Grieving parents to receive access to child’s social media

BEREAVED parents will be told the role social media played in their child’s death from today under new powers handed to the online regulator Ofcom.

Ofcom said it would issue orders to tech firms to force them to unlock the social media accounts of children where it is suspected it played a part in their suicide or death. Social media platforms that fail to comply will face fines of up to 10 per cent of their global revenue – equivalent to £10 billion for a company like Meta, the owner of Facebook.

Directors of the companies could be jailed for up to two years if they fail to comply with or obstruct Ofcom’s requests for access to the data.

The move follows The Telegraph’s duty of care campaign for new legislation to protect children from online harm and the deaths of children who took their own lives after being bombarded with harmful content such as posts encouraging them to take their own lives.

It took Ian Russell, the father of 14-year-old Molly who took her own life, five years to gain access to her accounts with the social media companies providing only a “tiny fraction” of the data requested. Even the limited data that the family obtained through the coroner showed that she received 16,000 “destructive” posts encouraging self-harm, anxiety and suicide in her final six months.

The coroner concluded she died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and “the negative effects of online content”, which had “more than minimally contributed” to her death.

Ofcom said the information it would seek would include the content encountered by the child and how the content came to be encountered by the child, including the role of algorithms.

They will also use their powers to secure data on how the child interacted with the content as well as any posts generated, uploaded or shared by the child.

An Ofcom spokesman said: “Working within the legal framework set by the Online Safety Act, we want to ensure that there are appropriate processes in place to support a coroner’s investigation or inquest into the death of a child.”