The health secretary Jeremy Hunt launched a blistering attack on Sunday on social media companies for “turning a blind eye” to emotional problems and mental health damage suffered by children who have uncontrolled access to their online platforms.
In an angrily worded letter sent to executives at Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Google, Hunt says their failure to come forward with safeguards to control access is both “morally wrong” and “unfair on parents”.
Hunt says their inadequate responses have left him with no option but to consider legislation on internet safety. He has also asked the chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, to report on the impact of technology on young people’s mental health, and to recommend healthy limits for screen time.
In the letter, Hunt tells the companies that their work on devising ways to verify the age of children accessing social media platforms, on screen-time limits, and on measures to end cyberbullying has fallen short.
“In particular, progress on age verification is not good enough ... I am concerned that your companies seem content with a situation where thousands of users breach your own terms and conditions on the minimum user age.
“I fear that you are collectively turning a blind eye to a whole generation of children being exposed to the harmful emotional side-effects of social media prematurely; this is both morally wrong and deeply unfair on parents, who are faced with the invidious choice of allowing children to use platforms they are too young to access, or excluding them from social interaction that often the majority of their peers are engaging in. It is unacceptable and irresponsible for you to put parents in this position.”
With the NHS facing a mounting crisis over a lack of mental health services for young people, the Guardian reported last year that an increasing number of young women were suffering mental health problems linked to conflicts with friends, fears about their body image and pressures created by social media.
Rates of stress, anxiety and depression were rising particularly sharply among teenage girls. NHS data showed that the number of times a girl aged 17 or under has been admitted to hospital in England because of self-harm had jumped from 10,500 to more than 17,500 a year over the previous decade – a rise of 68%. The rise among boys was much lower at 26%.
Hunt recognises in the letter that some progress has been made in developing new products to help parents limit what their children can access, but says it is nowhere near enough to convince him that the voluntary process for addressing the issues is working.
He adds that the pioneering services offered by the companies are not matched by an accompanying willingness to protect young people from the adverse effects: “Your industry boasts some of the brightest minds and biggest budgets globally. While these issues may be difficult, I do not believe that solutions are outside your reach: I do question whether [there] is sufficient will to reach them.”
The health secretary has been pushing for action from social media companies since late 2016, when he raised concerns about a growing online culture of intimidation and sexual imagery.
“There is a lot of evidence that the technology industry, if they put their mind to it, can do really smart things,” he said at the time. “For example, I ask myself the simple question as to why you can’t prevent the texting of sexually explicit images by people under the age of 18, if that’s a lock that parents choose to put on a mobile phone contract.” He added: “There is technology that can identify sexually explicit pictures and prevent [them] being transmitted.”
He also said at the time that technology should be used to tackle cyberbullying automatically, using “word-pattern recognition”.
There were many areas “where social media companies could put options in their software that could reduce the risks associated with social media”, he added.
