That this House believes that current legislation is falling short in preventing online harms; and calls on the Government to review whether it is necessary to introduce new legislation that is centred around harm reduction in this Parliament.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate. Not long after my election in 2024, I visited the Internet Watch Foundation in Cambridgeshire. That organisation is on the frontline of the fight against child sexual abuse material, and is one of only a handful of non-law enforcement bodies worldwide with the legal power to proactively seek out and remove online images and videos of such abuse. During my visit, the IWF told me that, in the preceding five years alone, it had taken down more than 1 million webpages that showed at least one child sexual abuse image—often, they showed hundreds or thousands. The IWF’s annual report last year revealed that 2025 was the worst year on record for child sexual abuse material. Its analysts confirmed 312,000 reports—a 7% rise on the year before. Most starkly, in 2024 they discovered 13 AI-generated videos of child sexual abuse, but in 2025 the figure was 3,440—a rise of over 26,000%, for those who are interested in numbers. Nearly two thirds of those videos were category A material, which is the most extreme classification.
A little while after my visit, I began to work with the Molly Rose Foundation on the proposal in this motion. At the time, the Online Safety Act 2023 had been in law for nearly two years, and the protection of children codes of practice that came from it, which promised to improve user safety dramatically, had just been published and implemented. The text of those codes was heavily criticised by civil society, and even by the Children’s Commissioner, who said they would simply not be strong enough to protect children from the
“multitude of harms they are exposed to online every day.”
It seemed timely for a motion to be brought before the House so that we could scrutinise the Online Safety Act and its resultant codes, as they now are being used in practice, and highlight to the Government the need to take action in this Parliament to protect young people. After the codes were implemented in mid-2025, the Mental Health Foundation published research stating that 68% of young people had experienced harmful content online. It described the harm as one of
“the biggest looming threats to young people’s mental health”.
In October 2025, the Molly Rose Foundation found that over a third of children reported that they had been exposed to at least one type of high-risk content in the past week. In a classroom of 30 children, that is 11 who are, every day, being shown content that promotes suicide and self-harm or that romanticises depression and eating disorders. That is the exact “primary priority content” that the UK’s flagship piece of online safety legislation explicitly promised it would protect them from. Just this week, the BBC aired “Inside the Rage Machine”, which used whistleblower testimony and evidence to lay bare how social media giants such as Meta and TikTok are consistently and deliberately pushing harmful content to users, after finding that their outrage fuelled engagement.
Last week, I ran a supermarket surgery in my constituency. I had a flipboard that asked whether people felt that social media should be banned for under-16s. It is rare to get this level of agreement, but 78% of my constituents of all ages—older people, young people and even children—said yes. What was consistent was the fear they felt about this space and the belief that it is doing damage to young people as they grow up. I am not 100% sure on my position yet, but does the hon. Member agree that the Government are right to consult to work out the best option to protect young people from social media?
The text of the motion asks for a review, and that is certainly what I want to see.
I have not come here today to stir up panic or to imply that the wellbeing of our children, or indeed our adults, is doomed. There is hope and we should not have to accept harm as a reality of life on the internet. As the Molly Rose Foundation chief executive officer, Andy Burrows, noted this week after campaigning pushed both TikTok and Meta to row back on plans for end-to-end encryption in direct messaging,
“tech firms are not immune to pressure”.
However, pressure on its own is not enough. The Government must urgently look at strengthening the Online Safety Act to ensure that pressure has robust legislative backing behind it, and that Ofcom actually has the power to enforce the regulations that will protect us all from harm.
Online harm comes in three forms. First, there is harmful content: the outright illegal and the extreme, posted and peddled by bad actors across social media platforms. Then we have harmful interactions with bad actors, including grooming, cyber-bullying and extortion. I am sure that Members across the House will share many stories of the impact of both types of harm today; it is a tragedy just how many there are. I want to focus on the third form of online harm, which is the harm that arises from not just the type of content encountered online, but the intensity with which it is repeatedly pushed on to young people by the platforms themselves.
This week, I was pleased to participate in the Royal Society pairing scheme. I was paired with Doctor Lizzy Winstone, a researcher from the University of Bristol whose work focuses on how young people use social media and its impact on their mental health. Her most recent research investigates the algorithmic recommendation of content as one of the primary mechanisms that shapes young people’s digital mental health. She and others have found that a large part of online harm is structural, arising from not just individual bad actors, but business models designed at their very core to maximise attention and to profit from provocation.
I congratulate the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) on securing the debate and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.
Facing harm online is one of the biggest struggles that our young people face daily, from toxic influencers trying to push a certain way of life or ideology to those who encourage eating disorders. However, social harms extend a long way beyond that, from aggressive algorithms designed so that young people get addicted and trapped online, to forums encouraging self-harm and suicide. Many hon. Members will be aware that I have been raising this issue in this place over a number of years.
Earlier this month, I chaired a roundtable with the Mental Health Foundation to look at the evidence about the banning of social media for under-16s. As it happened, it took place on the same day that the consultation was launched, and I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for attending our meeting. We heard from mental health experts, affected parents, the Minister and young people themselves. While views on “how” we should protect young people are diverse, the consensus on the “now” was absolute.
There is disagreement about whether an absolute social media ban for the under-16s is the right answer. Should we have a more nuanced approach where we look at a wider range of issues such as the architecture of social media platforms? Following the consultation, the Government must design any proposed policy alongside young people. We will not find an effective solution without including the young people who operate in this world and who are most affected, and we must look to social media companies to start getting their act together and protecting people.
The links between young people using social media and increasing levels of loneliness and poor mental health are well documented. We have a youth mental health crisis, with nearly one in five children aged eight to 16 having a probable mental health disorder. That is a staggering number. As we have heard, the Molly Rose Foundation found that 95% of recommended posts on certain teenage accounts contained content related to suicide or self-harm. As Members know, Molly Rose tragically took her own life at the age of just 14, after social media algorithms continuously served her with self-harm and depression material, which created a rabbit hole for her to go down. She saw more than 2,000 harmful posts in the last six months of her life.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) on securing this debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.
There is no shortage of online harms demanding our attention. I have spoken before about children buying illegal drugs that are openly advertised on social media, the flood of harmful eating disorder content reaching young people, and Ofcom not holding social media companies to account, although it has increased powers to do so under the Online Safety Act. Today, though, I want to focus on another deeply disturbing trend. Men are secretly filming women on nights out and profiting by posting the videos online. These accounts mask themselves as “nightlife content” or “walking tours”, but the videos tell a completely different story; they fixate on women in dresses and skirts, often filmed from behind and from low or intrusive angles. These women have not consented—in most cases, they do not know that they are being filmed—and the scale is staggering. The BBC found that videos such as these have been viewed more than 3 billion times in just three years.
Once they have been uploaded, the abuse begins, with comment after comment dripping with misogyny:
“Look at how these ladies are dressed, no wonder they get attacked”
followed by a laughing emoji,
“They belong to the streets”,
and “Easy meat”. Hundreds of misogynistic comments like these flood the replies beneath nearly every video. This vile practice has victims, and the impact is real. Women who have been filmed in this way say that they no longer feel safe to go out; they feel watched, exposed, vulnerable, distressed and harassed. They no longer enjoy a night out or being in public. We must be clear that secretly filming women in this way is deeply degrading and predatory and must be stopped.
I thank the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Bedfordshire for securing this important debate.
Online harms are systemic, they are scaled, and they are producing real-world consequences, as we have seen. Social media is now the environment in which young people grow up—it is almost universal when children enter secondary school. According to a consultation by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, 81% of 10 to 12-year-olds are on social media, and 86% have accounts. The Youth Select Committee also did a study on youth violence and social media back in 2024, and found that 97% of 13 to 17-year-olds were online and that 70% of them see real-world violence online. That is a huge number of statistics, but they demonstrate the fact that social media is now in every young person’s bedroom, in their hand and in their pocket.
Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore from the University of Cambridge told me that adolescent brains are highly sensitive to the social environment, and the social media companies are probably aware of this. Adolescents’ brains have heightened neuroplasticity, and this will continue until their mid or late 20s. During adolescence, young people are trying to find identity and belonging, and I fear that the tech companies are exploiting this.
Where can we see evidence of harm? The National Education Union did a study called “Big Tech’s Little Victims”, in which researchers created fictional accounts and spent half an hour each day on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. They found that harmful content appeared within three minutes, and often immediately. Young people in my constituency say, “I do not want to see this harmful content anymore,” yet they are still shown it, so what is going on?
The hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Bedfordshire mentioned the “Inside the Rage Machine” documentary, which I have seen a number of times. I am absolutely horrified at what the whistleblowers have revealed.
The hon. Lady is making a very powerful speech about how young people, whose brains are still being formed, are being bombarded with online content. May I just let her know that my hon. Friend is actually the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom)? When she mentions him again, she might correct that.
My apologies to the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom).
I was speaking about “Inside the Rage Machine”. What people have witnessed is remarkable. The documentary makers found that serious exploitation cases were not being prioritised by TikTok, and that algorithms were repeatedly pushing harmful content.
It is not as simple as saying that we must ban children from social media; we need a suite of measures. The core issue is that young people, who are forming their identities, are vulnerable. Addictive algorithms are designed to maximise time and engagement, and they prioritise provocation instead of the truth. Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere is an incredibly powerful and timely contribution to the debate, and he shows us that the online world is like a gold rush in the wild west. The approach of “hook, identity, monetise” drives profits, with streaming platforms like YouTube rewarding people who spout abominable things. There is a business model behind this, and I think we are all very much aware that we need to do something about it.
Harmful content spreads across platforms, so we need to be very clear about any ban on social media. Last week, the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee looked at the ban in Australia. We learned that because Australia defined which social media companies were to be included, other companies took their place. We can learn from that and it can feed into the Government’s consultation. We have to make the legislation stronger. Bans have limits, because they can be bypassed, as we see in Australia. They also shift the responsibility to the user. Why can we not shift the responsibility to the companies? We should not be banning children from social media; we should be banning the companies from exploiting our children.
I support a number of the things that the hon. Lady is saying about the dangers of online harms, especially for children, but I am unclear about her position on a social media ban for those under 16. Although I accept her overall point, which is that social media companies have a responsibility, we could send them a really clear signal, and protect children, by bringing in an immediate ban on under-16s using social media. Does she support that or not?
I welcome that intervention. Initially, action needs to be taken, but I am not sure whether a ban would be clearcut enough, because there are so many ways to get around it. How do we verify if a person is 16? The emphasis is being put on the young person—the user—who is trying to access that service. As long as the tech company can say, “We have done facial recognition—we have done all that is reasonably possible”, the liability is on the young person. It should be the other way around, with the responsibility being on the tech company. The hon. Member may well agree that the tech companies need to be doing more, and that is where the Government consultation on strengthening the regulations needs to come in.
These online harms are not isolated occurrences; they are being designed into platforms, they are being amplified at scale and they are shaping the real world. We must be serious about protecting our young people. We must address the systems and the incentives that are driving this harm, and hold the tech companies to account. The question is, should we be banning children from social media or should we be banning social media from exploiting our children?
I thank the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) for securing this crucial debate. Since my election, constituents in Heywood and Middleton North have repeatedly raised issues about online harms, especially as they see those who control the platforms seeking to shirk accountability at every turn. That is why we cannot discount the significance of the Online Safety Act. That critical piece of legislation—the first of its kind in putting a range of new duties on social media companies and search engines to mitigate the harms that those online can pose to our constituents—was a welcome step taken by the previous Government and implemented by this Labour Government.
Perhaps to a greater extent than in any other area of policy, we must recognise that the frontiers of online media are constantly expanding, technology is evolving, and our daily life is increasingly determined by what takes place on phones, laptops and tablets. Though the Act was immensely welcome—it goes some way towards dealing with this complex set of challenges—we cannot wait another 20 years before we come to substantively revisit this topic.
To underscore why constant adaptation to these threats is necessary, I would like to touch on three themes. First, there is the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation. The integrity of our democracy and the tone of our discourse through to our continued belief in facts, evidence and science are all on the line in the war being waged unrelentingly in these digital spaces, where online actors are determined to amplify falsehoods to erode a sense of public trust that has taken generations to foster. The meteoric rise of AI has made the challenge all the more pressing.
People’s behaviour is being tracked on apps, and algorithms responding to them are driving misleading and sensationalist content into the most impressionable, vulnerable and isolated minds—so many of them are young people who are growing up unable to tell fact from fiction. We know that adults are also susceptible to such trends.
4:12 pm
20 of 44 shown
All of that is to say that if the motion for this debate seemed appropriate at the beginning of this Parliament, when I first visited the IWF, it is now urgent. Every week, I hear from parents, young people and organisations who are fighting a losing battle against the proliferation of online harms because, despite its noble aims, the current legislation is falling short of what Parliament envisaged it would do.
Social media is built to be addictive. Hooking users in and keeping them engaged is at the very heart of almost every platform’s business model. Algorithmic models cause harm through both overtly harmful content and content that is harmless on the face of it. There are attention deficit harms caused by passive screen watching and health harms associated with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Higher social media use has been directly linked to shorter sleep duration and difficulties with sleep onset. Gambling harm is often overlooked, but a recent Guardian investigation found that Meta AI was pointing vulnerable social media users to illegal online casinos and even suggesting ways to bypass UK gambling safeguards. Regulation is clearly not keeping pace with the evolving digital landscape.
Often, it is the directly harmful, even illegal, content that is caught up in these algorithms. The shock, disgust and strong emotion inevitably caused by this content creates engagement: we watch for longer, we engage more, and the algorithm takes this as permission to show us even more of it to keep us hooked. Endless scrolling functionalities allow already vulnerable users to fall into a world where there is no escape from this cycle. Members will be aware that we Liberal Democrats have long called for platforms to implement built-in caps on social media doomscrolling.
In 2017, it was concluded for the first time ever that content on social media had contributed to the death of a young person when teenager Molly Russell tragically took her own life. Before she died, she had viewed thousands of suicide and self-harm videos and images on Pinterest and Instagram, some of which were pushed to her without her asking to see them. The word used by the coroner was that Molly was able—even encouraged by platforms—to “binge” this content.
The normalisation of these recommendation mechanisms has created an awful, self-perpetuating cycle. One case study from the University of Bristol described a 17-year-old girl who was forcing herself to repeatedly watch graphic content of a gory accident on TikTok to try to desensitise herself to violence. She knew that she would be regularly exposed to this kind of content online and wanted to train herself to be able to watch it and not feel sick. We can only assume that due to her increased attention, she was shown even more of this horrific content.
Recommendation systems in and of themselves are no bad thing. They create a personalised space to explore interests and sometimes do filter out content that a user has no interest in. The problem is that a user’s engagement with content does not always indicate their actual interest in it. Another young person from the University of Bristol study—a trans man—described feeling compelled to intervene in homophobic and transphobic comments sections, to try to support his community and challenge prejudice. He was understood by the platform to have engaged, and subsequently he was bombarded with more and more of the same hateful content. The tension between knowing that his algorithm would register his intervention as interest and wanting to actively challenge hateful views was a constant source of stress online.
Problems also arise from a lack of transparency. Not only are social media platforms under no obligation to publish their algorithms, but with AI increasingly being used to build and continually iterate these algorithms, the platforms themselves are often unaware of the exact mechanisms that shape experience. Harm is occurring as a result of an unaccountable black box. Young people are not entirely passive in this system—they know it is happening—but platform tools provide very limited control over what the algorithm continues to recommend.
Looking at Ofcom’s summary of the protection of children codes of practice, we can see how a weak interpretation of the Online Safety Act is allowing such harm to be perpetuated. Volume 4, section 17 says that platforms must
“Ensure content recommender systems are designed and operated so that content indicated potentially to be PPC”—
primary priority content, which is suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and mental health content—
“is excluded from the recommender feeds of children”.
Research shows that children were most likely to report having seen harmful content through feeds with recommender systems—very few actively seek it out—so the intention behind this measure seems good. But then we see that it applies only to “child-accessible” parts of a service that are
“medium or high risk for one or more specific kinds of PPC”.
In Ofcom’s December review, not a single social media platform rated itself high risk for suicide or self-harm content. There is a clear gap between the intention of the legislation and how it is being implemented. That is because the Online Safety Act and its codes are ultimately built around compliance and not harm reduction. Rules-based legislation means that platforms can happily meet their legal duties if measures in the codes are followed, and they are under no obligation to effectively and proactively address the harms identified in their risk assessments. Putting only a moral duty on platforms to protect young people from harm is not going to work—we have seen for years that it does not work.
How can we expect the very same platforms that have been shown to deliberately and knowingly peddle harmful content to young people to essentially police themselves? Why would they bother when it is so much more profitable to tick already loosely defined boxes? A full review of the current legislation must investigate the barriers that Ofcom says are preventing it from delivering on the intentions of Parliament. That includes the safe harbour principle, which allows platforms to claim compliance and skirt enforcement action on harms about which they are already aware, and the complete lack of any obligation in the Act that platforms take active steps to reduce the risk of harm to users. In practice, that means that a platform can follow Ofcom’s codes to the letter, even while its own risk assessment shows that it is aware of serious ongoing harm, and face no enforcement consequences.
Amendments could be passed within months to introduce the robust, risk-based minimum age limits that we Liberal Democrats have been calling for. Minimum joining ages should be determined by a platform-specific assessment of age appropriateness in risk. That will incentivise the market to adopt lower-risk functionalities if platforms wish to open themselves to a wider pool of users.
We could argue that a review of sorts has already taken place: every coroner’s report, every tragic story told in the Chamber and every investigation by charities and organisations make up that review. The evidence is plainly there, but the harm is being allowed to continue. We are here as Members of Parliament to scrutinise, and we have done that. There have been 12 debates with the words “online safety” in the title this Parliament and there have been hundreds of references to “online harm”, yet there has been little indication that the Government are addressing the core issues raised in this debate.
I hope that Members will use this debate to raise the full range of harms we hear about in our work. I ask the Minister to respond specifically to these questions: will the Government examine whether the safe harbour principle is serving Parliament’s original intentions or has become a mechanism that platforms use to avoid accountability for harms about which they are already aware? Will the Government commit to ensuring that any new legislation this Parliament brings forward is built around harm reduction and not compliance?
The rise of forums where groups encourage extreme forms of violence, self-harm, suicide, animal cruelty and political extremism, is extremely worrying. They look to target impressionable young people, pipelining sadistic and hateful ideas and content straight to them. UK law enforcement identified several cases in which perpetrators coerced girls as young as 11 into seriously harming or sexually abusing themselves, siblings or pets.
These forums encourage or blackmail users into committing serious acts of self-harm or suicide. One specific pro-suicide forum has been linked to more than 135 deaths in the UK alone. That is 135 empty chairs at dinner tables. These are extreme forms of online harms, and I am glad that the National Crime Agency and international partners are taking them seriously, but do they have the powers and resources to protect young and impressionable people from serious online harm?
This debate on online harms is not new. We have been talking about how to protect people from the online world over many years in this House, and there is a real danger that we are permanently running to catch up with online operators. Experts described the Online Safety Act as a ceiling for safety, not a floor. In many cases, social media companies are doing little more than their statutory duty. In December last year, not a single platform determined itself to be “high risk” for suicide or self-harm content. We cannot let companies mark their own homework.
Platforms are systematically downplaying harms, and are incentivised to allow the problem to go on if advertisers still deem the platform safe. Ofcom needs to have the power to mark these companies honestly, and if they are failing, it needs to be able to act. Does the Minister believe that Ofcom has the powers that it needs to act and for that to be followed through on?
Let me talk quickly about a meeting that the Molly Rose Foundation and affected parents recently had with Ofcom to highlight significant concerns, which included strengthening the Online Safety Act and extending it to cover children’s wellbeing. I am told that the meeting was very unsatisfactory. Will the Minister agree to meet with me and those parents to discuss the situation further? This is important to them; they have lost their children, and they want to do more to protect others.
Right now, the law is failing. In 2024, a man was arrested on suspicion of stalking and harassment for this kind of behaviour, but no further action was taken due to limitations in the current legislation. As of now, there is no provision in law to prosecute for covert filming of this nature. This abuse sits in a legal grey area between several different crimes, including voyeurism and harassment, giving this type of video the space to grow. Existing voyeurism offences are framed around private acts or taking intimate images. Harassment laws were not designed to address the recording and mass distribution of this kind of content, so perpetrators slip through the cracks and the problem grows.
My Liberal Democrat colleagues in the other place tabled an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would have created a specific criminal offence of secretly filming someone without their consent for sexual gratification, or to humiliate or distress them. The Government’s view was that this amendment was too broad. Yes, we must protect the freedom to film in public and legitimate journalism, but we cannot allow that to become an excuse for inaction, because right now women are being targeted, filmed and broadcast to millions without protection. Something must change.
We should look at harassment laws, including how the Public Order Act 1986 can be strengthened to tackle sex-based harassment, both offline and online, because harassment does not stop on the streets—it continues online, often indefinitely. It should be an offence to record and distribute footage of someone without their consent when they are targeted because of their sex and that material is used to objectify and humiliate them and subject them to misogynistic abuse. Women should not have to wonder every time they go out whether they will wake up the next morning to find themselves plastered across the internet in the most distressing and degrading way. It is not beyond the Government’s power to fix this issue, and I urge them to listen and to close this gap in the law, to protect women from this vile misogynistic harassment.
This week—of all weeks, when we have seen a deeply concerning outbreak of meningitis in Canterbury and east Kent—we see misinformation and blatantly anti-science positioning rear its ugly head once again, as we saw in the covid-19 pandemic and have seen countless times since. It is a really obvious thing to say, but the onus is on us to speak with one voice as MPs on such a critical topic as public health and to confront those harmful narratives at their source.
A great deal more thinking needs to be done in digital spaces when it comes to misinformation, whether medical or otherwise. That requires strengthened regulation and real intent between the Government, Ofcom and the platforms. I am pleased that the Online Safety Act has provisions to capture myths and disinformation where they are illegal or harmful to children, but we have much further to go in curtailing the weaponisation of online platforms to spread lies, conspiracies and harmful falsehoods to millions across the country.
Secondly, I would like to speak about the protection of children. I have raised the issue of technology-assisted child sexual abuse on several occasions in this place. It needs to be tackled from both sides—the judicial and the digital—so I wholly welcome the Online Safety Act and the Government’s wider work in this area. From stopping companies like X, or AI tools like Grok, generating vile, sexualised images of children and non-consensual, intimate deepfakes to the commitment to ban nudification apps and to introduce a legal duty requiring tech platforms to remove non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of being posted, it is clear that the Government stand firmly against those who would do our children harm.
That being said, TACSA also has further dimensions that warrant serious consideration. It can take many forms, such as the distribution of child sexual abuse material, sexual harassment, exposure to sexually explicit materials and grooming, to name a few. Despite the prevalence and seriousness of these crimes, there is an over-reliance on non-custodial sentences across our judicial landscape, with magistrates courts dominating outcomes, and gaps in the unduly lenient sentencing scheme. Online or technology-assisted child sexual abuse has profound and lasting impacts on children for their whole lives, comparable to that of physical abuse. Digital regulation and our justice system must reflect the insidiousness and seriousness of such crimes, and I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that when he concludes the debate.
Finally, I will briefly touch on how discourse in digital spaces is increasingly affecting our communities. Following the Manchester synagogue attack last year, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate identified a troubling rise in antisemitism online, where violence against the Jewish community was celebrated and further encouraged. We only need open X, Facebook or other platforms to see a disgraceful barrage of abuse levelled at our Muslim community too, with platforms giving previously fringe far-right voices the means to amplify their dangerous and divisive rhetoric to millions. The harm that these actors can inflict on the capacity of our communities to come together is being played out each and every day. All too often they can hide behind anonymous accounts, and real people—my constituents and people across the country—are having to face the consequences. I am proud to represent a diverse constituency, but I fear the power that those online have to direct actions and attitudes in real life. I hope that the Minister will touch on that pertinent topic.
I welcome this Government’s efforts to curtail online harms. Indeed, I welcome the work of any Government in doing so. Things, however, are moving at a staggering rate. We therefore cannot view the Online Safety Act 2023 simply as a job well done; rather, we should see it as another rung on a growing ladder. To keep our constituents—especially children—and our communities safe, we need to ensure that our thinking is consistent with the expanding nature of these digital spaces. Ultimately, that means recognising that, for all their utility in connecting us with one another, these platforms also have a near unlimited capacity to do people harm. I truly fear the consequences of failing to recognise that.