Fail to protect young online? Face arrest

SOCIAL media bosses could be arrested in the UK if they break laws to protect young and vulnerable people online, the British suicide prevention minister warned yesterday.

Jackie Doyle-Price said self-harm and suicide images were being ‘normalised’ online and this had the effect of ‘grooming’ children. Her warning came after UK digital minister Margot James told the Mail that web giants would be forced by law to sign up to a code of conduct to protect users.

Ms Doyle-Price told the BBC yesterday that new laws could be introduced if they failed to ‘step up’. Asked if bosses could then face arrest if they broke these laws, she said: ‘Nothing is off the table.’ She added: ‘We’ve seen in the past that these companies have been very cavalier about their responsibilities but equally, once their reputation is on the line ,they want to step up.’

She said she would encourage them to ‘do the right thing’ and that if they did not fall in line ‘we will take legal powers to make sure they do – they have a duty of care to their users’. She said that, in her view, social media sites were publishers, not platforms, so they should be held to account by the law.

Ms Doyle-Price brought up the tragic suicide of British teenager Molly Russell, 14, whose father blamed harmful images on Instagram for her death. ‘I have no doubt that the suicide and self-harm content of the kind that Molly viewed had the effect of normalising self-harm,’ she told the UK National Suicide Prevention Alliance conference.

‘It has an effect akin to grooming. We have embraced the liberal nature of social media platforms, but we need to protect ourselves and our children from the harm which can be caused.’

Ms Doyle-Price, who was last night meeting representatives of Instagram’s owners Facebook, said: ‘If companies cannot behave responsibly and protect their users, we will legislate. Providers ought to want to do this. They shouldn’t wait for government to tell them what to do.’