Rishi Sunak has declined to give his backing to calls by the mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey for social media apps to be banned on smartphones for under-16s.
Esther Ghey is campaigning for searches for inappropriate material to be flagged to parents in the wake of the sentencing of her transgender daughter’s killers.
Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe were both 15 when they killed Brianna, 16, with a hunting knife after luring her to Linear Park, Culcheth, a village near Warrington, Cheshire, on February 11 last year.
Jenkinson had watched videos of torture and murder online.
The Prime Minister, who is visiting Northern Ireland, said his thoughts were with Brianna’s family after the “unspeakable, unspeakable, awful act” but declined to say whether the Government might consider such a proposal.
Mr Sunak, echoing comments from Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, pointed to the “tough new powers” now in force under the Online Safety Act.
The legislation passed into law in November and requires social media companies to curb the spread of illegal content on their platforms and protect children from seeing potentially harmful material, with large fines among the potential penalties for those who breach the new rules.
He said: “As a parent, I am always worried about social media and what my young girls are exposed to.
“That’s why I’m pleased we have passed the Online Safety Act over the last year and that means the regulator now has tough new powers to control what is exposed to children online.
“And if the big social media companies do not comply with that, the regulator is able to levy very significant fines on them and the priority now is making sure that act is up and running.”
Downing Street stressed that the legislation currently in place gives ministers “the tools to make the web safer for children”.
The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “The Act allows us to respond to the changing nature of technology and changing nature of threats and it gives us room to respond to these changes.”
Ms Ghey told the BBC over the weekend that she wanted a law “that there are mobile phones that are only suitable for under-16s”.
She said that such phones would “not have all of the social media apps that are out there now”.
“If a child is searching the kind of words that Scarlett and Eddie were searching, it will then flag up on the parent’s phone,” she said.
She said if the searches her daughter’s killers had made had been flagged, their parents would have been “able to get some kind of help”.
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