Brianna Ghey’s mother just launched a petition calling for tech companies to be held accountable for children’s online safety

Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, who was murdered by Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, has launched a petition calling for a change in the law that would make phone companies more responsible for children’s online welfare.

Today, we're reaching out to encourage you to sign the petition here

Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg yesterday morning, Esther Ghey introduced the petition, which she hopes will ban social media apps on phones for children under 16. “If you’re over 16, you can have an adult phone. But if you’re under, you can have a child’s phone, which won’t have all the social media apps out there now,” she explained.

A staggering 80% of children (aged 12-15) have had potentially harmful experiences online, according to research from the Online Safety Data Initiative. Last week, over in the states — where many of the world’s biggest tech apps are headquartered — CEOs from Meta, TikTok, Snap, X and Discord were forced to answer questions from the Senate about what they were doing to protect children who are at risk of online bullying and harassment, as well as a gruesome slew of harmful content. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Instagram was one of several social media titans told they have “blood on [their] hands”.

Jenkinson and Ratcliffe, who were sentenced to a minimum of 20 years and 22 years imprisonment, respectively, for plotting and killing Ghey had planned the murder using messaging apps. Both 15 at the time, they'd watched videos of violence and torture on the dark web before the murder. Ghey believes that if better protections were in place to protect children, her daughter Brianna would still be alive.

The petition calls on the government to introduce phones without access to social media for children under 16. Esther Ghey mournfully discussed how she discovered after Brianna’s murder that she’d been accessing self-harm and pro-anorexia content online and described how it’s “just not doable” for parents to monitor everything their children are doing online.

Speaking live on the panel of Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, alongside Ex-Facebook vice president Richard Allen and former Secretary of State for Education, Justine Greening, Marie Claire’s Editor-in-Chief Andrea Thompson agreed that better measures for protecting children online are “much needed, much overdue”, adding that “the lack of regulation means that parents are just struggling to cope”.

“There are so many positives that come with a rapidly changing digital landscape, but it’s imperative that we protect children from the harmful unregulated content that they can readily access the minute they have a smartphone in their hand,” said Thompson.

If passed, the petition would prevent children under 16 from accessing social media apps on smartphones. The petition would also make it mandatory for companies to flag searches of inappropriate content to parents. Ghey said she would “like to see mobile phone companies take more responsibility” and noted that this flagging procedure is already used in schools, so the software exists.

The UK government has recently passed the Online Safety Act, giving more power to Ofcom to analyse the risks on platforms and then order those companies to mitigate risks. Still, Esther Ghey believes more needs to be done to protect children.