Children’s Social Media Accounts

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg, and to debate such a powerful and moving topic.

I want to start, as more or less everyone in this room has done, by paying tribute to Ellen for her tireless campaigning work. I cannot come close to comprehending the pain that the death of Jools must have caused you, even before it was exacerbated and extended by the lack of closure when social media companies refused to give you access to data that could help to explain what happened to him and when collectively, as a society, we showed ourselves impotent to compel them to do so. Your ability to turn that pain and that love into such a powerful petition and call for action, which motivated so many parents in my Hitchin constituency to sign up to it too, is a true inspiration to so many of us in the room. Just as we are inspired by you, we are inspired by the many families here with you today as part of the Bereaved Families for Online Safety support group, which has been doing so much important campaign work on the issue.

It is pretty clear to all of us who have spoken today that for far too long we have tolerated a belief that online harm is too tricky and too practically infeasible to regulate in the same way that we would regulate every other form of harm to which a young person could be exposed, often in contexts in which as legislators we have historically been more comfortable getting involved. We cannot tolerate that state of affairs any longer. Although there have been some steps forward, which are to be welcomed and which I will touch on shortly, the petition highlights several areas in which it is clear that we need to consider going further to ensure that we are all living up to our duty to do everything we can to protect young people right across society.

Both as a teacher and as a children’s social lead, I got to see at first hand some of the very real ways in which young people can be exposed to harm by our failure to act on the issue of social media and online harm over the past decade. As an MP now, I am always struck by the fact that, heartbreakingly, whenever I do an assembly, even in a lower school or a primary school, almost without fail there will be one young person, and often several, who will raise their hand and talk to me about an example where they have been made to feel unsafe or at risk online and ask what I, as their MP, am going to do about it. I know that urgency to act is felt by so many colleagues across party boundaries, both in this Hall today and across the House.

The petition focuses on particular aspects where we could do more to ensure that parents have both the right ability to provide oversight for children on social media and access to really important data after bereavement. I know that, following the petition, there has been some important progress from the Online Safety Act to give some powers to coroners and to Ofcom to ensure that in certain circumstances they can support parents’ ability to access that data, but as colleagues have pointed out, there are clear areas in which it does not go far enough.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) set out, it is pretty clear that at the moment some ambiguity in the legal position is being used as an excuse by social media companies not to act. We should not tolerate that; we should do all we can, hopefully as a Government, to clarify the position. Collectively, we should not be letting social media companies off the hook for not doing everything in their power to give the families access to the data where no right-minded individual could see any reason not to and where no right-minded individual or agency is likely to seek recourse against them for doing so. So many Members have rightly pointed out that that feels like an excuse, not a reason, to fail to disclose data. We should not tolerate that excuse from companies that we come into contact with in our work as representatives.

However, as has rightly been pointed out, it is important that we do not just look at this issue in the context of the existing legislation. We know that there are very real risks after bereavement that the data could be deleted. As my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) pointed out, thinking about ways in which we can compel earlier notification to Ofcom and to social media companies and online platforms that can have that data in order to remove that risk at source is surely a common-sense way of ensuring that that risk to getting justice and getting closure can be closed off.

Moreover, the petitioner and many others rightly point out and ask us to reflect on the fact that if we are really interested in child safeguarding and keeping young people safe, it simply cannot be only after a tragedy, after bereavement, that the opportunity for parental oversight and involvement takes place. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central rightly set out some of the very real and justified concerns that children’s charities and advocates have about unfettered and complete access, but as many other Members have set out, that should not be the case. It should not be beyond us to reason and think through how, in exactly the same way that parents provide oversight over every other aspect of a young person’s life, they can have access to the best and most sensible ways to do so on this platform, too. As the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) pointed out, thinking about the age at which young people can meaningfully and rightfully consent to opting out of parental oversight has to be part of that process.

It is fair to say that a few hon. Members are concerned that the implementation of the Online Safety Act, as it is currently envisaged and as some of Ofcom’s recent publications show, may fall short of doing justice to the importance of the issues. Whether it is considering what more we can do to protect young people from imagery and content relating to suicide and self-harm on social media, ensuring that we do not tolerate technical infeasibility as an excuse for tech companies not to act on the most egregious forms of harm, or having well-intentioned and important conversations about the right age of consent, to which many Members have alluded today, there is clearly a lot more that we can do collectively.

[Monica Harding]

Will the hon. Member go further and say that Ofcom’s implementation so far has been weak, overly cautious and fundamentally disappointing? Does he concur that it is unfair to put parents in the intolerably pressured situation of being the policemen of their children’s social media activity?

[Alistair Strathern]

Some aspects of how Ofcom has said it will take these matters forward are to be welcomed, but I absolutely agree with the underlying sentiment of the hon. Lady’s comment. Currently, what has been set out does not go anywhere near far enough. As representatives of our communities and of the families who want to do everything possible to keep young people safe from online harm, it is our responsibility to ensure that we are holding Ofcom accountable for being far more ambitious about how it can most creatively and robustly deploy the powers that we are giving it to keep young people safe.

[Lola McEvoy]

I thank my hon. Friend for his impressive and articulate outlining of the debate so far. Will he join my calls for Ofcom to strengthen the upcoming children’s code and, as the code is not yet published, to use this opportunity to include functionality, a stronger dynamic risk assessment—a live document that will be constantly updated—and the measures that my hon. Friend has laid out for the smaller and riskier platforms?

[Alistair Strathern]

I concur wholeheartedly. My hon. Friend has been a tireless campaigner on this issue, both in our debate today and throughout the time I have known her—a very short time, but an impressive one none the less. As she rightly points out, the children’s code is a real opportunity to do right by the intentions of the legislation and by the collective ambition that we are discussing today. From my hon. Friend to the children’s commissioner, campaigners on the issue are pretty united about the opportunity that a more ambitious code could deliver for safeguarding young people.

For far too long, we have allowed young people to be exposed to a level of harm online that we would not tolerate in any other aspect of life. It is potentially understandable, but not excusable, that as legislators we are sometimes more comfortable imposing restrictions or acting in areas where we have more direct lived experience, as in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill or the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. Those are tangible things that we are comfortable and used to voting and making laws on, whereas online harm can sometimes feel a bit more nebulous and a bit tougher. However, that is no excuse not to act. The failure to act is written across the tragedies experienced by so many families across the country and so many campaigners in the room today. We must do better, and we have to make sure that this is the Parliament in which we do.