The UK Culture Secretary Maria Miller is to call on social media majors including Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook to crackdown on cyber-bullying by implementing better safety guidelines, in the wake of suicide of 15-year London schoolgirl Tallulah Wilson.
Miller is planning a meeting in next few weeks with Tumblr together with social media majors to make commitments similar to internet service providers made in 2013.
Reports revealed that Wilson had accessed blogs about self-harm and suicide on Tumblr for several months before committing suicide.
According to Tallulah’s mother Sarah Wilson, she had entered ‘a world where the lines between fantasy and reality became blurred’, and summoned web firms to pull out their ads from sites that host self-harming and suicide-promoting blogs in a bid to stop similar suicide attempts.
The Daily Mail cited an undisclosed government source as saying: "We put a lot of pressure on the big internet service providers over web porn and it worked.
"All new broadband customers have automatic settings for family-friendly filters to block porn and only the adult account holder can change the setting," the source added.
"We want to do the same sort of thing for social media sites."
Echoing Wilson’s call, Miller would now insist the social media firms to be more practical in handling content deemed to be destructive to youngsters.
