Here we go again.
Brianna Ghey‘s mother is calling for a ban on children’s access to social media after it was revealed her daughter’s killer watched torture videos on the Dark Web.
Her mother, Esther, said she wants smartphones to be made available for under-16s without social media apps.
This woman has suffered a terrible loss. She is the last person we should be listening to when having a rational discussion about such matters. You may recall the government of the day listening to a similarly bereaved mother a couple of decades ago. What that gave us was a hideous piece of legislation that ended up outlawing images of lawful, consensual acts even when it was the people involved taking the pictures and sharing them amongst themselves. Like all such legislation it was ill-conceived, badly thought through and a complete waste of time, because it did not address the underlying problem. This would be exactly the same. Social media and the dark web are two different things, yet are used glibly as if they are one and the same here. That this child managed to find what she was looking for indicates an underlying issue with her, not social media. That she went on to kill is, again, an issue with her, not social media.
I’m not a fan of social media, but it is not the cause of what happened here and any attempt to legislate on the back of this case will be the same ill thought out, knee-jerk reaction that we have come to expect from our hard-of-thinking politicians. And will be equally useless.
The same way that politicians and civil servants never suffer any meaningful consequences for actions or decisions they make which harm people, the populace is quite happy to blame anything else but themselves.
Won’t someone please think of the children?
No, not the parents, the interferring busybody state apparatus.
Surely it would make more sense to ban children murdering other children?
Sounds like a plan.
Why has nobody thought of that before? I mean, it’s like walking into schools and shooting all the kids. Why did it take until 1996 before they banned that?
Search for the Comic Book Code of 1954.
Well there was nothing else to whinge about then.
Banning something is always the knee-jerk reaction to horrific crimes-it doesn’t work.
Perhaps it has to do with the unseemly media reporting of ‘victims’ feelings?
It may sell column inches (or pixels) but people were allowed their grief in private.