One in three internet users between the ages of 12 and 15 say they saw “hate speech” online in the past year, according to Ofcom’s latest survey of children’s media habits. It is the first time the UK regulator has posed a question about the topic in its annual study.
The NSPCC charity said the finding was “very worrying”, adding such posts should not be tolerated. The report also indicates children are spending more hours a week on the net. And it suggests that many of the children are too trusting in Google.
More than a quarter of eight-to-15s who used a search engine said that if the US firm listed a link then they believed its contents could be relied on.
Ofcom said most of these children had mistakenly assumed that the results were chosen by some kind of authoritative figure who had hand selected accurate pages.
Hateful media
The report was based on interviews carried out with 2,059 families between April and June.
The hate speech question asked: “In the past year, have you seen anything hateful on the internet that has been directed at a particular group of people, based on, for instance, their gender, religion, disability, sexuality or gender identity?”
The children were told this could involve hateful comments, images or videos posted to social media including YouTube. Of the 12-to-15-year-olds who replied, 27% said they had “sometimes” seen instances of hate speech over the past year, and a further 7% said they had “often” seen examples.
Ofcom noted that children from the three lowest social and economic groups in the UK were twice as likely to have given “often” as their answer as those from more wealthy backgrounds. Read more
