Children’s Social Media Accounts

Debate between Lewis Atkinson and Cameron Thomas

Monday 13th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Lewis Atkinson]

I agree that social media companies rightly face regulation; I will talk a little more about that later.

There is, rightly, debate and campaigning in the media and elsewhere—we saw some of that over the weekend—about the level of regulation of online content that children may access online, whether that is illegal content or legal but harmful content. Although the regulation of content itself is not the focus of today’s debate, as a concerned parent myself, I am impatient for online services to take proper responsibility for what our children see. Social media companies must not shy away from their responsibilities to protect children, either because of misguided free speech concerns or out of concern about their levels of profit.

It is important to note, as context for today’s debate, that the law does not allow online services to collect or store the personal information of children under the age of 13. As a result, most popular services require users to be at least 13 years of age, but enforcement of that requirement has historically been lax. The age-assurance requirements in the Online Safety Act must be implemented without delay.

I know that hon. Members will want to touch on various elements of the approaches to social media regulation, but in parallel to the wider debate about content regulation, the petitioners are clear that there are specific issues about parental access that warrant a response in their own right, from both social media companies and the Government, so I want to focus my remarks, and I hope this debate, on those specific questions.

First, the petitioners call for parental access to social media when children are alive. I understand the instinct behind this call—the instinct to directly monitor what a child is doing online in order to protect them from the harms to which I have referred. However, in the course of preparing for the debate, I heard clearly from multiple perspectives, including children’s charities such as the NSPCC, that broad, overarching parental rights to children’s social media would not be appropriate. Of course, given that the minimum age of use should be 13, we are talking about teenagers. Children—teenagers—do have long-established rights to privacy, as set out by the UN convention on the rights of the child, and established UK law and practice in a range of areas reflects and recognises that.

Such rights are important not just as abstract concepts but because, as I have heard, older children sometimes need private online spaces to help them to explore the world—for example, a teenager understanding their own sexuality before they wish to share it with their parents. We also know that, sadly, in some horrible cases, parents are themselves perpetrators of abuse against their children. Establishing a blanket right to access children’s online activity would remove an important safe route for children to seek support and alert others in such cases.

The petitioners themselves have reflected on such matters, and although they remain determined to support parents to keep their kids safe online, there is a recognition that establishing an overarching parental right to access the data of living teenagers is unlikely to be the appropriate way forward. Instead, it appears to me that parental oversight of a child’s social media use should rather be achieved through strengthening and significantly increasing the uptake of parental controls and other specifically designed arrangements that children and their parents agree to together, as part of the sign-up processes for online services. It is clearly the responsibility of online services to implement and expand such measures, and I hope for rapid progress in that area as a key part of online services’ work to improve children’s safety online in partnership with parents.

I now turn to the issue of bereaved parents’ access to social media data, which is the specific issue for which Ellen has been campaigning, because she is still not able to access data about Jools’ use of online services before his death. I cannot begin to imagine the anguish of losing a child and, even more so, not being given information that might help a parent to understand the circumstances of their child’s death. We rightly talk about laws, protections and rights, but we do not talk enough as a society about the right—indeed, the need—to grieve a loss, especially one as painful as the loss of child.

In preparing for this debate, I spoke with SLOW, or Surviving the Loss of Your World—a charity that offers bereavement support for parents following the loss of a child. The charity emphasised to me the absolute necessity, as part of the grieving process, of establishing an understanding of what led to death. By being denied data about Jools’ online activity before his death, Ellen has been denied the ability to grieve as she wishes. The petition recognises that it cannot be right that a grieving mother is forced to go through years of campaigning and investigation to try to get answers about her son’s death. I urge everyone—especially those working in social media companies—to reflect on the evident injustice of the situation, and to commit to finding a way to do the right thing: to give Ellen the information and answers she needs.

The Online Safety Act 2023 made important provisions for Ofcom and coroners to access social media in relevant cases following a child’s death, in turn helping bereaved families. It is welcome that the current Government’s Data (Use and Access) Bill, which is making its way through Parliament, strengthens those powers and the requirements for data retention so that the risks of data loss in such cases are reduced. However, the provisions do not have retrospective mechanisms, and are therefore not sufficient for historical cases, such as Jools’, where the coronial process has already concluded. As a result, Ellen is in the situation where she has to try and crowdfund a significant sum of money for legal action to get Jools’ inquest re-run, so that the coroner can use the powers now available in law to access Jools’ social media data. It cannot be right that this is necessary.

Some online services say that without a change in the law, they cannot legally release data to bereaved parents like Ellen, but what has struck me in preparation for the debate is that there is not a consensus on the current legal situation. The online safety and data protection expert, John Carr, told me that he did not believe that the general data protection regulations necessarily limited the release of children’s usage data to bereaved parents. Snap, the provider of Snapchat, told me that it already, on a case-by-case basis, discloses usage data to a parent who is the successor to a deceased child.

Other online services—including some of the most prominent social media services used by young people, such as TikTok—seem to take a different interpretation of the law. They state that data protection legislation prohibits them from releasing any data they hold that would give parents like Ellen the answers they deserve. I find this inconsistency of interpretation from online services at best troubling and at worst suspicious, given the historical behaviours of some social media companies that were involved in minimising—and indeed covering up—evidence of the impact of online harm. I believe it is incumbent on all online services to use their considerable resources to push the existing law as far as they can, and to find a way to release data to bereaved families.

[Cameron Thomas (Tewkesbury) (LD)]

We owe it to our constituents that we work together, and leave no stone unturned to understand the trends and drivers that lead our children to take their own lives. Social media companies headquartered overseas have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot be relied on to take reasonable action out of good will, so I invite the hon. Member to agree that it is up to Parliament to legislate accordingly.

[Lewis Atkinson]

I agree that legislative action has been necessary, as the Online Safety Act shows, and indeed, there are provisions on this in the current data Bill. The issue is that there is a lack of clarity; under the existing law, some social media companies seem to be finding a way of doing the right thing while others are not. I will come to the hon. Member’s point when I ask a couple of questions of the Government.

I can assure the social media companies—in the event that they carefully do the right thing, on a case-by-case basis, and then face data protection questions from regulators in response—that they will find allies across Parliament in defending their actions.

I ask the Minister and the Government: what scope is there for stating clearly in law that, so long as due care is taken on a case-by-case basis, the release of data to bereaved parents is permitted? Could the data Bill be amended to include a clarification to remove, once and for all, the claim of some companies that they are prohibited from giving parents like Ellen the data and answers they deserve? Are there any other steps the Minister believes could be taken to right this injustice? I look forward to hearing the perspectives of colleagues and the Government’s response to this important debate.