Is there more that could be done to keep children safe online?

Good morning. Before the newsletter, an update on the news that broke last night that King Charles has been diagnosed with cancer. Buckingham Palace says that Charles is already undergoing treatment; it did not specify the type of the disease, other than to say it’s not prostate cancer. You can read Rajeev Syal’s analysis of the impact of the news on how the king carries out his role, and Andrew Gregory’s cancer explainer.

Today, we’re covering online safety for children, starting with a grimly familiar feature of the age: a devastated parent, granted a platform they never wanted, and using it to demand greater guardrails on smartphones to protect others from the fate that befell their child. At the weekend, Brianna Ghey’s mother Esther gave an interview to the BBC in which she called for social media apps to be banned on smartphones for under-16s. Esther Ghey said her daughter might have been saved if the searches being made by her eventual killers had been flagged to their parents.

The whole interview is deeply moving – and it presented an immediate challenge to the government. Yesterday, Rishi Sunak declined to back the idea of a ban on social media on children’s smartphones, but pointed to new powers for the regulator Ofcom granted by the Online Safety Act. For Ghey and many other parents, that is unlikely to seem like enough.

Is there anything that could? For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Alex Hern, the Guardian’s UK technology editor, about the protections that exist, whether they are enough and whose job it is to enforce them. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘This field has moved faster than governments – and parents – have been able to keep up with’

Esther Ghey’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg was above all remarkable for her expression of grief – and compassion. She talked about Brianna as a “home bird”, and said “the house felt so empty without her”. She said she could not forgive her daughter’s killers, Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, but did not “carry any hate” for them. And she said that she would be willing to speak to Jenkinson’s mother, who had seemed “completely broken” at the trial.

“I’d like to understand more how their life was and what they went through. I also want her to know that I don’t blame her for what her child has done,” she said. “I want her to know that I understand how difficult being a parent is in this current day and age.”

That is the driver of the other important thing she had to say: about the difficulties of being a parent in the smartphone era, and what government and technology companies should do about it.

What Esther Ghey is asking for

Ghey (pictured below with Brianna) set out two main demands: for a new law requiring the introduction of child-safe phones without access to social media, and for software as standard that would flag troubling searches to a parent. More evidence for her case: a study released yesterday which finds that misogynistic content is being amplified by the algorithms used by social media platforms, particularly TikTok, and becoming normalised in school playgrounds.

“I’d like to see mobile phone companies take more responsibility,” she said. “It’s so difficult for parents now to safeguard their children.”

That lament will resonate with many parents, but has specific power in Brianna’s case. She had “secretly accessed pro-anorexia and self-harm sites on her smartphone”, a petition created by Esther says. And prosecutors said that her killers had used Google to search for poisons, “serial killer facts” and ways to combat anxiety, as well as looking for rope on Amazon.

There isn’t one universal standard for doing all of this, but there are some tools available that allow a lot of control. Apple’s Screen Time feature allows parents to monitor their childrens’ phones, filter content, limit messaging contacts, track app usage and limit screen time. Google’s Family Link has similar functions, and others like the ability to shut down a device altogether. But the ability to track searches or give a child a phone with no access to potentially harmful content whatsoever are beyond both systems.

“It’s not that you need new software to do everything that Esther Ghey is asking for,” Alex Hern said. “But there is a broader issue here – in the same way that this field has historically moved faster than governments have been able to keep up with, it’s also moved faster than parents can keep up with. It is different with every app, it changes on a regular basis, and it is a large and difficult job to keep on top of.”

How the government has responded

The education secretary, Gillian Keegan, was also on Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, and wiped away tears after watching the interview. But as is often the case with such interventions – we might think of Ian Russell’s campaigning to strengthen the online safety bill – the government’s expression of moral support does not translate to a direct adoption of the proposals.

There have been significant steps in recent years to strengthen online protections for children in the UK, though. “Ahead of the UK children’s code in 2021, the technology companies made a lot of changes that it claimed were nothing to do with the children’s code but look like they may have been,” Alex said. “It rolled out a lot of them globally – once they had built the functionality to mark an account as being held by someone under 18, it looked good and useful, so they took it worldwide.”

Sunak and Keegan pointed to the provisions of the online safety bill, which significantly expand the powers granted to the regulator, Ofcom. That allows a more nimble system where a regulator can place obligations on tech companies that respond to particular issues, rather than needing primary legislation. “We’re getting better at saying, you need an appropriate way to do X, but we’re happy to let you decide what that is,” Alex said. “That feels more plausible than, for example, saying exactly how digital proof of age needs to work.”

Keegan also noted that the government is looking to ban smartphones in all schools. “That seems like a pretty easy win – but it’s probably less about child safety and more about education,” Alex said.

What platforms are doing

The big platforms, like Meta (which owns Instagram and Facebook) and TikTok, are more receptive to making changes than you might expect, Alex said. “They hate the fairly broad regulation of social media, but the hope is it gets them to do things semi-voluntarily. So, for example, Instagram has suddenly started preventing adults from DMing teens. It requires teens to opt in to being friends with adults, and gives parents the ability to monitor accounts.”

Particularly at Meta, changes like this are happening in part because “they have hit a scale where they’re no longer looking to grow tenfold, so they’re not as worried about rolling out something that would break as they grow, or become much more expensive”. Alex also suggests a more cynical motive: “The big companies know regulation is good for them, insofar as it’s harder for smaller competitors to adopt.”

There is an innate difficulty in all of this: the ways the responsibilities of regulators, tech giants like Apple and app-makers intersect. For example, age verification – the demand for a higher standard of proof that a user is 13 at minimum – “could be easier if we leaned on the fact that a small number of very big companies have so much power”, Alex said.

At the moment, Apple won’t even allow apps to access information that a particular device belongs to a child. “Apple and Google run all smartphones – they could work to build a digital proof of age that essentially solves that problem. It’s a reasonable technological ask and it should really be possible by now. But it doesn’t solve the problem of it being impossible to be a third company in that business. So do we want to enshrine these companies as all-powerful, or do we want a slower system that works less well?”

Often, small, iterative changes are effective – but sometimes it’s these steps tech companies resist most strongly. Alex uses an example about WhatsApp, and how it might be used by school bullies. “A child can be added to a group chat, in which everyone abuses them, and then be kicked out – so they’re left with these messages on their phone and no way to respond. You could make it so that an under-18 has to give consent to be added to a group chat. But they don’t like to acknowledge publicly that there are children under 13 on there at all. They don’t like admitting that they can’t stop the harm, but they can reduce it.”

Such a small step “is unlikely to help in a situation as devastating and extreme as Brianna Ghey’s, where a murderer is likely to push past the kinds of friction you might introduce”, Alex said. “But it might help thousands of marginal cases be less damaging. And maybe it could make a difference at one end of a pipeline where bullying begins, and gets worse, and worse, and worse.”

What else we’ve been reading

• As the wealth concentrated at the top continues to balloon, it’s only a matter of time before the world’s first trillionaire is announced. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian writes that a new era of the ultra-rich “signals another step backwards in the fight for a more balanced economy and healthier democracy” – but that, crucially, it can be stopped. Nimo

• Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, has an excellent piece dealing with some of the claims made about Abdul Ezedi, the Afghan man suspected to have carried out an appalling chemical attack last week. “It is right to look into the case and consider what could have been done by the authorities to safeguard the victims,” he writes. “But it is wrong to exploit it to drive forward an ideological attack on the asylum system.” Archie

• Alexis Petridis reflects on the success of female musicians at this year’s Grammy awards (above) and notes: “This year’s winners hardly smacked of special pleading.” More striking than expected victories for Taylor Swift, SZA and Billie Eilish, he adds, was “the sheer breadth of female artists’ domination”. Archie

• After years of struggling with alcohol and substance abuse, Margo Steines got sober. Soon after, she found her unhealthy exercise habits had made left her mentally unwell and chronically ill. She writes about how a compulsive fitness regimen almost killed her and how she is recovering. Nimo

• Ryan Gilbey interviews Felicity Huffman, who was jailed for her part in doctoring her daughter’s test scores to help her get a university place, as she makes her comeback on stage in London. “It’s been hard,” she says of the scandal. “Sort of like your old life died and you died with it.’” Archie

Sport

Formula 1 | The Red Bull team principal, ­Christian Horner, is under external investigation after an accusation regarding his conduct was made by another member of staff at the ­Formula One team. Horner has emphatically rejected the allegation which was widely reported as relating to inappropriate controlling ­behaviour.

Football | Phil Foden scored a hat trick as Manchester City came from behind to beat Brentford 3-1 and move two points behind Liverpool in a congested English Premier League summit.

Tennis | Emma Raducanu advanced into the last 16 of the Abu Dhabi Open with an impressive 6-4, 6-1 win against the world No 26, Marie Bouzkova. Another promising display from the 21-year-old, despite a slow start, sets up a meeting with second seed Ons Jabeur in the next round.

The front pages

“King Charles diagnosed with cancer, palace says” is the lead story in the Guardian today, and each paper has its own version. “The King has cancer” says the Times while the Metro and the Daily Telegraph both say “King has cancer”. The i goes with “King Charles diagnosed with cancer” while the Daily Mirror calls it “King’s cancer shock”. Two papers look harder for an angle: “King starts treatment for cancer” the Daily Express reports while the Daily Mail says “Charles is so grateful they caught it early”. The Sun is more sober than it often is, with “King: I have cancer” – it says he told William and Harry himself. The king and the big C are the picture lead on the front of the Financial Times, but the news splash is “US private equity boosts dividends by piling on debt as borrowing costs rise”.

Today in Focus

Cartoon of the day | Ella Baron

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

Even though women have always been closely involved in the samba tradition in Rio de Janeiro, positions of power have been dominated by men in samba schools, and women’s contributions remain largely unacknowledged. To drive change, Barbara Rigaud opened Turma da Paz de Madureira (TPM), Rio’s first and only all-women samba school, in 2013. Not only does the school honour the role women have always had in samba, it also provides a transformative space for empowerment and sisterhood for women who have often experienced significant hardship and even violence. “Women join TPM because they have freedom here,” Rigaud says. “They can see their worth and how important they are.” On top of the financial constraints, TPM also encounters persistent sexism. “We face a lot of prejudice and mockery because we’re being innovative, you see? Getting such a large number of women together, it’s different,” Rigaud says.

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

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