Force social media firms to protect children

SOCIAL media and online gaming firms should have a statutory “duty of care” to protect children from mental ill health, abuse and addictive behaviour, a coalition of the country’s leading experts demands today.

Data amassed by charities, academics and doctors links children’s use of social media and gaming to a range of serious and lasting harms, many of which build gradually over time and go undetected by parents or teachers.

They accuse businesses such as Facebook and Snapchat of cynically targeting children as young as eight, using addictive “hooks” from the worlds of behavioural psychology and gambling to capture “new skins” to keep them logged on for as long as possible.

Experts say existing controls are not effective, with charities like Barnardo’s reporting a growing number of middle-class children seeking help with issues such as internet addiction, sex texting, grooming and online bullying.

The Daily Telegraph today launches a duty of care campaign, as ministers consider new measures to rein in the worst excesses of online firms which it is feared are now harming a generation of young people. The campaign calls for digital companies to have a legal duty to protect children using their services.

Writing today, Peter Wanless, the chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), calls on the Government to introduce statutory regulation. “For too long, social networks have been allowed to treat child safeguarding as optional. We don’t have the same protections in place online as we do offline,” he writes. “After years of inadequate action I am absolutely adamant that now is the time to introduce statutory regulation on social media sites.”

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has identified “worrying” evidence of an association between heavy internet use and increasing rates of childhood depression, mental ill health and obesity. Examples include a 15-year-old boy from north London being admitted to hospital for eight weeks after becoming addicted to online gaming, and Felix Alexander, from Worcester, who took his own life, aged 17, after being relentlessly bullied online.

The growing concern comes as an investigation by The Telegraph found:

♦ Almost a quarter of UK schoolchildren now spend more than six hours a day online outside school hours, with 4 per cent at risk of a clinical definition of addiction – four times the proportion of alcoholics in the population;

♦ A doubling in the number of children seeking help from the NSPCC’S Childline for cyber-bullying in the last five years, with many victims suffering depression, self-harming and in some cases attempting suicide;

♦ Police arrest six people a day for grooming children via social media apps, with 1,628 crimes recorded since the introduction of a new offence of sexual communication last year.

The concept of a duty of care has a long history in English and Scottish law and has successfully been used since the Thirties to bring rogue business as diverse as factory owners and property developers to book.

William Perrin, one of the Whitehall team that created Ofcom and a trustee of Carnegie UK Trust, said a statutory duty of care was needed if the Government was to meet its stated aim of making the UK “the safest place in the world to be online”. “A duty of care, backed up by a regulator, will reduce the costs to society caused by badly run social media platforms and, crucially, will stand the test of time,” he said.

Children’s weekly internet usage has exploded in the past decade – doubling for under-11s and up 50 per cent for children aged 12 to 15 – and experts say it is partly because social media and gaming firms are deploying psychological tricks that feed addiction.

Prof Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University and Britain’s leading expert on addiction, said high-quality studies showed 4 per cent of adolescents – equivalent to one child in every classroom – were now classed as at risk of internet addiction. A much larger proportion – anywhere between 10 per

cent to 50 per cent – could be classed as “habitual users”, immediately picking up every email or notification, and checking social media a few times an hour. These children, although not formally addicted, could suffer educationally and experience withdrawal symptoms.

Prof Griffiths said “fear of missing out” was the most effective psychological hook played on by social media companies alongside a desire to stay online for an “unpredictable reward” such as a “like” or new friend request – the same technique that keeps adults playing fixed-odds slot machines for hours on end. “As soon as you get an activity that is available 24/7, youngsters have a fear of missing out and not knowing what is going on. If there is no Wi-fi, they have withdrawal-like symptoms,” he said.

The World Health Organisation this year moved to classify gaming addiction as a mental health disorder.

Dr Richard Graham, a specialist in the area, said typical outcomes of internet addiction included social isolation, conflict with parents and more complex psychological problems. He said some of his patients spent up to 15 hours a day online, with one German teenager requiring hospital treatment for dehydration after failing to drink while gaming for more than 24 hours.

Dr Graham accused social media companies of mounting “an arms race” to keep children online with, for example, Snapchat streaks – which reward children for reaching 100 days of continuous online activity.

“It’s a race to the bottom: how can we keep you online magnetically for as long as possible?,” he said.

Liz Kendall, the Labour MP and member of the science and technology committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the impact of social media and screen-use on young people’s health, welcomed the duty of care campaign.

“This is a hugely important issue as social media now plays such a big part in young people’s lives,” she said. “Whilst there are many positives about social media, there are also real risks ... particularly [for] young women and girls.”

Simon Hart, the Tory MP and member of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, said he thought change was on the way. “I have this feeling that in 10 years’ time, we will be looking at some of this activity in the same way we look at cigarettes now.”

Snapchat denied it used psychological hooks to keep people online. A spokesman said: “Snapstreaks are our way to allow for friendships to deepen over time, just like real life... we have also made the streaks indicator 30 per cent smaller in recent updates of the product to make them even less of a focus.”

The spokesman added that Snapchat had been designed without “public vanity metrics” such as likes or shares. It was also working to encourage young people to develop friendships offline outside the app.

She added that a dedicated safety team would respond to concerns or reports such as online bullying within 24 hours and in most cases took action within two.

Potential users were required to provide their date of birth to register, she said, and it used additional checks such as behavioural and interest-based data to confirm the truth of the age claim.

Facebook had not responded to requests for comment at the time of going to press.