites which glorify suicide or self-harm.

The best solution would be if the social media providers sort this problem out themselves out of their own sense of public responsibility and concern for their customers (and their reputations).

But if they don't, the government will have to pass laws to try to force them to sort it out.
9:09 am
Jim said…
generally the algorithems they use to send customers content which may be of interest to them, are based on the customers browsing history.

In other words they are being sent info on self harm and suicide glorification sites, quite simply because they have been browsing self harm and suicide websites.

I think its a bit of a chicken and egg situation.

also a lot goes from your shopping history, and its quite amusing that you buy something like a tumble drier from amazon, and for the next 2 weeks you get endless adverts for tumble driers, even though you just bought one and hopefully wont have to again for 5 or 6 years.

A rather funny one was when i bought my friend a "stress willy" from amazon as a bit of a joke pressy at xmas, you should have seen my internet experience for the next week or so

11:00 am
Anonymous said…
Why aren't you demanding companies like BT block all the scam callers? it's a far easier job to do than what you are asking social media companies to do.
7:20 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Companies like BT do wage a constant war against nuisance callers including scammers.


I'm not suggesting it's easy in either case (and neither is the government.) I'm not suggesting they'll succeed every time.

I'm saying the social media companies need to step up their game and make more effort to stop this sort of thing happening.

If you were to put a case that phone companies also need to step up their game, I might very possibly agree with you, and responsible phone companies like BT would probably take your arguments very seriously indeed.
12:04 am
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