Children need to be protected from toxic social media platforms | Letters

Young people are not the only collateral damage of the tech industry. Many tech companies foster a culture of harm internally as well. After three years at a tech firm, I learned that toxic organisational culture in tech is far more subtle and harder to call out. Tools that were, on the surface, meant to promote fairness and positivity, such as levelling rubrics and company values, were often weaponised against employees. Mistreatment was hidden behind benefits and perks. One year later, I have greater clarity on the psychological harm I extricated myself from.

The only glimmer of light is that online harms presented to children are finally being taken seriously. Unfortunately, the online safety bill fails to solve the problems and presents new ones for society. Much of the material online is safe for children. Some of it should not be seen by anyone, and should be made uniformly illegal. The bill proposes to proactively criminalise the remainder, with a wide-reaching legal tool of state power and censorship.

Reliable age identification of internet users is technically infeasible and socially dangerous. It takes little imagination to realise how this could be used by a government that was hostile to political dissent. State-wide content moderation presents a catch-22: if it is not easily circumvented, it is a harmful tool of censorship. If it is easy to circumvent (using a VPN, for example), it provides no protection.

The only way this problem can be solved is by empowering parents to conveniently manage the content their child sees on their own devices and on their own networks.Daniel LittlewoodDeptford, London