- Former EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy is backing a campaign to raise the minimum age for social media access to 16, citing concerns over harmful content.
- Cassidy fears for her daughters, Eliza (15) and Joanie (9), and the material they could encounter online, which she finds more disturbing than her character's on-screen dramas.
- An experiment by the 'Big Tech’s Little Victims' campaign showed that fictional 13-year-old profiles were exposed to hundreds of concerning posts, including sexualised content, racism, violence, and self-harm, within a week.
- Cassidy highlights the difficulty for parents to monitor children's online activity and believes her daughter may be desensitised to harmful content, despite claiming not to see it.
- The campaign, supported by the National Education Union, urges the government to act by raising the age limit and addressing algorithms that expose children to such material, referencing Australia's ban for under-16s.
IN FULL
