Algorithms directing boys to Andrew Tate content will be targeted in UK legislation.
The Online Safety Bill - which has been delayed going through a vote in Parliament due to a number of amendments - has been updated to include penalties for tech giants that lead young people to posts shared by people like Andrew Tate, a self-confessed misogynist who is currently imprisoned in Romania on rape and human trafficking charges.
Crossbench peer Baroness Kidron supported the House of Lord's helmed change despite the government’s resistance to the addition to the bill that also seeks to punish companies like Google, Meta and others for content published on their sites.
She said: "To push hundreds of thousands of children towards Andrew Tate for no reason other than to benefit commercially from the network effect is a travesty for children and it undermines parents."
Baroness Kidron also condemned social media sites like Twitter for pushing their users to doom scroll - a nickname for obsessively checking feeds for bad news - to increase engagement.
She continued that they had added "many hundreds of small reward loops that make up a doom scroll or make a game addictive".
The Liberal Democrats and Labour peers also supported the new amendment targeting algorithms.
Dame Melanie Dawes, the CEO of Ofcom - the body that will be responsible for enforcing the bill - expressed concern that the increasing edits to the bill were leading to a “layer of legal complexity” despite it being supported by internet safety NGOs.
Robin Wilton, a rep from The Internet Society, told the BBC: "Stronger regulations of these 'recommender algorithms' may be necessary to avoid putting inappropriate content in front of children and other users.”
