UK – Lord Puttnam had shown impatience as the Online Harms Law was not put into priority amidst the #stophateforprofit movement following the death of 14 year old Molly Russel who took her own line online after watching a stream of negative self-hate videos, landing Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg in hot water as cries for not regulating and deleting “hate posts” was not part of their directives, leading to the teenager’s death.
The Law was said at first to be pushed by the year 2023, which drew the ire of concerned parents and Lord Puttnam who had been pressured to force the The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to finalize it’s parliamentary proposal that was still in its initial stages.
The Online Harms Law covers that any website that distributes and allows the distribution of any harmful content on their platform are held accountable for such cases as Molly Russel’s death for not regulating content correctly and allowing such self-harm inducing content to be freely accessed on the platform.
The dive of Facebook and Instagram by 8% in one day was a huge hit as Mark Zuckerberg answered that he would be implementing changes as soon as possible while Lord Puttnam urged the fruition of the law to be finished in the immediate forthcoming days and not in the seven years originally proposed as it sat in a perpetual delay before such a tragedy had occurred.
The DCMS stated that since the beginning of the pandemic sweep, select specialist government units have been problem solving around the clock to locate and eradicate false information online about the COVID-19 virus. They worked closely with multiple social media platforms in an effort to curb and rebut false claims about the pandemic and the nature of the virus as it could endanger more lives. In all the chaos that has been occurring as COVID-19 ravages the world, cyber mental health was ignored.
The Age Appropriate Design Code is the beginning of reparation as the code set to force social media platforms to have the data of children so as to not recommend them content that could be harmful to them.
The looming problem of misinformation dispensed over the internet with countless unchecked sources spells the most threat in this time of fighting a pandemic with the constant fear that the information obtained is incorrect.
