Thursday 7th March - Online Media

We do not know how AI works.

YouTube specifically targets people with mental health issues. Mainly schizophrenia.

Disturbing videos on the YouTube Kids app have made children need therapy due to the lack of ethics behind the AI creating the videos.

Social media companies must be subject to a formal legal duty of care to their users.

'The liability of social media companies (and others) for the content they host is currently limited by the the 2000 European e-Commerce Directive'

The Science and Technology Committee has concluded that social media companies must be subject to a legal duty of care to help protect young people’s health and wellbeing when accessing their sites.

The internet is of course largely unregulated, and mainly adopts a model of self-regulation. But how is it that it came to be like this?

172.There is a growing consensus that the status quo is not working and that a new liability regime for social media companies, and the content on their sites, is required. How this should be achieved, however, is a subject of ongoing debate.292 The Children’s Commissioner for England told us how she had:

been pushing the tech companies for a couple of years now, with limited success, about them taking more responsibility for their platforms being a positive environment […] The notion that platforms need to take responsibility for content is much discussed. If it was an area of the community, there would be no doubt that that community needed some framework that protected but also enabled children within it.

From the perspective of this report, who is responsible for regulation on the internet?

The social media sites

What is meant by the terms 'standards lottery' and 'patchwork' when applied to regulatory frameworks?

The Committee also finds that there is currently a loose patchwork of regulation and legislation in place, resulting in a "standards lottery". This approach does very little to ensure that young people are as safe as possible when they go online. Key areas that are not currently the subject of specific regulation, identified by Ofcom, include:

• platforms whose principal focus is video sharing, such as YouTube;
• platforms centred around social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter; and
• search engines that direct internet users towards different types of information from many Internet services, such as Google and Bing.

This Report recommends that a comprehensive regulatory framework, one that clearly sets out the responsibilities of social media companies towards their users, must be created. 

The Government's forthcoming Online Harms White Paper, and subsequent legislation, presents a crucial opportunity to put a world-leading regulatory framework in place. However, the Committee is concerned that the Government’s forthcoming framework may not be as coherent as it ought to be. The Report recommends a package of measures which would form the basis of a comprehensive regulatory framework.

This would mean establishing a regulator to provide guidance on how to spot and minimise the harms social media presents, as well take enforcement action when warranted. These enforcement actions must be supported by a strong sanctions regime in order to be effective.

“More worryingly, social media companies—who have a clear responsibility towards particularly young users—seem to be in no rush to share vital data with academics that could help tackle the very real harms our young people face in the virtual world" - from your perspective, why are social media companies not more forthright in sharing data and other information with academics?


What possible ways are there of regulating online media?

The social sites could put things in place like youtube not recommending conspiracy theory videos and Instagram banning nudity

Why is it particularly hard to implement a standardised and singular framework of regulation?

The servers are not all based in the UK which means the legislation would have to be adopted

How do other countries regulate online media?



Parents don't know how to teach children how to use the internet because they don't fully understand it themselves. Parents do not know how to fully protect their children on the internet due to online child grooming and the disturbing YouTube Kids app.

Internet regulation is different for each website.

Online companies do not share the threats with governments because they don't want to risk forced regulation but they do not have to share the data.

Million Dollar Selfie

Zoella 'in Dubai'

Social Media makes products more real - hyperreality.

Zoe Sugg has 12M Youtube Subscribers and 11M Instagram Followers.

Influencer marketing is worth 4B $ Worldwide.

In a number of adverts, there was nothing to show that it was an advert or that a payment had been made to the influencer.