Ian Russell's daughter Molly died in 2017 after viewing content about self-harm online. Last month, he told the BBC that Prime Minister Keir Starmer was pushing new rules to protect young people from harm online, but too quickly and for the wrong reasons.

Starmer had just announced that companies like Apple and Google must stop children from seeing nude images on their phones. He framed this as the Government standing up to big technology firms. Russell's objection carries weight because his daughter's death helped make online safety a major political issue in the first place.

Andy Burrows, who runs the Molly Rose Foundation — a charity set up in Molly's memory — has raised a different concern. Meta (Facebook's parent company) has recently loosened some of the ways it polices harmful content. Burrows warned this could take things back to the way they were when Molly died. He has asked Ofcom, the regulator that oversees online safety, to step in. Together, Russell and Burrows represent something significant: the campaigners most associated with pushing for these protections are now at odds with how the Government is carrying them out.

How we got here

The Online Safety Act, which sets out the rules that websites must follow, came into force in January 2024. Getting it through Parliament took a long time, and it changed many times along the way.

At one point, the law would have let Ofcom force platforms to remove content that was upsetting but not actually illegal. That proved controversial — free speech campaigners objected strongly. The Government dropped that part, but some child safety advocates thought it made the law weaker.

When Molly died, her parents could not access the data on her phone. There was no legal framework for it. The inquest into her death revealed how much harmful content she had been shown online. This became a turning point: it helped build support across all the major parties for new rules to protect young people.

Why this matters now

The broader concern here is about how the Government is making decisions. Russell is not saying the new rules are wrong in what they aim to do. He is saying they are being announced too fast, without enough proper discussion with the families and campaigners who have lived through these issues.

That distinction matters in Westminster. The Online Safety Act was unusual because victim testimony and campaigner input shaped it heavily at committee stage. If the current measures are being decided without that kind of consultation, the political cost may be larger than any short-term advantage the Government gains from announcing them quickly.

There is also the question of what Ofcom will do about Meta's changes. The regulator has the legal power to act. If the Government pushes Ofcom to move swiftly, it will look like the political side is controlling the regulator. If it leaves Ofcom alone to decide independently, as the law intended, it risks appearing passive. Either way, the Prime Minister's team will need to handle a problem that Parliament and the party leaders on the opposition benches alone cannot solve.