Social networks to face government grilling over suicide promotion
The culture secretary is expected to demand greater action from networks over sites promoting self-harm and suicide
Tallulah Wilson, 15, died after being hit by a train in St Pancras station. Photograph: Eggmedia/PA
Culture secretary Maria Miller is to call on social networks such as Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook to crack down on cyberbullying in a dedicated summit scheduled for the next few weeks.
The plans follow the suicide of a London schoolgirl, Tallulah Wilson, who had spent months accessing blogs about self-harm and suicide on Tumblr beforehand.
Her mother, Sarah Wilson, described Tallulah having entered "a world where the lines between fantasy and reality became blurred", and called on companies to "withdraw their advertising from those sites who continue to host inappropriate self-harming and suicide-promoting blogs to stop this poison spreading".
Miller is expected to echo Wilson's call, and demand that social networks be more proactive about tackling content which could be harmful to younger users.
The government is reportedly feeling emboldened having won the fight over filters on the internet, and is now aiming to do the same thing for social media sites.
To summarise, social networking sites now are being claimed as the reason for some deaths for young teens. There is going to be action taken now as cyber bullying has increased. As a London school girl was posting things on a social networking site about self-hard and suicide on tumblr, people failed to acknowledge this and it was too late. Therefore the social networking sites need to be more proactive about tackling content which can be harmful for other young users.
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