TECHNOLOGY Secretary Peter Kyle called today for regular updates to online safety laws amid increased fears of children being exposed to harmful content on Facebook and Instagram.
Following Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that his social media platforms would do away with its content moderation teams, Mr Kyle reminded tech giants that British law has not changed and they must still obey it.
Meta’s plans to replace its longstanding fact-checking programme with a “community notes” system similar to that of Elon Musk’s X platform has been seen as an attempt to curry favour with the incoming US administration of Donald Trump.
Online safety campaigners have raised concerns that axing content moderation will allow misinformation to spread more easily and leave children and young people vulnerable to harmful content.
Andy Burrows, chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation — named after Molly Russell, who killed herself after viewing harmful content online — said Mr Kyle was “right that companies must follow UK laws” but added that those laws were “simply not strong enough to address big tech’s bonfire of safety measures.”
He insisted: “The front line of online safety now sits with this government and action is needed to tackle widespread preventable harm happening on their watch.”
On Saturday, Molly’s father Ian Russell warned that Britain was “going backwards” on online safety, saying that the implementation of the Online Safety Act had been a “disaster” that had “starkly highlighted intrinsic structural weaknesses with the legislative framework.”
Mr Kyle told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg that he had given “a very personal commitment to making sure that everybody, particularly people with vulnerabilities — and every child is vulnerable — has protection.”
He added that he was “open-minded” about changes to the law and that Parliament needed to legislate on online safety more regularly in order to keep up with developments, rather than relying on a “big bang” of legislation “every decade or so.”
The Cabinet minister expressed frustration that the previous government had removed parts of the Online Safety Act that dealt with legal but harmful content.
He said: “Kemi Badenoch, when she was running for leader at that exact point that the Bill was passing through Parliament, said that this was legislating for hurt feelings.
“That entire bit of the Bill was taken out, so I have inherited a landscape where we have a very uneven, unsatisfactory legislative settlement.”
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