For the last few months we’ve been working with the BBC, as part of an ‘army’ of bereaved mums Fiona brought together, on a campaign to challenge the social media companies to take responsibility for the drugs being sold openly on their platforms. Finally, after being put on hold during lockdown, this was aired on Monday 17th August, and then across other BBC programmes and wider media over the following days, including a longer BBC Newsbeat documentary.
See The One Show here (watch from 16:30) and the full Newsbeat documentary here.
This campaign has brought together eleven mums (and one dad) from across England, Scotland and Wales – from Ayreshire down to Somerset – all of whom have lost teenage children to drugs, and all of whom are totally committed to doing all they can to prevent any harm happening to anyone else’s child. Three of the children had found the drugs that killed them as easy as anything just through Snapchat. Two of these, Carson and Grace, were just 13, and Jodie just 16.
This powerful little ‘mums’ army’ wrote open letters to Ed Couchman, UK General Manager of Snapchat, and Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook VP for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), the UK bosses. These were intended to be delivered in person, en masse, to their London offices at the start of April with the BBC filming, but then the global pandemic hit, and so it was only last month that they received them.
Since then Fiona has had a very positive meeting with Instagram’s Director of Public Policy for EMEA, challenging them about the fact it’s still so quick and easy to find drugs on their platform despite their best efforts, but also putting together some really constructive plans to work with them to reduce the harm this can do through education and positive messaging. She also has a meeting in a couple of weeks with Ed Couchman and Snapchat’s Director of Public Policy for UK and the Nordics, along with one of the mums whose daughter died from drugs bought through Snapchat.
This is such an important issue – there are risks around drugs very specific to social media which many young people are unaware they might be vulnerable to, and about which many parents have no clue because it’s such a very different world. Now this is being aired we can finally go public about it all, and will be doing all we can – and we’ll keep you updated.
