Rein in tech to protect our kids

■ THE Online Safety Act will not be enough to stop the increasing dangers found online.

Allowing children over 13 access to mainstream adult social media sites is questionable.

Many adults avoid things you can legally access because they are psychologically harmful, but children should be protected from inappropriate content in a similar way to film classifications.

Governments need to get much tougher with big tech companies by making them criminally responsible for allowing children to access dark material.

The Government should also look at the algorithms that such companies use to control our behaviour. It must finally address the enormous, and far from positive, influence that big tech now has on society.

Brett Grainger

Rugeley, Staffordshire

■ The expectation that social media companies will voluntarily comply with legislation designed to control them obviously doesn’t work. Instead, social media profiles should be legally required to be attached to an active phone number, along with proof of address, age and eligibility. That way, those who try to abuse or flout things like age restrictions can be traced. A Phone Registration Agency should be established with a similar aim to the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency. Penalties for avoidance should be stiff and regarded as fraud, while so-called burner phones should be banned. Something desperately needs to be done because cyberspace at the moment is like the Wild West.

John Irving, Leeds

■ It is an utter disgrace that the Government is failing the families of victims of social media, one of them being 14-year-old Molly Russell who took her own life.

Molly’s father has called for the Online Safety Act to be toughened so tech giants are held to account and the number of fatalities brought about by the poisonous output of the internet are reduced.

They have a moral responsibility to take down harmful content without delay.

Jenny Pain, Chatham, Kent

■ It annoys me that many parents are too lax when it comes to monitoring what their kids are doing on the internet.

Children are so tech smart that the law is useless with these matters and parents need to be much more attentive.

But surely tech companies are smart enough to create proper parental control mechanisms that can flag up when minors are consuming damaging content?

Guy Middlewood, York

■ It’s time this government stopped dragging its feet and implemented the Online Safety Act without watering it down to the point of uselessness.

It affects every child in this country, whether their parents vote Labour or Tory. Rishi Sunak, if you’ve any guts left, sort it out.

Tony Howard, Salford

■ Perhaps if the creators of offending technologies spent more time perfecting them and ironing out possible faults or dangers, people would be safer.

But they’re more interested in getting it on the market as quickly as possible and making money.

Douglas Higgins, Liverpool

■ The focus on social media misses how violence is shown daily on TV too. EastEnders constantly features assault and abuse. It is the same with Coronation Street, and now even Emmerdale is going down the same path.

Roy Tandy, Liverpool