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Ministers want to issue teens with 'digital passports' to prevent access to pornography

New laws being drawn up to restrict under 18s to harmful content online will make little difference to social media  - Moment RF
New laws being drawn up to restrict under 18s to harmful content online will make little difference to social media - Moment RF

Teenagers should be required to have a “digital passport” to stop them being exposed to pornography on social media, ministers say.

MPs heard up to a third of content on social media sites is pornographic - yet will not be covered by age restrictions being introduced next year.

Margot James, Minister for Digital, said officials are working on plans which could give every teenager a unique online ID - or “digital identity” - in order to prevent access to inappropriate content.

Such checks could mean the ages of teenagers could be verified from the age of 13 onwards, ensuring that age limits on social media are adhered to.

Age restrictions on pornography sites are now due to be introduced next Easter, Ms James said, following a series of delays.

But she admitted the system would leave a signficant loophole, because it only covers commercial sites where more than a third of the content is pornographic.

Ms James told the Science and Technology Committee's inquiry into the impact of social media: “It is a weakness in the legislative solution. It is well known that certain social media platforms that many people use regularly do have pornography freely available on their platform.”

SNP MP Carol Monaghan said: “One of the concerns we all have is that children can stumble across pornography. We know that social media platforms where children are often active ... a third of their content can be pornographic.”

The minister said officials are now working to develop a system of “digital passports” which would allow age verification throughout childhood.

“I do think that the time has come,” she told MPs. “At the moment we think we have a robust means of verifying people’s ages at the age of 18. The challenge is to be able to develop tools that verify people’s age at a younger age, like for example 13,” she said.

“Those techniques are not robust enough yet but there is a lot of technological research going on and I’m reasonably confident that over the next few  years there will be robust means of identifying age at younger than 18,” she said.

The Daily Telegraph is campaigning for a statutory duty of care on the social media companies that would require them to protect children from online harms
The Daily Telegraph is campaigning for a statutory duty of care on the social media companies that would require them to protect children from online harms

But she suggested it would take at least two years, with “considerable hoops to go through” to develop such tools, and get support from the public for a system to give individuals a verified ID.

Ministers also raised fears that social media is fuelling suicide risk among youngsters.

Jackie Doyle-Price, recently appointed Minister for Suicide Prevention, said social media companies and websites have been far too slow to act to remove content encouraging self-harm and suicide.

“It remains the case that Wikipeida continue to publish  adivce about how to take your life,” she said.

 

“I’m very, very concerned about online content being a driver for that [suicide] particularly when you look at extent of use and how that feeds into people’s body image. And we know that self-harm and suicide are on the rise. Social media companies have been very slow,” she said.

Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner, called on parents to be better role models for children, and keep their mobile phone “in a box” for certain periods to set an example. And she said antenatal classes should teach expectant parents about the dangers of excessive internet use.