Police chief: only boycotting social media will force action on abuse
THE public should start boycotting social media companies and force them to act over online child abuse images, one of the country’s most senior police officers has said.
Simon Bailey, the country’s leading child protection officer and Chief Constable for Norfolk, said fining tech giants was a “drop in the ocean” and that damage to their brand might be the only way to get them to listen.
He said firms such as Google and Facebook had the technology and funds to eradicate indecent images but persistently failed to act.
He said it was time for consumers to consider using their commercial clout by boycotting those responsible.
“Ultimately, I think the only thing they will genuinely respond to is when their brand is damaged,” he said. Following a campaign by The Daily
Telegraph, the Government last month announced plans to introduce Duty of Care laws to hold tech firms accountable for allowing damaging material online. Platforms hosting content that promotes bullying, harassment, selfharm, suicide, child abuse and terrorism face huge fines as well as having their executives held personally responsible. While he welcomed the proposals, Mr Bailey said he feared the proposed sanctions might not be enough to persuade the overseas firms to act.
He said he had seen nothing to give him “confidence that companies creating these platforms were taking their responsibilities seriously enough”. He added: “Ultimately, financial penalties for some of them are going to be an absolute drop in the ocean. But if the brand starts to become tainted and consumers start to see how certain platforms are permitting abuse and allowing the exploitation of young people then maybe the damage to that brand will be so significant they will feel compelled to do something.”
Mr Bailey said that even if the proposed regulation proved effective, there was still a vast problem for the authorities in dealing with the dark web, which was much harder to police.
And he said as 4G and 5G networks were rolled out in more countries across the world, so further opportunities would arise for paedophiles to sexually exploit and abuse children. Mr Bailey said the extent of the problem was such that in every playground there was most likely a child who possessed pornography on their phone.
He said there was a growing generation of young men who were becoming “increasingly desensitised” to this material and were progressing to viewing illegal material.
Society is “not far off the point where everybody will know somebody” who has viewed illegal images, he claimed.
But he ruled out working with socalled paedophile hunters, saying the vigilante groups often frustrated police investigations.
He said: “I can’t deny they’ve led to convictions but they’ve also led to people being blackmailed, people being subjected to grievous bodily harm, the wrong people being accused, people committing suicide as a result of interventions, family lives being completely destroyed – and in the name of what? Facebook ‘likes’?”