Tag Archives: online safety

James Baker

Banning children from online games, and spying on every device: Why we must oppose Baroness Benjamin’s attack on liberty

By James Baker | Fri 12th December 2025 - 10:25 am

Shortly, families across the country will gather to celebrate Christmas. Elves will have been busy making presents for Children, and Santa will be loading his sack. Parents will look forward to the joy on their children’s faces as they unwrap them.

For many teenagers, this joy might take the form of a new computer game to play with friends over the holiday. Maybe Minecraft, Fortnite, or the latest Mario Kart.

Yet if one Liberal Democrat peer has her way, no one under the age of 16 would be able to play an online game that allows them to talk or interact with another player.

Baroness Benjamin is backing a series of illiberal amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

One would:

require all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users.

While the stated intent is to ban under-16s from social media, the definition of a “user-to-user service” under the Online Safety Act 2023 is far broader. It covers almost any service that allows users to create content or communicate online. This includes social media, messaging apps, forums, and, critically for teens (and gamer parents who game with their children), Multiplayer video games.

In practice, this would ban under-16s from:

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Mark Valladares

7 March 2025 – today’s press releases

By Mark Valladares | Fri 7th March 2025 - 10:30 pm

Safer Phones Bill: Government making “ponderous progress” as measures watered down

Commenting on news that the Safer Phones Bill was watered down to gain government support, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology Victoria Collins MP said:

So far, the Government has made ponderous progress on children’s online safety. I’m disappointed that they’ve seemingly succeeded in pushing for the Safer Phones Bill to be watered down – a bill that had such promise when it was first proposed.

There’s a mounting crisis in children’s mental health, driven in large part by addictive algorithms. Parents and families across the country are crying out for change when it comes to support in the online world.

We’re picking up the baton where the Government have dropped it – starting with our amendments to the Data Bill on the digital age of consent. We’ll keep fighting to make sure young people are properly protected.

Lib Dems demand publication of legal advice on seizing frozen Russian assets

The Liberal Democrats have written to the UK Attorney General, calling on him to publish the legal advice provided to the Government regarding seizing the frozen Russian assets held in the UK.

The call comes as pressure mounts on the Government to seize the assets and use them to fund support for Ukraine – made all the more critical by President Trump’s reckless decision to suspend military aid and intelligence sharing with the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

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Posted in News and Press releases | Also tagged , and | 13 Comments

Patrolling the new frontier: Regulating online extremism

By Ivor Roberts and Ian Acheson | Wed 11th September 2019 - 5:02 pm

A month after the horrific attack in Christchurch, which was live-streamed on Facebook, New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern said: “It’s critical that technology platforms like Facebook are not perverted as a tool for terrorism, and instead become part of a global solution to countering extremism.”

We wholeheartedly agree. Neo-Nazi and other far-right material, alongside Islamist and far-left content, spread swiftly on Facebook, with a potential to reach thousands in a matter of hours. Facebook is not alone; Social media platforms have been used by extremists to radicalise and inspire acts of terrorism across the world. Exposure to online extremism is not the sole cause of radicalisation, but in combination with other risk factors, it can weaponise a latent disposition towards terrorist violence.

Preventing online extremism has become a priority for policy-makers in Europe. In the U.K., the Home Office and DCMS have proposed to regulate internet platforms in the Online Harms White Paper, which considers a wide range of harms, including extremism and terrorism.

We offer several recommendations. First, a clear definition of extremist content can prevent uncertainty and over-blocking, and help ensure content is judged consistently by human moderators. Once human moderators have determined something is extremist content, platforms should use hashing technology to screen out known extremist content at the point of upload. One example of such technology is the Counter Extremism Project’s eGlyph – a tool developed by Hany Farid, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and member of the Counter Extremism Project’s advisory board.

eGlyph is based on ‘robust hashing’ technology, capable of swiftly comparing uploaded content to a database of known extremist images, videos, and audio files, thereby disrupting the spread of such content. We have made this ground-breaking technology available at no cost to organisations wishing to combat online violent extremism.

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Caron Lindsay

Lib Dems slam Tories’ approach to online safety

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 17th February 2016 - 2:56 pm

Liberal Democrat peer Jane Bonham Carter has  slammed the Tories’ plans to enforce age limits for pornographic websites as “a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” She said:

In a free, democratic society the answer is not just to ban everything. This risks being another example of the Government using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The Government are jumping on poorly thought through proposals. Popular websites could easily fall foul of new rules when it is hard to define what should be blocked and even harder to technically do it.

The Tories should look at their own track record in this area. When they introduced internet filters many LGBT websites were blocked too, cutting people off from vital information and advice.

Rather than developing a banned-by-default approach we should be investing more in sex and relationship education at school to ensure that teenagers and young adults have a healthy understanding of relationships and sex to empower them to make good decisions.

The Government’splans have already been dismissed as ineffective by industry experts.

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Posted in News | Also tagged and | 18 Comments
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