Perran Moon

Meur ras, Sir Roger. It is an honour to serve again under your chairship. I thank the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing the debate, and the 416 constituents in Camborne, Redruth and Hayle who signed the petition. I want to start with a line from Ofcom’s report on children’s exposure to harmful content online, which was published just 11 days ago: “Children’s…exposure to eating disorder content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act”— the Online Safety Act— “came into force in July 2025.” That is damning. The status quo fails outright to protect children from harmful eating disorder content pushed by recommender algorithms. I will focus on eating disorders, not because they are the be-all and end-all of the debate on banning social media, but because they are emblematic of where we have not been bold enough. Across the country, many children and their parents must grapple with the issue of eating disorders, and it is one of the key reasons why I became an MP. I do not wish the experience of my family on any other, which is why reading Ofcom’s comments compelled me to speak today. Pro-eating disorder content can be found far and wide across social media. Terms such as “thinspo”, “looksmaxxing” and “ana”—short for anorexia—are used across social media to evade moderation. To all intents and purposes, algorithms shamelessly push them to vulnerable children’s feeds all the same. A meta-review of 50 studies involving 10 to 24-year-olds found consistent links between social media usage and eating disorders. Among those with eating disorders, 97% said that social media hindered rather than supported their recovery. Although it is often girls whose algorithms push eating disorder content, it is increasingly true for boys too. A February report by the Children’s Commissioner for England found that through short-form social media content, children are routinely exposed not only to prescription weight loss drugs, as the hon. Member for Winchester (Dr Chambers) mentioned, but to steroids, through both organic content and influencer marketing. Returning to my central point, the current approach fails to regulate the algorithms sufficiently to protect children from harmful eating disorder content. A social media ban for under-16s is blunt, and no age-verification system is perfect, but it is the proposal before us and it goes some way to matching the scale of the harm being done. When an industry’s business model depends on capturing children’s attention, we cannot keep asking children and parents to carry all the risk; the burden must fall on the platforms. We must act now to prevent our most vulnerable children from being exploited to their immense harm.