South Holland and the Deepings MP Sir John Hayes says the social media 'beast must be caged'

In his latest Hayes in the House column, our MP takes aim at social media and its 'sinister excesses'.

In my lifetime, the way that many people communicate has changed dramatically. The piercing power of the internet can be useful, but, at best, it’s a double-edged sword as social media’s superficial banality obscures a growing crisis of depression and decay, of self-doubt and self-harm, all facilitated by technology companies that profit from exploiting people’s doubts and fears.

The modus operandi of these companies is not simply the communication of messages and information.

Instead, they control and manipulate virtual interaction in ways that exploits people’s innate fears whilst simultaneously trapping them through a digital addiction.

So drunk are they on this power, with their massive captive audiences, that these social media conglomerates’ entire business models rely on ruthlessly exploiting vast quantities of data harvested from their virtual addicts.

Driven by a rapacious desire for growth, they have abandoned any notion of duty of care to their users.

Their avarice both stokes the monetarising of personal information whilst concurrently blinding them to the plethoric manners in which this data can be, and is, being generated, used, and cynically exploited.

Perhaps the most shocking manifestation of this is the harm done to children.

Having opened Pandora’s box into the digital realm, social media giants are unable to police the billions of items being posted on their platforms.

A graphic example being police videos advertising – indeed, glamorising – illegal Channel crossings by children.

The 1,400 minors accompanying the nearly 50,000 crossings last year had their images placed on the internet to advertise that despicable trade.

When the market fails in this way, Parliament must step in –which is why the Government is right to have introduced the Online Safety Bill.

However, like all measures, it has benefited from the amendments implicit in scrutiny, one of which we persuaded the Government to accept will wipe the material showcasing illegal Channel crossings from the internet, requiring social media companies to face up to their responsibilities.

Another change to the Bill I helped, with colleagues, to secure will make tech directors personally legally liable for breaches of their child safety duties.

No longer will those senior executives be able to wash their hands of the harm they do, hiding behind their firms.

This bill provides an unrivalled opportunity for Britain to lead the world in curbing the sinister excesses of the internet age and its reckless masters. For all their virtue signalling, the tech giants’ lack of action speaks louder than words.

Whether it is facilitating the promotion of deadly Channel crossings or the day-to-day damage done to the mental health of Britain’s young people, let us be under no illusion: they know what they are doing - and we know too. It is time to act and cage the beast before it devours us all.

Strengthening the powers of Ofcom to keep children safe will ensure that the buck stops with tech management. As GK Chesterton said: “Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.”

The careless tech conglomerates cannot be trusted to check themselves, and as such this Government’s Online Safety Bill is a welcome start.

But in time to come, as the social media beast writhes and breathes, Parliament must keep it caged before its fearful fire burns us all.