The bereaved parents of children whose deaths were linked to social media have been told during a meeting with the Prime Minister that measures should be announced in a matter of “weeks, not months.” The group attended 10 Downing Street on Tuesday afternoon as the Government’s Growing Up In The Online World consultation, which floated measures such as an Australia-style social media ban for under-16s, app curfews and limits on addictive features, closes.
Speaking outside of No 10 after the meeting, the parents, many of whom carried a picture of their child, urged Sir Keir Starmer to take action quickly. Ellen Roome, who believes her son Jools Sweeney died aged 14 after looking at harmful content online, said: “We have been campaigning for years and been crying out for action. They now need to step up and do something.” She added, “I’d love to have come out right now as a: ‘Yes they’re going to do something and it’s really positive.’ I pushed quite hard on why haven’t they done something now, and this whole thing around the consultation was because various charities have said they need to consider their views. While we’re waiting, more and more children are dying. They need to take action – apparently that will be weeks, not months.”
Ms Roome added bereaved parents were unable to access their children’s online data to check what content they were viewing prior to their deaths. “I’ve never been able to obtain Jools’s data, four years down the line,” she told the Press Association. “There’s a lot of us that cannot have access to our children’s data. And social media companies, if they wanted to help me, they’d say: here you go, here’s all the data. I’m having to re-apply to the High Court to get Jools’s inquest to be done just to establish what he was looking at. That’s fundamentally wrong. I’m his parent, he was 14-years-old – I should have that data.”
Ruth Moss, whose daughter Sophie Parkinson, 13, died in 2014, told PA she had “mixed feelings” about the meeting. “It was very positive to have a meeting: it’s the first prime minister to sit down with bereaved families,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for about just under 12 years now, and so I’m a natural cynic. I hope that our voices were heard – I think they were, it was a listening exercise and the Prime Minister did listen to what we were saying and listen to what we want. So I come out of here with hope.”
While some groups have said that a ban may not be the appropriate instrument to tackle a wide spread of social media harms, Ms Moss said it would be a “good first step.” “I think there are more measures that need to be put in place as well,” she added. “It isn’t just about a ban, it’s a complex issue, we need more than one solution.”
Lorin LaFave, the mother of 14-year-old Breck Bednar who was murdered after being groomed online, said: “We need the Prime Minister to choose children over Big Tech.” Esther Ghey, the mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey, also attended No 10 on Tuesday, but did not come out with the other parents after the meeting. Brianna was 16-years-old when she was murdered in 2023 by two teenagers who had accessed harmful content online.
The meeting comes as Sir Keir pledged a crackdown “very quickly” after the Growing Up In The Online World consultation closes. Visiting a nursery school in East Sussex, Sir Keir said: “The consultation on children and social media is closing this evening. We’ve had very, very many people being part of the process, either responding or in discussions with me and with others. I’m meeting some of the parents this afternoon. I’ll be really clear, the question now is not whether we do something, we are going to act – I’m absolutely clear that this needs to be something where there’s a game-changer. So, we will be acting. The question is only what we do, and that will be coming very quickly, because we took powers earlier this year to make sure we can act very, very quickly. So, consultation will finish. We will then act, and we will be decisive, because it’s absolutely clear to me that we need to take action to protect children, and we can act quickly.”
The Government has gathered 81,283 responses to the consultation on social media harms affecting children, according to figures seen by the Press Association. Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) data on Tuesday afternoon showed 42,410 responses had been sent in from parents. A further 13,890 had come in from young people.
