Social media companies have to step up and take responsibility for violent videos online.
These awful posts are sparking violence among our young people. The story of a 14-year-old who was savagely beaten with a baseball bat is just the latest in a string of attacks.
Too often the Daily Record has reported on horrific assaults like these which end up plastered over social media in an attempt to gain online popularity.
The experience of bullying is bad enough without these viral videos making victims feel even worse. And they have a negative effect on those who watch the videos too.
As Liberal Democrat MSP Willie Rennie put it, millions of people witnessing violence on social media “causes so much harm to so many more” than it otherwise would.
Our children need protected. No more kids should have videos of them being attacked posted on the internet.
That is why we are running the Our Kids: Our Future campaign.
The social media companies have a duty of care to young users. It is time for them to invest in identifying harmful content, prevent it from being shared with children and remove it from the internet as quickly as possible.
They should listen to young people and work for positive change. TikTok and Snapchat have urged people to report violent content, but this is not the solution. It is up to them to take action.
If they do not, there will continue to be sickening attacks against our young people. It will spiral and more children will be subject to awful abuse. This cannot be allowed to happen.
The Daily Record will continue to hold the social media giants to account until they clean up their act and protect our children.
Ban is only option
The Daily Record’s campaign to ban single-use disposable vapes has clearly been rattling cages.
We were shocked at the scale of the damage being done to our parks and open spaces by hundreds of thousands of these items simply being thrown away.
Just one day into our Bin the Vapes campaign, the Scottish Government agreed to a review that could lead to a ban. Now one of the companies which makes the devices has launched a scheme to make it easier to recycle them.
While this is a welcome move, we remain firmly of the view that only a total ban on disposable vapes will do.
Our reliance on single use plastics is one of the major problems facing our planet today.
So our message to manufacturers and the Scottish Government is simple.
Ban these single-use vapes as quickly as possible.
It is simply not acceptable for these items to be on sale when multi-use options are easily available.
The fear is that any scheme to encourage recycling of these items will simply fall on deaf ears.
The fact is that some consumers will simply discard them in public by the skip load as they are doing now.
So our message to manufacturers and the Scottish Government is simple.
Ban these single use vapes as quickly as possible.
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