Mr. Paul Gordon:

Trust in traditional media is lower among the younger population who tend to get most of their news from social media. That is one of the challenges. Younger age groups have high literacy skills but when that is married with the distrust, to some extent, of traditional media, it leaves young people more open to disinformation online. Investment in media literacy programmes right across the life cycle, from young people to older people, is vital in doing that. The NYCI with Webwise provide resources for youth workers and anyone working with young people to recognise disinformation to ensure they are safe and autonomous users of social media. We are trying to empower them to develop those skills. It is important to do that both in a formal education setting and non-formal education settings like youth work.

The proliferation of harmful racist and misogynistic content online is having a significant impact. Young people are seeing more of this. We have aggressive algorithms on social media platforms that continue to push it, even after community guidelines are violated. That is where the role of the online safety commissioner and the recently passed Act come in. It is about looking at sanctions for social media companies under the soon to be published codes but also being proactive in ensuring we are examining what other types of harmful content the online safety commissioner should be looking at. The social media companies also have a responsibility to play their part in helping to fund media literacy programmes. We saw a UK all-party parliamentary group recommend a levy on profits to fund such programmes. There is scope for that within the Act and it was discussed in the context of a digital services tax in the report of the Future of Media Commission. Those are opportunities for us to address this issue. It is important we take a proactive approach rather than being reactive to one particular person who is in the media at any given time. It must be embedded in both formal and non-formal education.