East Hampshire MP Damian Hinds says parents today face an unenviable dilemma: trying to protect their children from the harms of the online world, whilst also wanting them to benefit from tech’s possibilities, and conscious that much of friendship groups’ interaction is online. I hear from many local parents concerned about this area, and it is now getting a lot more attention in parliament too. The landmark legislation is the Online Safety Act which we passed in 2023. Some of that is already in force, some not yet. Last week, a new set of ‘Children’s Codes’ – which come out of the Act – should force more filtering out of more the very most harmful material for children. That is an important step, but we need more.
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00:00One of the issues I've really been focusing on in Parliament is about online
00:04safety and particularly online safety for children and this week I put down two
00:09amendments to the government's data bill to try and enhance protection for
00:13children particularly with high-risk social media and you can see from this
00:17clip a little of that debate. The default in fact was 16 and various
00:22countries including Germany the Netherlands and Ireland selected 16 we
00:26selected 13 and that means that that at that age you can now sign up to social
00:31media have your behavior tracked for the purpose of targeting content and ads
00:35towards you could start your own channel you can have multiple IDs and you have
00:40to make those decisions about what details of your private life you share
00:44many people just believe that 13 in terms of brain development is too young to make
00:48some of those decisions. You can read the article in this week's Herald and Post