 Right nearly all of us want harmful content taken off social media We know it's there almost half of all teenagers have seen something harmful on social media in the last month So the problem is none of us are doing anything about it The Chartered Institute of Marketing says two-thirds about 62% of children say they rarely or never report Harmful posts only seven percent say they always do now This is important for business as well because it gives social media a bad reputation It lessens its appeal as a marketing tool You know who wants their brand to appear unwittingly next to disturbing images now We're joined by Lee Hopwood who's chair of Chartered Institute of Marketing who's been researching this matter Lee Let's just get the basic facts right. What are what do we mean when we talk about harmful images? Well really harmful images are anything from anything that might be sexually related or terrorist related But it's not just harmful images. It's harmful video content. It's bullying. It's abuse There's a lots of ways that harmful content is being Displayed on social media when it shouldn't be okay. So why don't people report this? Why why such a large number of teenagers see it? They know they don't like it But they don't know anything about it Well, I think there's a number of things to be honest I don't think the social media companies make it easy to report harmful content And I think they could make it a lot easier by making those report buttons one available and two much more accessible But I also think and one of the reasons why I'm here today is because we need to make it much more aware to the public That we should be reporting content I think there is a the government needs to do a public awareness campaign to make sure that We as as individuals as parents are Reporting that content and that we are making sure that our children are reporting that content Children are less likely to report content than adults So the government has now said that if people complain about something then That the social media companies have to take it down But you're saying that's simply not going to work if we don't go to that first process of reporting it Absolutely, so the government is putting forward a proposal to say what the social media companies need to do However, they need to get their people their processes their technologies in place to be able to respond to what could be a Huge wave once they start enabling people to report that content far easier now Surely there's a business that the business angle here is important because surely a social media company wants to attract advertising Wants to get its advertisers there, but if it has a reputation of doing nothing about Harmful images those advertisers going to be scared away So it's got a real incentive the social media companies have a real incentive of keeping the place clean as it were Absolutely when so why doesn't it work? Why doesn't it work? Well? I think the the social media companies are obviously focused on their their revenues They want to see their revenues I think there is such an increase and quite a rapid increase in the number of people that are Starting to disengage with social media and I think that the danger is that if social media companies don't embrace what's inevitable then Then they'll end up disengaging their people their users And if they're their users aren't there then the the companies that are spending money 52 billion pounds a year on social media those companies will simply start looking at how they can spend their money elsewhere To engage with their customers. Okay, Lee. Very good to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much