In a session of the Joint Committee on the Online Safety Bill, Dean interviewed the Director of Government Relations Europe at TikTok, Dr Theo Bertram. and a Senior Director at Twitter, Nick Pickles.
Dean started by asking Nick Pickles about Zach's Law, a campaign to criminalise the sharing of malicious posts aimed at causing seizures and harming people with epilepsy. When he asked him why Twitter did not already prevent flashing images from being sent to individuals with epilepsy, he said that the posting of flashing images to Twitter for that purpose is already "a violation of Twitter's abuse rules". Nick also raised the point that "strengthening the criminal law..." is important "because there is currently no criminal offence that would cover the issue in my understanding..." and he pledged that "Twitter fully supports (Zach's Law) and if there is more we can do we will work with those partners to understand that..."
Following his questions to Nick, Dean asked Dr Theo Bertram why TikTok is not doing more to stop challenges that are promoted on their platform that can often lead to people being harmed. Dr Theo said that Tiktok takes these challenges "very seriously... and it is against their policies" but he also admitted that they need to do more to tackle this issue. He explained that TikTok is working with academics and third parties to learn how to proactively resolve the problem that Dean raised by "better understanding children's attitudes to risk... so that it helps us to design a product that keeps that off the platform."
Please watch the video at the top of this post to see the full version of Dean's questions to the witnesses.
