The Internet Watch Foundation, which was established within the industry and operates a hotline to report indecent images of children, was held up as a British success story and the basis for an international drive towards removing illegal child abuse content.
An equally effective and speedy response was claimed by the Press Complaints Commission when tackling inaccurate and intrusive content on newspaper websites. Tim Toulmin, director of the PCC, defended the self-regulation of what he acknowledged was the “massive online presence” being established by the British newspaper industry and its huge global reach. “People are pig sick of regulation…all non illegal material should be left alone. There is no need for regulation”. But self-regulators had to offer a speedy response and the PCC was keeping standards of journalism and audio-visual output as high as possible.
Self-regulation was quick, collaborative and entirely free to the complainant on a twenty-four basis. When a report on a newspaper website included, by mistake, an elderly lady’s telephone number, her son emailed the PCC at 9pm and five minutes later her contact details were removed. When another paper’s site used pictures of an actress being harassed in the USA, there was “very quick action” to take them down. A third newspaper removed unpleasant comments about the appearance of a girl who was close to death.
When asked whether the increased number of inaccuracies in online journalism was due to the rate at which newspapers were reducing their sub-editing staff, Toulmin insisted there was no evidence of a link between the loss of sub-editors and the number of online mistakes. Peter Robbins, chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation, said his staff were dealing with 34,000 complaints a year, of which 25 per cent resulted in some form of action.
Thirty three other countries now operated similar hotlines to take down illegal child abuse images and the UK had proved that a difference could be made by establishing a consensus within the industry. Social networking sites were also covered by self-regulation. Camille de Stempel, director of policy for AOL UK, said the company operated a zero policy on child abuse images. In addition, social networking sites could apply for a criminal records check on moderators who worked with children’s content on the internet. Another innovation was to assist adults dealing with potentially harmful content. The help that was available was always offered first when searches were made. So in response to the statement “I want to kill myself”, the first information that would be offered would be a link to the Samaritans.
Derek Wyatt, MP, co-chair of the all party parliamentary group on communications, said that he hoped that in the government’s new communications act, Ofcom would be given a leadership role in tackling the issues regarding internet content.
Ofcom, which Wyatt rated as being worth “eight out of ten” as a regulator, should begin by resolving outstanding issues regarding child safety. In responding, Ofcom’s head of convergent media, Jeremy Olivier, said it would be up to the government to decide whether Ofcom should have a role in tackling illegal content on the internet. However, he doubted whether it would be possible to offer users of the internet the same level of content regulation which had been promised to listeners and viewers of radio and television.