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Facebook is facing calls to take concrete action on cyber-bullying after it emerged a scheme it is helping fund to protect children has been forced to push back targets.
Last October Facebook pledged to put $1.3m (£1m) into a programme,run by the Diana Award and Childnet, to help put a “digital safety ambassador” in every British secondary school by October 2019. The plan was for the charities to train pupils to be representatives who could help peers with cyber-bullying.
There were about 2,000 schools involved, with Facebook’s funds to help it reach another 2,500.
The Daily Telegraph has discovered the programme has been implemented in just 461 schools. The date by which it is hoping to be in all British secondaries has been pushed back to March 2020.
It is understood Facebook is concerned the charities will not be able to hit the targets it has set, and is assessing how it can boost numbers.
One problem is that too few schools are aware such a programme exists, and Facebook is weighing up whether to market the programme on its platform. The Telegraph contacted more than 100 schools, of which five responded to say they had heard of the scheme.
Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, said the charities were “the experts so I think it’s important to give them room to run these programmes”.
“However, we do engage with them and we will think about ways to make sure people do know about this particular programme – that may mean going back and doing some ads in the UK to make sure people are aware,” she added.
Childnet said Facebook’s involvement in the programme was “purely financial”. Both Childnet and the Diana Award said they were confident they could hit their targets by March 2020.
Facebook decided to allocate the funds to the existing scheme amid growing criticism of how it deals with cyberbullying on its platform.
A survey last year found 83pc of young people thought social media companies should be doing more. More than half of the 1,089 11- to 25-year-olds asked had experienced cyber-bullying.
Alex Chalk MP, who led a government inquiry into how social media companies could protect children, told The Telegraph the £1m funding had appeared to be a “tokenistic gesture”.
“I really welcome Facebook’s efforts to face up to the issue of cyber-bullying and I think it’s right that they are engaging with it but ultimately it’s really important that the response is not tokenistic, that it’s part of a coherent response which is transparent about the scale of the problem and transparent about the way that they’re responding to it,” he said.
“To say you’re putting in £1m is completely meaningless until you know the number of users and the number of people who are making complaints. If you put in £1m and you’re getting 10 million complaints, that wouldn’t be putting in adequate resources.
“Facebook should be saying ‘I’m not happy with what’s going on on our platform, and people who are poisoning the debate amongst children, who are behaving in a way that’s toxic should be suspended or removed from the site’, and Facebook shows a marked reluctance to do that.”
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Telegraph
