UK HEALTH secretary Jeremy Hunt has called on social media giants to do more to tackle sexting among the nation’s teens, which he blames for rising cases of mental illness. Yet his proposals for smart locks that stop teenagers sharing sexually explicit images are just the latest example of government demanding magical fixes for complex societal problems.
Giving evidence as part of a House of Commons inquiry into , Hunt singled out social media as a key platform for abuse, , “I ask myself the simple question as to why you can’t prevent the texting of sexually explicit images by people under the age of 18.” He also asked why “word pattern recognition” couldn’t be used to identify and stop cyberbullying.
Hunt’s tech proposals are easy to suggest, but much harder to implement. Artificial intelligences can flag abusive keywords and recognise explicit images, but these are crude tools that often fail to understand context and are easy to circumvent.
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Most practical filters, like those protecting the comments sections of a website, rely on feedback from thousands of viewers who can flag objectionable content, which isn’t much use in a two-way chat dialogue. And similar content filters on Facebook have resulted in women having their accounts suspended for .
How can we hope to build AI that recognises porn, when even US Supreme Court judges have failed to pin down what counts as obscene, only concluding, ““? Even if we could, we shouldn’t. In the light of the pervasive powers granted by the UK Investigatory Powers Act and by the Digital Economy Bill, we should be wary of yet more infrastructure to filter the internet.
“Demands to block explicit images refuse to engage with how teens – and the rest of us – use the net”
“What Hunt is proposing is real-time processing of every image shared digitally,” says at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK.
Hunt’s plea will play well with concerned parents, but Crick, who has been working to reform UK computer education, views tighter controls as not just technically unfeasible, but strategically wrong. “We’re trying to create competent and capable young people who can confidently navigate the internet,” he says, not just trying to protect them by shutting them out.
Excluding them could backfire, shifting teen activity onto less regulated services. While protecting children online is clearly desirable, it’s less obvious why tech firms, not parents, should be responsible. “If your child is aged under 12, should they have unsupervised access to the internet?” says Crick.
The health secretary’s comments betray our uneasiness about sexual awareness in young teens. There’s no doubt that we’re seeing a dramatic change in norms around sex and sharing sexual content, which comes hand in hand with the potential for abuse through revenge porn and extortion. But sexting isn’t going away, and demands to block explicit images refuse to engage with how teens – and the rest of us – use the internet.
If the minister really wants to tackle problems around sexual activity and mental health in young people, he ought to spend less time demanding magical fixes and more time ensuring Britain’s youth can access high-quality sex education and well-funded mental health services.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Under 18s sexting ban? No thanks, Mr Hunt”
