Collective criticises online safety code for failing to stop spread of far-right hate

It comes as researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found that more than 300 million children a year are victims of online sexual exploitation and abuse. This equates to 12.6%, of the world's children having been victims of non-consensual talking, sharing and exposure to sexual images and video in the past year.

The new code will introduce binding obligations on video-sharing platforms to protect their users from harmful content, including:

• Prohibiting the uploading or sharing of harmful content on their services including cyberbullying, promoting self-harm or suicide and promoting eating or feeding disorders as well as incitement to hatred or violence, terrorism, child sex abuse material, racism and xenophobia.
• Using age assurance to prevent children from encountering pornography or gratuitous violence online and having age verification measures in place as appropriate.
• Providing parental controls for content which may impair the physical, mental, or moral development of children under 16.

The Online Safety Commissioner, Niamh Hodnett, said: “It is essential to create a safer online world for all of us, especially for our children. This updated Code is an important step forward to hold platforms to account for keeping people safe online. 

"It takes account of responses to our public consultation and our consultation with our Youth Advisory Committee. We are now notifying the Code to the European Commission and once that process is complete we will apply it later this year.” 

However, the code was criticised by the Hope and Courage Collective (H&CC), which fights against far-right hate. It said the code will not force social media corporations operating here to turn off Recommender Systems by default.

Niamh McDonald, H&CC's Director of Advocacy and Community, said the code falls short of what is needed to "keep elections safe, protect communities targeted by hate and to dial down the emotionally manipulative content spreading unchecked".

"Coimisiún na Meán has done a U-turn on their earlier stated intention of turning off the algorithm that automatically recommends content to people without them ever requesting to see it.”

According to the research launched by the University of Edinburgh’s Childlight Global Child Safety Institute, just under one in eight children have also been exposed in the past year to online solicitation, such as unwanted sexual talk which can include non-consensual sexting, unwanted sexual questions and unwanted sexual act requests by adults or other youths.

Offences can also take the form of "sextortion", where predators demand money from victims to keep images private, to abuse of AI deepfake technology. The research suggested that the US is a particularly high-risk area.

The university's Childlight initiative — which aims to understand the prevalence of child abuse — includes a new global index, Into The Light, which found one in nine men in the US (almost 14 million) admitted online offending against children at some point.

Surveys found 7% of British men, or 1.8 million, admitted the same, as did 7.5% of men in Australia. The research also found many men admitted they would seek to commit physical sexual offences against children if they thought it would be kept secret.