Tax profits of social media firms to fund child research
SOCIAL media companies’ profits should be taxed to fund research into their impact on children’s mental health, MPS have said.
The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on social media and young people’s mental health said it wanted a 0.5 per cent levy on the profits of tech firms to fund studies on the damage their products were doing to children.
The committee said also it wanted Ofcom to enforce a legal duty of care to stop social media being a “lawless digital playground”.
The call comes after MPS heard evidence from teenagers who said harmful content online was “glamorising” mental health problems and “making them trendy”.
The group’s report is published as the Government is expected to unveil its White Paper, which will set out new regulations of tech companies.
The Daily Telegraph understands it will include a statutory duty of care that will place a responsibility on social media companies to protect children from harm on their platforms.
Under the group’s proposals the levy would fund a new organisation called the Social Media Health Alliance that would commission studies into the long-term impacts of social media on young people’s mental health.
The group’s recommendations come after a year-long inquiry set up by the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), in which it heard evidence from nearly 40 experts and organisations as well as teenagers.
During its evidence, one teenager warned the APPG: “Social media glamorises mental illness, it makes it cool and trendy”.
The charity Samaritans also told MPS the availability of information about suicide methods on social media and search engines risked fuelling copycat deaths.
Following the report, Shirley Cramer CBE, the chief executive of RSPH, said: “The overarching finding is the need for social media companies to have in place a duty of care to protect vulnerable users and the need for regulation, which would provide much needed health and safety protection for what is a lawless digital playground.”