Our children's online safety should not be traded away to appease Trump and the tech giants

16 April 2025, 22:34

Just this week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance suggested that a “great agreement” between his country and ours is on the horizon.

Like, I suspect, most of my colleagues in the House of Commons, I’ve been hearing from worried parents and families all asking the same question of this prospective deal:

Will our Online Safety Act be up for grabs?

Earlier this month the Prime Minister seemed to confirm as much. Families across the UK will be horrified at the prospect of these vital protections being sold off to Trump, Musk and the other tech barons who have gotten their hands on power in the US.

This Labour Government may be about to make their biggest mis-step yet. After stripping pensioners of Winter Fuel Payments, after burdening high street businesses with their damaging Jobs Tax hike, one might be forgiven for thinking they might try to play it safe.

But offering up our children’s online safety to appease a bully like Donald Trump would be the biggest bungle yet.

We simply can not allow it. 

And I know the British public won’t accept it.Keeping children safe online has never felt more central to our national debate, and more and more ink is now spilled each week on the topic.

It can be difficult to get to the nub of the issue.

So over the last two months I’ve toured the schools of my constituency, to hear from teachers, parents and from students themselves about how they really feel about their engagement with the online world.

What I’ve seen has been surprising. Young people themselves are as conscious of the dangers and distractions of the online world as adults. 

They know the impact of social media platforms that are addictive by design, perfectly crafted to exploit the reward structures of young brains. 

And they know that this is perhaps the key driver of the crisis we are seeing in young people’s mental health.

It’s imperative that we move to protect our children.

In the coming weeks, MPs will have the chance to vote for my amendments to the Data Bill. These would bring UK data protection law into line with many of our European neighbours, so that under 16s could no longer consent to having their data harvested by the social media giants.

It would be a first step towards tackling the addictive algorithms at their source.

Today I’m calling on the Government to treat this like the Public Health crisis it is. That means putting our children’s safety and their mental health before the profits of social media giants, it means making sure we are led by best practice and evidence, and crucially, it means accepting that our hard won online protections can neverbe offered up on a plate to Donald Trump and his cronies.

Victoria Collins MP is the Lib Dem Spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology.

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