Tech giants to be bound by code of conduct

Social media firms must block harmful content for children or face massive fines

SOCIAL media firms will be legally required to protect children from harmful content under the first ever code to police the internet.

In a victory for The Telegraph’s Duty of Care campaign, Elizabeth Denham, the Information Commissioner, today publishes groundbreaking rules that will bar Facebook, Google and other tech giants from serving children content that is “detrimental to their physical or mental health or well-being”.

The government-backed code will be enforced by fines of potentially billions of pounds and is designed to prevent cases like that of Molly Russell, the 14-year-old who killed herself after viewing self-harm images on Instagram and other sites.

It will require firms to safeguard children’s privacy, to curb “addictive” features and to restrict the use of personal information for commercial ends.

Ms Denham said: “As we have met with various stakeholders, the profile that The Telegraph has given, especially to children online, has been really important. There are laws to protect children in the real world – film ratings, car seats, age restrictions on drinking and smoking. We need our laws to protect children in the digital world too.

“This is a first step towards online digital services taking responsibility for their users’ experience.”

Ian Russell, Molly’s father, welcomed the code and said it would protect children and prevent tech firms from “monetising misery”. He added:

“It is shocking that in failing to make the necessary changes quickly enough, the tech companies have allowed unnecessary suffering to continue.”

The Culture Department said the code would be “an important part of our wider work to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online”.

The code is due to be passed by Parliament by this summer after which firms will have a year’s grace to prepare for it.

It is expected to be followed by duty of care laws giving a regulator powers to bring criminal sanctions.

The Telegraph has campaigned since 2018 for a statutory duty of care to protect children from online harms.

Ms Denham’s code says online platforms must be designed in a way that makes them safe for children and, if they are not, children must be barred.

Profiling – where algorithms use a child’s online history to target them with content they might like – must be switched off by default and can only be used if the firms have measures to protect children from harmful content.

“If you profile children ... in order to suggest content to them, then you need suitable measures in place to make sure that children aren’t served content which is detrimental to their physical or mental health or well-being, taking into account their age,” the code says.

The legal requirement under the Data Protection Act 2018 will be backed by fines of up to £17.5million, or 4 per cent of annual worldwide turnover, whichever is higher, meaning almost £2billion for Facebook and £5billion for Google.

The code curbs firms’ use of “sticky”

features such as notifications, continuous scrolling, autoplay or reward loops in games or videos to encourage children to stay online for hours. It will also require pause buttons that allow children to take a break at any time without losing their progress in a game, or popup warnings to halt them.

Features that “use personal data to exploit human susceptibility to reward, anticipatory and pleasure seeking behaviours, or peer pressure” will have to be switched off by default.

Settings must default to “high privacy” which means a child would have to opt in if they wanted others to see their profile. Geolocation, enabling a child to be tracked, would be switched off by default – and if activated, turned off at the end of each session.

Baroness Kidron, who sponsored the original amendment that formed the code, said it was a “momentous day” that forced tech firms to put the “best interests” of children above commercial interests.

Andy Burrows, the NSPCC head of child safety online policy, said it would “force high-risk social networks to finally take online harm seriously” or “suffer tough consequences”.