Article written for The Times - published 11 April 2022 On April 19, the day the House of Commons returns after the Easter recess, we will debate and vote on the Online Safety Bill. This is a world-leading piece of legislation, that will set mandatory minimum safety standards for social media platforms, and create an […]
Article written for the Daily Telegraph published 17 March 2022 The future is digital. Hybrid working, speaking to loved ones far away, community organising to send supplies to Ukraine: the internet has made this all so much easier. But so far, we’ve struggled to rein in the wild west of the internet, where abuse, crime, and […]
Article written for the Guardian - published 17 February 2022 When the then Conservative cabinet minister, Norman Tebbit, fondly remembered how his dad went out on his bike to look for work he could hardly have imagined how many hundreds of thousands of people would be doing just that. The number of delivery riders working in the […]
Article written for the New Statesman - published 7 February 2022 The last time I wrote for the New Statesman on Big Tech and internet safety, the joint committee on the draft online safety bill’s inquiry was in full swing. Over the course of five months, the committee received more than 200 written evidence submissions, and took […]
Article written for Mace Magazine - published 19 January 2022 On 28 October, Facebook changed its corporate nameto Meta and staked its claim to become the company of the Metaverse.It was the same time its global head of safety, Antigone Davis, gave evidence to the UK Parliament’s joint select committee on the Online Safety Bill, […]
Article written for CapX - published 13 January 2022 This month marks the one-year anniversary of the Capitol Hill riots in which five people died. It’s a stark reminder that dangerous behaviour online can metastasise into real-world violence. Plenty of other examples can be found closer to home, like the racist abuse of England footballers after […]
Published in the The Times on 14 December 2021 As the father of two children, aged 14 and 12, their safety now, and the nature of the world we are building for them for the future, are my main concerns. The internet is already central to how most of us stay connected, access information, work and […]
Article written for Mace Magazine - published 18 October 2021 If we want to end the tragedy of the harm that can come from young minds engaging with toxic content on social media platforms, the corporate culture of big tech companies needs to change. “It is our experience that there is frustratingly limited success when harmful […]
Article written for The I Paper - published 18 October 2021 The murder of Sir David Amess has shocked us all in Westminster. It was an attack on our very system of democracy, killing an MP as he worked with the people in his constituency, seeking to help them and represent their concerns. It has made […]
Written for the Daily Telegraph - published 29 July 2021 The senior Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth wrote in a now infamous internal company memo “the ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good”. The trouble the tech […]