Tony Vaughan

My hon. Friend raises an interesting point. The legislative regime that we have at the moment, as I will come on to say, will require risk assessments. The state of the evidence when the Online Safety Act 2023 was being passed is different from the evidence that we have today, so the nature of those assessments and of the risks is necessarily different. As I will come on to say, we need to look at that on a continual basis. As I was saying, social media can be a wonderful tool, but it has become a wild west where too much harmful content is being pushed on to young people, and social media companies are simply not doing enough to tackle it. The sad fact of the matter is that social media is pushing content that radicalises, that catalyses mental health crises and that is highly addictive. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, last month raised the alarm about how extremist ideologies are reaching children as young as 12 through social media platforms, and young people radicalised by social media are on its books. That, of course, is a growing threat to national security. Another issue is mental health crises. We are seeing skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and even suicide among adolescents.