Making child safety optional puts its priority behind profit

FACEBOOK knows a lot about us. Its business model depends on it.

The biggest social network uses our information to sell adverts that are tailored to us based on our age, gender, location, and seemingly our inside leg measurement.

In the same way Facebook uses data to make money, it could use data to better protect children.

It’s possible for social networks to detect adults with multiple accounts, contacting thousands of children. Even the type of language used by groomers can be detected by algorithms. But left to their own devices, do Facebook do this? Do other social networks do it? We don’t know.

What we do know is that online grooming is a problem. And while we know that Facebook, followed by Instagram and Snapchat, are the most-recorded in police files as being used by groomers – they’re by no means the only sites.

Youtube and its supposedly child-friendly site Youtube Kids have frequently come under fire for hosting harmful and inappropriate videos.

After a string of bad press, parent company Google said in a blog it was bringing in higher standards because “potentially inappropriate videos… can hurt revenue for everyone”. Google’s focus on revenue being hurt, rather than on children being hurt, speaks volumes.

Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, is currently leading on the Government’s Internet Safety Strategy. It is expected to include a safety code for social networks – but one that’s voluntary. Making child safety optional is not good enough.

For more than a decade we’ve seen the voluntary efforts of social networks fall short. If child protection continues to be an optional extra, it will remain – at best – secondary to the pursuit of profit. The answer has to be a mandatory code that forces sites to keep children safe – or face hefty fines and sanctions.

This is a golden opportunity for Mr Hancock to protect every child now and in the future. We urge him to take it.