Social Media: Eating Disorders
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps her Department is taking to ensure online safety regulations adequately address harmful eating disorder-related content on social media platforms.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan
Under the Online Safety Act, services must implement rigorous safeguards to eliminate illegal content that promotes or facilitates serious self-harm.
For services accessed by children, the bar is even higher: they are required to deploy highly effective age-assurance to prevent children encountering content that while not strictly illegal, still promotes, encourages, or provides instructions for eating disorders. These protections are critical to preventing harm and safeguarding vulnerable users.
Services must also protect children from content that shames or otherwise stigmatizes body types as this type of content may cause harm if encountered in high volumes.
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