Baroness Beeban Kidron, the crossbench peer and former award-winning film director, has accused Sir Keir Starmer of “appeasing” big tech companies and being “late to the party” on regulating social media and artificial intelligence.
Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of “appeasing” big tech companies and being “late to the party” on regulating social media and artificial intelligence.
Baroness Beeban Kidron, the crossbench peer and former award-winning film director, made the remarks in an interview with BBC’s Political Thinking with Nick Robinson.
She was responding to proposals from Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has launched a consultation on banning under-16s from social media and pledged to clamp down on what he described as the “addictive elements” of apps.
The government said it had already introduced “some of the strongest online safety protections in the world” and rejected claims it was soft on technology companies.
In the interview, Beeban quoted Winston Churchill as she criticised the government’s approach.
She said: “The appeaser thinks that they feed the crocodile in the hope they’ll be eaten last.”
And she added: “We’re giving away our kids to Silicon Valley to please Trump.”
Beeban also said successive governments had pushed back on measures that would have stopped AI chatbots being used to create sexualised images.
Keir wrote in a recent article he wanted to “crack down on the addictive elements of social media” that “keep our children hooked on their screens for hours”.
He added: “And if that means a fight with the big social media companies, then bring it on.”
A government spokesperson said: “We are clear: when it comes to children’s safety, nothing is off the table, and no company is too big to face the consequences.”
They added: “Just weeks ago, we called out abhorrent non-consensual intimate images being shared on Grok, which led to functionality being removed, and now ministers are legislating to make ‘nudification’ tools illegal and bringing additional chatbots within scope of the Online Safety Act.”
Beeban criticised Keir for citing his experience as a father of two teenage children.
She said: “I don’t think that anybody is an expert because they have their own children.”
Beeban added: “His children are very particularly sheltered.”
She also said: “He is the prime minister. He has two working parents with education and access to all the information in the world and nothing that untoward might happen to his individual children. That’s not the experience of children at large.”
The government last month launched a three-month consultation on banning social media for under-16s in the UK, following the introduction of a ban in Australia.
Beeban told Nick Robinson such a measure was “not a silver bullet”.
She said: “My own personal view is that we are in a digital world, we have an AI future, and we can’t uninvite the next generation.
“We have to let them participate in that. But I do think that access to children should be conditional, and it should be conditional on respecting their rights, on keeping them safe, on actually not addicting them and not extracting economic value out of their behaviour.”
Sir Keir Starmer accused of “appeasing” big tech companies over social media regulation and AI
