Government ministers have claimed that an agreement has been reached with internet firms that will help restrict access to child abuse images. Meanwhile, UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have refused to place an automatic block on pornography.
Whitehall meeting
Earlier this week, government minister addressed the issue of child safety during a Whitehall meeting attended by large internet firms, including Google, Yahoo, Twitter,Facebook, BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Vodafone.
The firms agreed to give the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) more resources to actively search and remove child abuse images - as opposed to simply acting on the information it receives.
“Fundamental change”
Culture Secretary Maria Miller, who chaired the meeting, said that the agreement would lead to “a fundamental change” in the way that illegal content could be accessed online.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One Programme, she said: “What has been agreed today is a fundamental change in the way the industry will approach child abuse images and removing them from public view.
“It does mean that more of those images can be removed too.”
PM “personally committed”
Prime Minister David Cameron said that “important steps had been taken” and vowed to push companies to make restricting access to indecent images a “priority”.
He said that he was “personally committed” to the cause and urged firms to “use their expertise, their brains and their brilliance to get these disgusting images off the internet.”
Automatic block
UK Internet Service Providers have been at the centre of the debate on child safety following the conviction of April Jones’s murderer, Mark Bridger, who was found to have accessed child abuse images on his personal computer.
Calls were subsequently made by John Carr, member of the Government’s Council on Child and Internet Safety, to place an automatic block on images depicting violence and child pornography.
It is believed that at least one million images depicting child abuse are available online, but only 40,000 are reported to the IWF each year.
Bombarded
A 2011 Mothers' Union review found that children were being bombarded with harmful content over the internet, television, videos and in advertising, and that more needed to be done to help parents block access to indecent material.
Internet firms have said that whilst they will continue to encourage the use of “family friendly parental controls”, they will not introduce a default block on pornographic images.
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