Isolation over coronavirus will mean people turning to social media – now is the time to really ‘be kind’

Even the world wide web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is aware the internet can be a dark place for women and girls especially. We all need to be careful over the coming weeks, writes Janet Street-Porter

Smartphones, social media and coronavirus isolation is not a great mix (iStock)

Coronavirus means millions of us will spend days and even weeks cooped up at home. However, instead of being a safe place, modern house arrest should come with its own health warnings.

With time on our hands, the majority of us will be glued to our smartphones, using social media to stay in touch. In the hands of the young and impressionable, the vulnerable and the naive, the internet can result in mental and physical harm. In the space of three decades, the web has transformed our lives in positive ways and broadened our vision – but it’s also destroyed people’s health and fostered revolting behaviour. Young women in particular are suffering, targeted by cyberbullies and those who would exploit their insecurities about sex and body image.

The creator of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is so concerned he has just published an open letter to governments and tech companies claiming that “the web is not working for women and girls”. His charitable foundation joined forces with the Girl Guides to publish research showing that more than half of young girls have suffered online abuse. More worrying was the finding that 87 per cent thought the situation was getting worse.

According to Sir Tim, this online abuse can result in girls refusing to go to school, it can take the form of bullying which affects women’s confidence at work, and it is curbing freedom of speech – female journalists and politicians are routinely attacked for expressing opinions others might find challenging. The death of 14-year-old Molly Russell caused outrage when it emerged that she had viewed self-harming images on Instagram. After Molly took her own life, images featuring self-harm and suicide were still being posted on Instagram, even though the company said it was against its policy.

Now, the government plans to frame new laws to force tech companies to police their content better, under the aegis of Ofcom, the communications regulator. Echoing Sir Tim’s findings, Ofcom say four out of five internet users aged between 12 and 15 have been exposed to harmful content online in the last year. They want any company publishing user-generated content (like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook) to take down “harmful” material – anything promoting terrorism, child sexual abuse, cyberbullying, self-harming, suicide and so on. Failure to do so will result in fines and even custodial sentences.

In Germany, a new law requires companies with more than two million users to do just this, or face large fines. The EU has new legislation which means companies can be fined up to 4 per cent of their turnover if they do not remove offensive material when asked to do so by governments.

The government has also decided to tackle fake news by setting up a team of experts to monitor the rubbish that’s being circulated during the current health scare. There have been stories that a vaccine to combat coronavirus exists (untrue), rubbish about hand cleansers and all sorts of spurious cures – in France, it was claimed that snorting cocaine acts as a deterrent to the virus. This kind of fake news could be deadly.

Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants governments to monitor social media content for offensive material – of course, because it is an impossible task, the volume of stuff involved is too much to realistically sort through. For all their huge profits, Facebook and co don’t want to spend money on an army of human beings filtering content. The best they can hope for is to act promptly to remove any posts reported as offensive.

Now, Ofcom will be charged with identifying offensive material and demanding it is removed – an unrealistic task it is bound to fail at. Many users will be undeterred and will continue to put up material which contravenes guidelines, because there’s a strong chance they will succeed in evading detection.

Could the coronavirus be an opportunity to try and reduce our dependence on the internet, and chatting online? Perhaps we could lower the level of aggression, if nothing else.

Fed up with some high profile feminists competitively boasting about “woke” events they attended on International Women’s Day, I posted a picture of me painting a shed a calming shade of green. It has been viewed over 116,000 times and liked by over 2,000 people. It generated fun comments which help to negate the nastiness which led to 15 people being muted this week (mostly low-level snipers who don’t bother to read what I’ve written, they just spit out insults).

The recent death of Caroline Flack highlighted the damage that social media can do, and her wish that we should “be kind” has been widely commented on. But while our society professes to be “concerned” about issues affecting our peers, from cancer to climate change, in reality we can easily morph into bullies and be less than kind hiding behind the anonymity provided by a smartphone. The fallout of this nastiness has been appalling; one in eight people aged under 19 in England have a mental health problem, which rises to one in four girls aged between 17 to 19 who say they have considered self-harming or suicide.

There’s no point in expecting this generation to read a book or turn off technology – smartphones are how they conduct their lives. Parents and friends need to be vigilant. Let’s hope that an enforced period of isolation caused by this nasty virus doesn’t have unanticipated consequences.