LONDON — Social media executives could face criminal liability if they refuse to share information about deceased children’s online activity with authorities, according to changes to the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill announced by the government today.
The changes would empower Ofcom to demand relevant data from social media companies, including information about how a child interacted with content online and how that content was promoted by the company’s algorithms, in instances where online harms are suspected to have played a part in a child’s death.
They follow a long-running campaign by bereaved families and the crossbench peer Beeban Kidron to allow greater scrutiny of the role social media can play in bringing children to harm.
If companies fail to provide a valid excuse, they could face enforcement action, including fines and the sanctioning of senior managers, said DCMS Lords Minister Stephen Parkinson.
“Our changes to the bill will seek to ensure that Ofcom has the powers it needs to support coroners and their equivalents in Scotland, so that they have access to the information they need to conduct investigations into a child’s death where social media may have played a part,” said Parkinson.
He said a full package of measures would be brought forward at the bill’s report stage, expected to begin July 6.
Details of how Ofcom would legally compel companies headquartered outside of the U.K. to hand over the relevant data is still to be worked out. Parkinson said the government would “seek to engage our American counterparts” to ensure U.S. data laws did not inadvertently prevent compliance with the new U.K. legislation.
“The amendments put an end to the inhumane situation where corners and families in crisis are forced to battle faceless corporations to determine whether a child’s engagement with a digital service contributed to their death,” said Kidron. “Bereaved families have a right to know what happened to their children, and coroner’s have a duty to ensure that lessons are learned, and those who have failed in their responsibilities are held accountable.”
Kidron, who is also chair of the 5Rights campaign group, has been working on the amendments with the Bereaved Families for Online Safety, a group which includes the parents of Molly Russell, the 14-year-old who died by suicide in 2017 after repeatedly engaging with online content related to suicide and self-harm. Her parents spent years attempting to obtain their daughter’s social media data.
The difficulty of obtaining social media data has been a long-standing problem for bereaved families, creating “a terrible situation where when something goes wrong, parents spend years and years [trying to access data], coroners don’t get the information they need, and the companies are not fully complying,” Kidron told POLITICO last week.
“It is essential that if a child has died and there is any indication of social media playing a part in the death, that there is a possibility to scrutinize this,” Ruth Moss, mother of Sophie Parkinson and member of the Bereaved Families for Online Safety group, previously told POLITICO.