BPS encouraged by calls to ‘toughen-up’ Online Safety Bill

The society is particularly pleased to see recommendations to ensure robust requirements to protect children from cross-platform harm, something the BPS explicitly outlines in its briefing on the issue.

This measure is vital to address harms such as child grooming moving across platforms to encrypted messaging and livestreaming sites.

The society is also encouraged to see the recommendation that content or activity promoting self-harm be made illegal, as is already the case for suicide.

Dr Linda Kaye, chair of the British Psychological Society's Cyberpsychology section, said:

"We are pleased to see the recommendations in this report call for stronger measures to protect people from online harms.

Exposure to certain content online may have negative and detrimental psychological implications for both children and adults.

The internet can distort, normalise, glorify and by extension may encourage behaviours that compromise the safety of its users and those around them.

Having precautions in place is vital for prevention for any potential risk to harm in the future."

Professor Sonia Livingstone, an expert in online safety, added:

"I welcome the report's demand that businesses provide 'proportionate systems and processes to identify and mitigate reasonably foreseeable risks of harm' to their users.

Psychologists play a crucial role in evidencing such risks of harm and evaluating efforts to mitigate them, especially as regards disadvantaged or vulnerable groups.

"Such efforts at mitigation should, as the report clearly proposes, shift the burden of responsibility from individual users to the businesses whose policy and design decisions too often promote commercial interests over those of the public."