Dr. Mary Aiken:

The other point is that we are not standing still in time. While we can talk about European law, it is constantly under review and evolving. I work closely with the EU in various areas, including the audio-visual media services area. One area we are looking at is the availability of video content that is targeting children online. There is a phenomenon known as "dark Peppa Pig", where people embed extreme content in videos that are being played for children who are three or four years old. Parents put on YouTube and allow their toddlers to watch the videos. Then, embedded in the video will be beheadings and other extreme content. This comes from people with psychopathic or sadistic dispositions deliberately trolling children.

The debate in the EU at the moment has been along particular lines. The thinking is that these are big data problems and, to address a point made already, the content is uploaded immediately and is, therefore, distributed or published immediately. Effectively the mechanisms they are looking at involve getting users to flag their own content and label the user-generated content as suitable for children or otherwise. However, if people are deliberately embedding content designed to troll children, they are not going to flag that content. The reason those in the United Kingdom are moving towards the online harms idea is because they are facing a tsunami of problem behaviour - as are our front-line services - in terms of the negative impact of harmful content on children. The child and adolescent mental health services in the UK are being overwhelmed by what is happening to children who are growing up in cyberspace.