Pope Francis calls for tech giants to be accountable for protecting children online

The Pope has said tech giants should be held directly accountable for protecting children on their sites.

The pontiff yesterday also called for managers at tech firms to be held responsible so child safety "is not sacrificed for profit", in one of his most direct interventions in the debate on online harms to date.

Pope Francis’s comments echo UK Government plans to introduce a new statutory duty of care on tech giants to better protect users, a measure campaigned for by the Telegraph.

In a white paper published this summer, ministers said they are considering making senior tech executives criminally liable for serious breaches of the incoming legislation.

Speaking at the Promoting Digital Child Dignity conference in the Vatican, the Pope said that social media and tech firms could no longer continue to be “neither legally nor morally responsible” for what happened on their sites.

Pope Francis said the "painful and tragic experience" of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church gave it a sense of "duty to approach these issues with a long-term vision".

"There is a need to ensure that investors and managers remain accountable, so that the good of minors and society is not sacrificed to profit," he said.

"For the sake of advancing the development of the internet and its many benefits, companies that provide services have long considered themselves mere suppliers of technological platforms, neither legally nor morally responsible for the way they are used."

He continued: "It is now clear that they cannot consider themselves completely unaccountable vis-a-vis the services they provide for their customers.

"So I make an urgent appeal to them to assume their responsibility towards minors, their integrity and their future."

The Pope said the balancing of free expression and privacy online is a "crucial aspect" of digital life but raised fears about increased use of encryption which would make "any control extremely difficult, if not impossible".

"A fitting balance must be found between the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression and the interests of society, so as to ensure that digital media are not used to perpetrate criminal activities against minors," he warned.

Last month, the Home Secretary Priti Patel accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of creating a “digital blindspot” where paedophiles and terrorists will be able to hide their “despicable” crimes, over his plans to encrypt the company's Messenger app.

The move would mean even Facebook would be unable to see what the messaging service’s more than one billion users are sending to each other.

The Pope’s remarks also come as the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (ICCSA) released research showing children as young as 10 now consider being sent sexual images online as “normal”.

Academics from the University of Bedfordshire surveyed 260 children aged 10 to 18-year-olds about their experiences of sexual harm online.

The report found that girls in particular are becoming “desensitised” to receiving unsolicited explicit photos online meaning “such incidents became accepted as an everyday part of life rather than something harmful to be acted on.”

The report also raised concerns that children were not making their social media profiles private due to an “approval culture”, where they felt pressure ape Instagram and YouTube celebrities who garnered large numbers of followers.

More than 80 percent of the children surveyed said they wanted tech giants to do more to keep them safe.