Molly Russell’s dad urges Keir Starmer to act on online safety in letter

The father of Molly Russell, the teenager who took her own life after seeing harmful content online, has personally appealed to the prime minister to tighten rules that protect children and has warned the UK is “going backwards” on internet safety.

Ian Russell, who backed the previous government bringing in new requirements for tech firms in the Online Safety Act, calls the way the regulator Ofcom is implementing the rules a “disaster”.

In a letter to Sir Keir Starmer on Saturday, seen by the BBC, Mr Russell says there is “widespread dismay” among bereaved families who have fought for tougher protections, and that more young people have lost their lives because of “dither and delay”.

And he warns that without tougher actions, “the streams of life-sucking content seen by children will soon become torrents: a digital disaster driven by the actions of tech firms, and being left unchallenged by a failing regulatory model”.

“This preventable harm would be happening on your watch,” he writes to Sir Keir.

The Online Safety Act, introduced last year, is designed to force tech firms to take more responsibility for the content on their platforms and protect children from some legal-but-harmful material. Ofcom decides the specific guidelines that companies must follow.

Safety campaigners believe there are significant loopholes in Ofcom’s code on illegal content, including a lack of specific rules on live streaming or content that promotes suicide and self-harm. And the new codes of practice, which are still being worked on, won’t apply to private messaging.

An Ofcom spokesperson said: “We recognise the profound pain caused by harmful content online, and our deepest sympathies remain with Ian Russell and all those who have suffered unimaginable loss.” They said the voices of victims “will continue to be at the heart of our work”.

The spokesperson added that tech firms are required to assess the risks of illegal harms on their platforms by 16 March, and after that companies would need measures to reduce the risk of illegal content appearing and to remove it quickly when it appears. “In the coming months, as our enforcement powers commence, platforms will face further obligations to protect children from harmful content, even where it is not illegal,” they said.

In his letter, Mr Russell also says Elon Musk, who is the boss of X, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are part of a “wholesale recalibration” of the online world, moving away from safety towards a “laissez-faire, anything-goes model”.

“In this bonfire of digital ethics and online safety features, all of us will lose, but our children lose the most,” he writes.

He calls on the government to both bolster the Online Safety Act and to introduce extra legislation designed to tackle what he describes as “the reckless behaviours of social media leadership”.

A No 10 spokesperson said Sir Keir was thankful for Mr Russell’s letter: “Ian Russell, alongside many other families and parents, has shown immense bravery through the most tragic of circumstances to campaign for children’s online safety. We are grateful for all their contributions and will continue to work with them to get this right.

“This government is committed to ensuring online safety for children. Social media platforms must step up to their responsibilities and take robust action to protect children from seeing harmful content on their sites.”

Mr Russell’s daughter Molly took her own life in November 2017 after being exposed to a stream of dark, depressing content on Pinterest and Instagram. He has been campaigning for online safety measures since his daughter’s death.

You can read his letter in full at the bottom of this story.

No one watching or listening to Mr Russell over the years could deny his passion for change or his deep knowledge of the dark world that Molly was caught up in. Along with other bereaved parents we have met in the past couple of years – including Esther Ghey, Judy Thomas, and Mariano Janin – he has told his family’s story with huge dignity, and for a simple reason: he doesn’t want anyone else to go through the pain.

He’s become a prominent campaigner on an issue that is important to millions of parents and young people around the country. His voice is hard for the government to ignore.

But creating and then imposing rules on the online world is difficult for politicians for many reasons.

The Online Safety Act weathered many controversies and took years to put together. On one side were campaigners concerned about providing protection, on the other, fierce lobbying from the tech companies against straying into censorship or invading people’s privacy.

Ofcom was picked to police the rules and could theoretically be incredibly tough, threatening fines of millions of pounds or even prison for those companies that break them. But the new codes of practice are not yet fully in force.

But campaigners like Mr Russell believe it’s already obvious the rules fall short. The Internet Watch Foundation boss, Derek Ray-Hill, also told us: “Unless Ofcom is more ambitious in its interpretation of the Act, so many of the things the legislation makes possible will remain frustratingly out of reach.”

There is a sense in Whitehall of “wait and see”. Ministers have acknowledged that as technology advances, extra laws might be required. The Home Office is expected in the next couple of weeks to outline new offences to tackle child abuse online. But the government is also nervous about making rules so tight that tech companies feel unwelcome.

This weekend we’ll be joined by the Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, who is determined to make the UK a good place for big tech companies to do business, to help the economy grow. From Sunday onwards he will spell out how artificial intelligence can speed up government business and improve our public services – this government, like Rishi Sunak’s, believes AI can boost the UK’s sagging productivity.

But the advance of those technologies bring risks, and tricky decisions for ministers.

Warnings that advanced AI could wipe out thousands of jobs; concerns over deepfake video in pornography, child abuse, or misinformation. Even Paul McCartney and Kate Bush have got the government in their sights as they campaign to try to protect artists’ work being used without payment by giant AI platforms, upending decades of copyright law.

Multiple sources familiar with government discussions on child safety and other aspects of this massive quandary say they are concerned the Department of Science and Technology (DSIT) is not paying enough attention to the possible downsides.

A government source said some discussions about protecting people online had been “spicy”. “This is a form of harm. It’s normal for departments like Home Office and Department of Health to be constantly reviewing what’s going on to keep up with safety – [DSIT] is not yet used to having to doing the same.”

A source at DSIT said the department had already acknowledged there might have to be more legislation in future but highlighted the fact that the Ofcom codes aren’t yet completed or in force.

These aren’t new arguments. But Musk’s trolling of the UK government and Zuckerberg’s flex away from fact checking have shifted the ground on which the conversations are taking place.

Ministers have to consider what’s right for the economy as well as protecting the public. And they might not want to admit it, but no politician wants to pick a fight with billionaires with massive social media megaphones – or indeed be seen to curtail our liberties or privacy without good reason. Arguably that is why measures like the Online Safety Act took so long to introduce in the first place.

The palpable fear from campaigners like Mr Russell is that just as technology has been speeding up, hard-fought moves to put safety first have been slowing down.

Dear Prime Minister,

Six months ago, you were elected on a platform that promised an end to short-term sticking plaster solutions. I am writing to you as a bereaved father and online safety campaigner because it is evident that urgent action is required to protect young people from the horrors they are routinely exposed to online.

It’s now over seven years since the death of my youngest daughter Molly. More than ever before, I am convinced that strong and effective online safety regulation is the most powerful tool available to prevent the loss of ever more young lives at the hands of social media platforms whose indifference to children’s safety is fundamentally baked into their commercial strategies, business models and products.

However, in recent months it has become clear that progress towards online safety has stalled – and we are now going backwards. Regulation as it is currently designed is failing to deliver the protection that children and parents need, want and deserve. No one can credibly claim that Ofcom’s implementation of the Online Safety Act is anything other than a disaster – a view not only shared widely by civil society but also increasingly privately shared across many parts of your Government.

Ofcom’s choices when implementing the Act have starkly highlighted intrinsic structural weaknesses with the legislative framework. We not only have a regulator which has fundamentally failed to grasp the urgency and scale of its mission, but a regulatory model that inherently and significantly constrains its ability to reduce preventable harms.

While I understand that this is legislation you inherited and did not design, the reality is that unless you now commit to act decisively to fix the Online Safety Act, the streams of life-sucking content seen by children will soon become torrents: a digital disaster driven by the actions of tech firms, and being left unchallenged by a failing regulatory model. This preventable harm would be happening on your watch.

At the same time as the UK’s overdue regulation is falling badly short, the very industry being regulated is ominously changing. The Online Safety Act was developed around a premise that large tech firms would increasingly accept their responsibilities, and we would see safer social networks develop over time.

However, this is a time when platforms readily say they will now ‘catch less of the bad stuff’; allow underdeveloped AI to generate and spread disinformation; and promote targeted and polarising content leading to isolation and despair. We have now entered a different era, and we will need a different regulatory approach that can address it.

Put simply, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are at the leading edge of a wholesale recalibration of the industry. We should be in absolutely no doubt that when Zuckerberg speaks about a ‘cultural tipping point towards prioritizing speech’, he is signalling a profound strategic shift away from fundamental safety measures towards a laissez-faire, anything goes model. In this bonfire of digital ethics and online safety features, all of us will lose, but our children lose the most.

It’s on that basis that I now encourage you to act swiftly and decisively to address this coming flood of preventable harm. In the immediate term, that means strengthening the existing framework. Beyond that, it means committing to substantially strengthened regulatory model – with primary legislation being introduced as soon as possible to enact its provisions.

It is not just a new Online Safety Act that is required, but a wholesale re-imagining of the framework to ensure it is capable of responding to the threats of today and beyond. A new framework must be fundamentally oriented towards tackling the reckless behaviours of social media leadership – a goal which can best be achieved through establishing an overarching Duty of Care supported by a robust set of conduct-based rules to enforce it.

A bolstered OSA must have harm reduction at its core. That means having a clear harm reduction duty on Ofcom, transparency and safety-by-design as integral components of the regulatory regime, and a regulatory design that puts victims at its core – a major failure of the current regime, where the asymmetry between the interests of victims and industry has if anything been substantially reinforced. The voices of those with lived experience must be heard clearly if big tech’s powerful players are not to shout them down in this debate.

Crucially, this must also mean an extension of the Duty of Candour to extend to tech firms. This vital measure stands to correct the historic injustices faced by so many victims, and the power of this measure to address the cultural issues driving harms in the tech sector – and the asymmetry between industry and victims which perpetuates further harm – would be considerable.

Too many parents have lost hope that governments will deliver the online safety reform they urgently need. Among bereaved families, there is widespread dismay that successive governments have chosen to dither and delay when the consequences of inaction has been further lost lives.

As Prime Minister and as a father, I implore you to act. You now have a profound opportunity, but also a great responsibility, to act clearly and decisively and to show to millions of parents across this country that meaningful change is on the way. It is time to decisively protect children and young adults from the perils of our online world.

Yours Sincerely,

Ian Russell,

Chair of Molly Rose Foundation, and Molly’s dad