UK going ‘backwards’ on online safety, Molly Russell’s father tells Starmer
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The father of a teenage girl who killed herself after viewing harmful content on social media has told Sir Keir Starmer that the UK is “going backwards” on online safety. Ian Russell, chairman of the Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), in a letter to the Prime Minister on Saturday, said regulator Ofcom’s implementation of the Online Safety Act has been a “disaster”.
Mr Russell said unless there are changes to the legislation, “the streams of life-sucking content seen by children will soon become torrents: a digital disaster”. Passed in late 2023, the Online Safety Act is the UK’s first major legislation to regulate social media, search engine, messaging, gaming, dating, pornography and file-sharing platforms.
It gives Ofcom the power to fine firms that fail to meet these duties – potentially up to billions of pounds for the largest sites – and in serious cases can seek clearance to block access to a site in the UK. In December, the regulator published the first set of online safety rules, legally requiring platforms to assess the risk of illegal content like terrorism, hate, fraud, and child abuse and implement safety measures by March or face enforcement action.
However, Mr Russell wrote that Ofcom’s choices “starkly highlighted intrinsic structural weaknesses with the legislative framework”, and that the regulator “has fundamentally failed to grasp the urgency and scale of its mission”. Mr Russell said Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X, formerly Twitter, owner Elon Musk “are at the leading edge of a wholesale recalibration” of the technology industry.
