The government must make social media websites sign up to a mandatory code of practice and give an independent regulator the power to fine those that break the rules, the NSPCC has said.
The charity said the government had failed to properly implement about half of the child safety online recommendations made in a report commissioned by ministers a decade ago, despite pledges to make the UK the safest place in the world for children to go online.
“It’s simply wrong that the government has allowed social networks to mark their own homework for the past decade, and that their new strategy would let that continue,” said Peter Wanless, the NSPCC chief executive.
“It’s impossible to fathom how much harm has been done over those years in terms of online sexual abuse, hate speech, violent and harmful content and cyberbullying.”
In 2008 the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, asked the child psychologist Prof Tanya Byron to investigate the impact the internet and video games were having on children. Her report made 38 recommendations for making the online world safe for children, including a call for voluntary regulation of websites.
A decade later, the government’s internet safety strategy is only now in the process of developing a code of practice for social networks and fewer than half of Byron’s recommendations have been fully implemented.
Meanwhile, the online world has moved on significantly: Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp did not exist a decade ago; 83% of 12- to 15-year-olds have a smartphone, and half of all children have a social media profile by age 12, according to Ofcom.
In a new report, commissioned by the NSPCC, Byron accused ministers of dragging their feet and said the time had passed for a voluntary code. “The government said they want the UK to be the safest place for children to be online,” she said. “Yet only now are they starting to play catchup on recommendations I made 10 years ago, while other recommendations have been ignored entirely.
“The internet is absolutely ubiquitous in children’s lives today, and it is much too late for a voluntary code for social networks. The internet strategy must absolutely create a legally enforceable safety code to force social networks to keep children safe. The online world moves too fast for government to drag its feet for another decade.”
Byron’s report comes just days after the NSPCC revealed there had been more than 1,300 grooming offences in the first six months since a new law came into effect, with almost two-thirds of cases involving the use of Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram.
