Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
Each morning, during the Radio 4 breakfast programme 'Today', there is a segment called 'Thought for the Day'. This is where reflections are offered from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.
This morning, following the MP admitting that he had viewed pornography in Parliament, Rhidian Brook took a look at the issue of pornography.
He began by examining the negative aspects of online porn, including the normalisation of violence against women, torture etc and that children were actually using porn as a form of sex education!
He went on to reveal that a study by the British Board of Film Classification revealed the shocking result that 60% of 11-13 year olds had viewed porn accidentally on their devices. One of Rhidians friends has a son who was shamefully sent home from school for viewing porn. He was so traumatised by the shame of being caught and by the content that he'd accessed that his father dedicated himself to ensuring that age verification on the internet be made a legal requirement and the result will form part of the Online Safety Bill:
He ended his talk with the following quoatation from the Bible:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016xj0 |
Members of a certain age may remember the wonderful Floella Benjamin from the BBC children's programme 'Play School'.
Floella is now a member of the House of Lords for the Liberal Democrats. In an interview that I saw yesterday, she explained that she has always fought for the rights of and protection for the most vulnerable and discriminated against in society. She went on to say that she believes that children are our most vulnerable citizens because they don't have a voice and that this is why she is putting her support behind the Online Safety Bill, particularly with regards to preventing children from accessing online pornography.
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Yesterday's Radio 4 programme 'You & Yours' contained a report about the growing problem of facebook and Instagram accounts being taken over by scammers:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016xqv
Many of these are owned by small businesses. Once they have taken control, they try to blackmail the true account holders because they know that these sites are essential to their business, but even those that do pay don't get their accounts back.
Instead, the friends/followers of the accounts are scammed for money in the name of the true account holder.
Reporting this to Meta, who own these sites, has proved fruitless. People are ignored, sent into a permanent reporting loop or asked to provide evidence of ownership. One man supplied them with a copy of his passport and a solicitors letter to verify his identity as requested and they still failed to act, meaning that more and more of his friends were being sucked into the scam in his name.
A Conservative MP, Kevin Hollingway from the Treasury Select Committee, said that the Online Safety Bill will not only be about dealing with harm, including financial harm, but about preventing it from happening in the first place and that it is hoped that the threat of substantial fines and personal liability for the owners/directors of websites will provide an incentive to focus their attention to prevent or deal with such incidents properly in the first place.
As it stands, complainants feel angry, frustrated and stalled because they have nobody else to turn to to resolve matters.
Private legal action is also being considered to force Meta to compensate users for their inaction.