Tech companies should pay for child abuse epidemic 'like oil spills', ex-Government child safety Czar says

Tech companies should pay compensation to child abuse victims ‘in the same way as oil spills’, the UK's former online child safety czar has said.

Baroness Joanna Shields, who was appointed as Britain’s first Minister for Internet Safety and Security in 2015, said social networks needed to pay “reparations” to help victims due to the “vast” scale of abuse unfolding on their sites.

In an interview with The Telegraph, the ex-senior Facebook executive also said she was “absolutely appalled” by her former company’s plan to encrypt is Messenger app.

The move, which would mean even Facebook would be unable to see what is being sent on the app, has been widely criticised by police, politicians and children’s charities, with the NPSCC warning it would turn social network into a “one-stop shop” for grooming.

In October, the Home Secretary Priti Patel wrote to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg warning him that encryption risked creating a “digital blindspot” where paedophiles and terrorists will be able to hide their “despicable” crimes.

The row comes as the Government is drawing up legislation to impose a statutory duty of care on tech companies to better protect users from online harm, a measure The Telegraph campaigned for.

Baroness Shields, who founded the international governmental network against child abuse WeProtect, said there was now a “vast” amount of abuse unfolding online as social media gave paedophiles a way to contact children directly.

However, she said she felt tech giants had not accepted responsibility for their role protecting children and now needed to be forced to pay to help the victims being groomed and abused on their services.

Baroness Shields added: “Whether that comes from a court or a government, we need to take care of those people being harmed and say you guys (the tech giants) need to be responsible for that.

“It is logical, if there is an oil spill and you damage an entire shoreline for a thousand miles, there are reparations, you pay back those people to clean it up and take care of it. But we don’t do that for human beings? Really?”

Before joining David Cameron’s government, Baroness Shields, 57, carved out a highly successful career in the tech industry, rising to become a senior executive at Google in 2005 before joining Facebook as vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2010.

After a successful stint at the social media giant, Baroness Shields became an advisor to Mr Cameron on the digital economy in 2014 before he appointed her to the House of Lords and made her Minister for Internet Safety and Security in 2015 - a role she held until 2017.

A key part of her tenure in government was setting up the WeProtect initiative, at the direction of Mr Cameron, which started as a trans-Atlantic partnership to share intelligence to combat child abuse online.

In a speech to the WeProtect Global Alliance Summit in December in Addis Ababa, Baroness Shields recounted how it was meeting the parents of murdered five-year-old April Jones and learning how her killer had become addicted to viewing child abuse material online that moved Mr Cameron to act to protect children on the internet.

Since its founding , WeProtect has now grown into an international organisation with 90 countries and 30 tech companies joining.

Last month, WeProtect published a Global Threat Assessment report, which warned that tech companies’ move towards encrypting their services was the “biggest challenge” to keep children safe online, as made it much harder to detect abuse happening on social media and messaging sites.

Baroness Shields urged Facebook to reverse its plans to encrypt its one-billion user Messenger app, on which more than 12 million reports of child abuse images were flagged last year.

She said that encrypting the service would make it much harder to stop the growing trend of paedophiles abusing children over live streams, a feature in the Messenger app.

“This (encrypting Messenger) is not even a commercial decision,” added Baroness Shields. “This is stand that they are taking that is profoundly in contrast to what the moral position needs to be. I am absolutely appalled, I don’t understand it.

“I have long since lost my influence (at Facebook), but it wouldn’t have been a decision I think the company would have made in 2012 when I was still there. I am actually confused and bewildered that this is a decision this company is making.”

A Facebook spokesperson said: “End-to-end encryption is one of the strongest tools we have to protect the privacy and security of people and their messages from cyber security threats.

"We have a responsibility to keep people safe and there is no place for grooming or child exploitation on our platforms.

"That’s why we use technology to proactively remove it and are developing further ways to detect patterns of harmful behaviour even when we can’t see the content of messages in order to ban and report those responsible.

"We work closely with child protection authorities in the UK, and we’re consulting with experts on the best ways to implement safety measures before fully implementing end-to-end encryption.”