Royal colleges back online duty of care
A slice of social media companies’ profits should be used to protect children and for research into mental health conditions, three royal colleges said as they backed The Daily Telegraph’s Duty of Care campaign. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said the death of Molly Russell, 14, who took her life after viewing self-harm images online, was the latest example of how self-regulation by the social media giants had failed. It called on the Government “to act decisively”.
THREE leading royal colleges have backed The Daily Telegraph’s campaign for a legal duty of care on social media companies – and called for a slice of their profits to be invested in protecting children and in research into mental health.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and Royal College of Nursing said regulation in the form of a statutory duty of care was needed to protect children from “disturbing” content or harms such as cyberbullying, self-harm, suicide and abuse.
Their demands are significant because they represent the very medical practitioners who are dealing with the consequences of the explosion in children’s use of the internet and social media.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists said the death of Molly Russell, 14, who took her life after viewing self-harm images online, was the latest example of how self-regulation by the social media giants had failed.
Molly’s father, Ian, blamed Instagram for contributing to her death. “We call on the Government to act decisively,” said Dr Bernadka Dubicka, chairman of its child and adolescent faculty.
“We support both the creation of a duty of care for social media companies and the formation of an external regulator to ensure that code of conduct is enforced,” she said.
“We know from the recent survey of the prevalence of children’s mental health that it is the most vulnerable young people with mental health disorders that are more likely to be adversely affected by time spent on social media.
“So it cannot be right that young people can easily access highly disturbing images on social media such as those promoting self harm and anorexia, and that it is easy to get around age-verification checks.”
In advance of a policy paper on social media that the college is to publish next month, she said the social media giants should be forced to invest a proportion of their profits into “muchneeded research aimed at shedding light on the benefits and harms of the internet and social media”.
Dr Max Davie, the officer for health promotion at the RCPCH, also backed such a move, saying: “These tech giants make an awful lot of money. As a proportion of their profits, I don’t think it would make a huge dent in them to spend more money on children’s safeguarding.”
He said the RCPCH backed a regulator and “cautiously” welcomed a statutory duty of care but said such regulation, setting minimum standards and sanctions for social media firms, needed to be based on research evidence that was currently lacking.
He pointed the finger at tech giants which “hoarded and didn’t release” data that could show what impact social media was having on children.
“We need an informed regulator as well as an effective regulatory,” he said. “The regulator has to be able to lift the lid and have access to internal documents, internal data, who is doing what and the actual process – even something as basic as how many people they have working on safeguarding.”
Fiona Smith, lead for children and young people at the Royal College of Nursing, said: “We are pleased to support the campaign for a duty of care on social media firms that can help protect children from online harms that damage young lives and cause distress for parents and families.
“If duties of care for children exist in the offline world, they should exist in the online world too.
“Whether it be online bullying, grooming, violent imagery or advertorial content that preys on young people’s vulnerabilities, social media firms need to understand that along with the hundreds of millions of pounds of profit comes a responsibility to ensure that children are kept safe and healthy on their platforms.”