Emily Darlington leads fight for safer kids’ mobile phone use.
The MP for Milton Keynes Central has set out some of her plans to reduce children’s use of mobile phones and the way they have access to damaging social media.
Speaking exclusively to MKFM, Emily Darlington said she is leading the fight against the technology companies to force them to do more to help young people when they are using their mobile phones, tablets or PCs.
The Labour politician, who has received personal threats and abuse online in her time as an MP, says more must be done to limit young people’s time online and protect them better when they are using Apps.
And she is pushing for greater pressure to be imposed to ensure online users reveal their true age and identity, while pressing technology companies to do more to ensure ‘child friendly’ content is actually safe and harmless for minors.
Reacting to the Government’s recent consultation on a complete ban on under 16s using social media, Emily says she thinks the first debate should be on whether there is a sanction on social media at school.
“Every school in Milton Keynes has some kind of mobile phone ban,” she says. “Some are enforced better than others and some schools are more tolerant and say, ‘as long as we never see the phone it’s OK’.
“But every secondary school has something in place. Primary schools do not tolerate phones at all and if you speak to secondary schools their overall policy is they shouldn’t be in schools. Some schools insist they are kept in your locker, while others say it’s fine as long as ‘we don’t see it’.”
She accepts that many parents want their teenage children to have a mobile phone with them when they are travelling to and from their school, often alone. She says parents want to be able to track their children.
The London-born politician is well-known for her campaigning against child sexual abuse and says that ‘end to end encryption’ sites, which are considered ‘safe’ because they scramble data so that only the sender and receiver can see them, are actually where a lot of abuse is happening.
“The kids get approached while they’re on games and then they get moved into these end to end encryption sites,” says Emily.
“Research shows that 850,000 people in the UK consumed child sexual abuse images. But 80% of those images were self-produced. So there are young men and women being moved into end to end encryption sites and asked to send pictures and live streaming of themselves, and that’s where it comes from. The other 20% is being bought in from places across the world.”
Now she would like the tech companies to programme the phone devices to stop children’s ability to create these images. She believes the technology is available.
“The camera will show you what you are trying to take but it won’t let you take it or do a video,” says Emily. “Not by stopping selfies but by recognising the image. And then you can’t upload anything.
“There are only two operating systems for mobile phones in the world, iOS and Android, so it’s not like you have to talk to 40 different people – there are only two. There are brilliant UK minds that are developing how you can achieve this. Then you have to get iOS and Android to do it.”
Protecting young people from abuse on social media is Emily’s goal. She has survey results on 14 to 16 year olds’ social media use in Milton Keynes that she is currently analysing.
“And we are doing a parents conference off the back of that so that parents can hear what the young people are saying,” adds Emily. “We need to re-do the survey to get younger children included. We are definitely going to run it for all secondary schools, but we do need to do something for primary schools too.”
She also wants stricter controls on being honest about who you are and about your age so that if you commit a crime online, the police are able to contact you.
“Anonymity is a problem online,” says the MP. “We are in a world where you are allowed to say something online that you would never say to someone’s face, and I think that’s a problem.”
Emily is also pushing for stricter controls over what is appropriate for children to watch on specialist kids Apps.
“We need more education about social media, cleaning up what they can see, and probably limiting Apps that can’t meet an agreed threshold,” she says.
“Some Apps say they are ‘kid appropriate’ and I say to them ‘on what basis?’. Is it U-rated, because I understand that as a parent. Or is it PG? I keep pushing them on it and they can’t answer that question at the moment. Because if you want to empower parents, we need to know.”
