Lisa Nandy urges YouTube and TikTok to promote better content for children
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UK culture minister says government wants to ‘open a dialogue’, but will intervene if platforms do not comply. The UK culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has written to video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube and TikTok, urging them to promote higher quality educational content to children.
Recent statistics suggest that although a decade ago children watched an average of two hours’ television a day, that has since dropped by more than 70%. Instead, children were migrating to YouTube, TikTok and other streaming platforms between the ages of four and eight, Nandy said.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the government wanted to “open a dialogue” with the platforms initially, but that she would consider stepping in if they did not comply. Nandy said: “A lot of content made in the UK is very high-quality content directed towards children. It helps inform them about the world, it helps with emotional wellbeing and development, and it’s very enjoyable as well.
“What we’re finding is that more and more children are moving on to video-sharing platforms like YouTube, finding their own content, and it’s often not as high quality as the sort of content public service broadcasters and commercial broadcasters are producing, and that’s one of the concerns as a government.”.
The former BBC presenter Floella Benjamin, who guest-edited the show, described the platforms as a “wild west” fraught with inappropriate content. Nandy said while the government had already strengthened measures to take down content harmful to children, she felt there was “a more profound point” around the quality of the content children were consuming.
