Online safety plan that only mentions pornography once

THE Government’s Action Plan for Online Safety makes little reference to the harmful effect that easy access to hard pornography can have on children.

The 55-page document has only one reference to children’s easy access to such material on smartphones and tablets – in a section called Stronger Protections.

Curiously, it states: ‘We are only in the early stages of understanding how smartphone usage affects how and when users consume content and its impact.’

This is despite a slew of reports and warnings from experts, including Dr Mary Aiken, one of the world’s leading cyber security experts, who believes children should have no unsupervised access to smartphones.

A report last month by the 5Rights Foundation in the UK, which advocates for children online, found tech firms deploy an ‘unfettered use of persuasive design’ that encourages children to keep clicking – and accused them of a ‘cavalier disregard for childhood’. And the French government is bringing in laws to ban smartphones in schools for children up to the age of 15.