Rhaid i'w gwneud hynny, mae'r ffordd ym mwyaf ym mwyfyrdd i ddim yn Llywodraeth Cymru ar gyfer Maen nhw Mark Macdonald, ac yn gweithio gael gyntaf o'r oedd cyd-dweithiau. Rwyf wedi gwneud Mark Macdonald i ddim yn gweithio ar gyfer maen nhw, rwyf i ddim yn 14 munud, oedd, minister. On behalf of the Scottish Government, I'm pleased to open this debate on child internet safety and to move the motion in my name. On 21 April this year, I launched the national action plan on internet safety for children and young people, which sets out 23 actions for the Scottish Government and partners to improve internet safety for children and young people. In developing this action plan, we've worked across government with third sector organisations, Education Scotland, Police Scotland and, importantly, with children and young people themselves. The action plan has two overarching aims. Firstly, that children and young people are able to enjoy the internet, show resilience and take advantage of the many opportunities that it has to offer. Therefore, a key priority includes occupying children and young people themselves to stay safe online. Secondly, that children and young people are protected, safe and supported in the digital world. Therefore, priorities include ensuring that parents and carers feel empowered to support their child's online activity, supporting children and young people who have suffered abuse online and deterring potential perpetrators from committing online abuse in the first place. It also emphasises the role that wider society, including the online industry, must play in enhancing internet safety for children and young people. I would like to highlight some of the actions from the plan in the chamber this afternoon. Before I do, however, it's important to highlight that the internet and mobile technologies have positively transformed the lives of children and young people, bringing vast opportunities for learning, empowerment, communication and support. We must ensure that we equip our children and young people to benefit from those opportunities and to do so safely. The amount of time that children and young people spend online has more than doubled since 2005, and they spend more time online than they do watching TV, using apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp to name only a few. The ways in which young people are online continues to develop, with new apps and developments in gaming allowing greater interaction online than ever before. I recognise that, for many children and young people, there is less and less distinction between the online and offline worlds. Many young people no longer understand the concept of going online in the way many of us in the chamber do. Their lives and identities are inextricably linked to their ability to interact and exist across the internet. However, increasing reliance on online technologies makes us all, and especially children and young people, potentially vulnerable to those who seek to exploit those technological advancements for malicious, fraudulent or criminal purposes. Being aware of the risks associated with the changing behaviour is so important to ensure that our children and young people can feel confident when going online and that we feel empowered to support them effectively. Unfortunately, we are all aware that the internet is increasingly being used as a cover and a vehicle for those who wish to harm and abuse children. To understand the scale of the issue, over a six-week period in summer 2016, 523 children were identified as victims or potential victims of online child sexual abuse or other related abuse during Police Scotland's Operation Latice, the first national operation of focused activity to tackle the many forms of online child sexual abuse. Extrapolation of those figures means that more than 4,500 children a year are being harmed or potentially harmed online with potentially many more.  As part of the action plan, we will work to ensure that professionals and communities have the appropriate skills and knowledge to provide support to children and young people, including those who have suffered abuse online. We will work with the Marie Collins Foundation, a UK charity to pilot the CLIC path to protection training module in Scotland, which is targeted at all professionals charged with safeguarding children who have been sexually abused and exploited online. Although the Government has already committed to progressing child protection training for professionals working with children and young people, including teachers, I take on board the need to ensure that that includes equipping teachers with skills and knowledge on online safety to teach digitally, as they will increasingly do so in the future, with confidence. I am happy to accept the amendment in Tavish ScotStain in that spirit. We should not single out any one group of professionals or one part of our population. We almost see the protection of children as our collective responsibility, and we almost work together to ensure that children and young people are protected online. Importantly, the industry and social media providers in particular must also see the protection of children as a core responsibility. The NSPCC and O2 recently found that four out of five children feel that social media companies are not doing enough to protect them from pornography, self-harm, bullying and hatred on their sites. Children and young people surveyed overwhelmingly said that social media providers need to do more to protect them from inappropriate or harmful content. That makes it clear that children and young people do not feel that they are protected from inappropriate and upsetting content online and that social media companies need to do more to protect them. I recognise the efforts of the online industry, including internet service providers and social media providers, to keep children safe online. Many have made efforts to provide support for parents, run campaigns to address key issues and developed responses to the changing challenges that are faced by those who use their platforms. I also acknowledge and welcome the engagement by industry with those in the third sector and with government. However, I strongly agree with children and young people that the online industry needs to do more. As part of the action plan, we have committed to working with digital media providers and industry to ensure that parents, carers and families, as well as children and young people, have access to appropriate information and support. I can allow extra time for interventions, Minister Stewart Stevenson. Can the minister give us further information on how we might support parents in particular? I do note among the actions that parents and carers are highlighted, but they will be one of the most difficult groups to educate and to reach. We will all recognise that children are probably, in many senses, more expert than the adults in the environment in which we are talking about. Mark McDonald? I thank Mr Stevenson for his intervention. He has somewhat preempted what I am about to come on and speak about a little bit later, so I can respond to him directly just now. I absolutely agree and recognise the situations that he describes. I myself as a parent find very difficult sometimes to relate to the online activity that my own daughter undertakes through her tablet device. I would not class myself as being all that old, although others may disagree. At the same time, I recognise that the internet and the way in which it is being used has moved on substantially over a very short space of time. We have to ensure that all of society is able to cope with that pace of change and ensure that we protect children as part of that. Our on-going engagement will include UK-wide discussions with social media companies, technology firms, young people, charities and mental health experts, focusing on industry responsibilities to society, how technology can improve safety and helping parents to face up to and discuss dangers and how to help young people to help themselves. As we developed the action plan, we spoke to children and young people and they told us that one of their main concerns online is bullying. Bullying of any kind is totally unacceptable and we should intervene early, deal with it quickly, whenever and wherever it happens. Importantly, it is clear that online bullying should not be treated any differently to offline bullying. This is what young people have told us themselves. Online bullying or cyber bullying, as it is often referred to, is the same behaviour as offline and it certainly does not feel any different to being bullied online or offline for those who experience it. Scottish Government continues to fully fund respect me, the national anti-bullying service, which provides direct support to local authorities, schools, youth groups and all those working with children and young people. We expect that all schools develop and implement an anti-bullying policy that should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis. When those policies should reflect the overarching local authority policy and our refreshed anti-bullying guidance, the national approach to anti-bullying for Scotland, children and young people will be published later this year. We want all children and young people to learn tolerance, respect, equality and good citizenship to address and prevent prejudice, as well as about healthy relationships that are all attributable to both online and offline environments. Education is one of the most important areas where we can work to promote internet safety for children and young people and we are committed to making sure that child internet safety is properly recognised in Scottish education. Children and young people will learn about the safe and responsible use of different technologies, including the internet and social media, as part of their broad general education under a curriculum for excellence. As part of the action plan, we have committed to working with the south-west grid for learning to promote and update the 360-degree safe tool that is used by schools in Scotland to help to ensure that schools continue to have robust up-to-date e-safety policies in place. Daniel Johnson, your microphone is not very good at technology. I welcome the comments about incorporating those elements into the broad general education. I wonder whether the minister could elaborate on some of the details that will be undertaken to train existing teachers who are already practicing. Mark McDonald makes a fair point. The Government is committed to ensuring that we review not just the initial teacher education, which the Government made a commitment to do, but to look at the continuous professional development that is made available to teachers and how we can make that more relevant. We have a number of programmes that are under way, and we are looking at how we can empower pupils and teachers in those regards. I am more than happy to write to Mr Johnson with more detail of the specific programmes that are in place but to keep that matter under review in relation to those. Although I said that education is one of the most important areas in which we can work to promote internet safety for children and young people, I believe, as I highlighted to Mr Stevenson, that empowering parents and carers to guide and support their child's online activity is most definitely another. Smartphone and tablet ownership among children and young people is on the increase. That means that they are accessing the internet everywhere they go, including their home. Ofcom recently reported that more than half of three-to-four-year-olds and 75 per cent of five-to-15-year-olds use a tablet in their home. That is in addition to smartphone ownership, having access to a smart TV, games console, desktop computer or laptop. Therefore, it is more important than ever for parents and carers to feel confident to engage in that activity. In addition to the anti-bullying service, respect me delivers parent training sessions on internet safety across Scotland, providing practical advice to parents and carers on online settings and security. Indeed, there are a wide range of resources and opportunities out there for parents and carers, provided by industry, third sector organisations and Police Scotland. However, not all parents and carers are aware of those resources or know which ones to use. I have committed to engaging with parents and carer organisations across Scotland to host a series of events aimed at empowering parents and carers to support their children's online activity. That includes enabling parents and carers to feel confident about having open conversations with their children, to encourage them to communicate responsibly with their children and to know where to go for help if they need it, promoting the vastory of existing resources that I have outlined are out there. We also need to equip children and young people themselves to stay safe online. We need to ensure that all children and young people are fully armed with the knowledge of their rights and skills that they need to use the internet safely. That includes an understanding of cyber risks and threats in a time when we are experiencing cyber crime at an unprecedented rate. Children and young people told us that the most important thing to improve online safety was for them to be supported to build their own personal resilience. Therefore, we will work with our partners to ensure that children and young people are supported to build their own resilience online. Young people also told us that talking about staying safe online through peer networks is one of the most effective ways to reach them. We continue to support Police Scotland's choices for our life be smart peer mentoring programme and the Fundamenters and Violence Prevention programme, both of which encourage young people to think carefully about the way they behave online and ensure that they remain safe and supported. As we work to improve internet safety for children and young people, listening to their voices is vital. The Scottish Government is proud to support the Five Rights campaign and have awarded £100,000 of funding to Young Scot to help to place young people at the heart of the Five Rights Coalition in Scotland and support them to develop insights and make recommendations about rights in the digital world. On the Five Rights Coalition, one of the five rights is the right to remove. I wondered what analysis of the Scottish Government has done around what specific legislative powers this Parliament has or perhaps the UK Government has around enforcement of that. That is one of the key points. When content is out there in the public domain and is shared and multiplied in numerous times, it is very difficult to trace that and to get to the people that own that content. How do young people know where to go to get that content off once it is in the public domain? That is a really big area to look at. I thank Jamie Greene for the intervention, and he is quite right in highlighting it. He will be aware that much of the legislation that underpins the issue that he highlights remains reserved to Westminster, but we remain in constant dialogue with our colleagues in the UK Government in relation to how we can best ensure that inappropriate content is removed from the internet as soon as possible. I had a very constructive discussion with the Internet Watch Foundation, who is actively working to remove inappropriate content. I believe that they sent a briefing to members ahead of the debate today. I encourage members to enter into discussion with the Internet Watch Foundation and help to highlight their work and how people can contact them within their local communities. The Five Rights Coalition has identified a youth commission consisting of 19 people from across Scotland to develop informed insights, ideas, recommendations and solutions in relation to how Scotland can become a nation that realises and respects children and young people's digital rights. I look forward to their final report in the coming weeks, and we will carefully consider its findings in future policy development. As the Minister for Child Care and Early Years, but also as a father of two, I want all children and young people in Scotland to be protected, safe and supported in the online world and for them to be able to enjoy the internet, show resilience and take advantage of the opportunities that it has to offer. That is not just the responsibility of industry, social media providers, parents, teachers or other professionals, but the responsibility of all of us as a society. It is everyone's job to do all that we can to keep our children and young people safe, whether that be in our local communities or in the virtual world. Although there is no doubt that the digital world they inhabit now and in the future contains risks and challenges for their wellbeing, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is a fundamental part of the lives of children and young people today. It is a fantastic source of education and entertainment. It is the first place that they often go to talk to their friends, and I encourage young people to embrace the internet's huge potential. Minister, I cannot remember if you moved the motion, but would you do so to make sure? I did at the beginning, but I formally move it now just to be safe. Okay, the motion has twice moved. I also forgot at the beginning of the debate to ask those who wish to contribute to press the request-to-speak button, so can I ask that you do that now? I call Annie Wells to speak to her and move amendment 5515.2. I would like to start by moving the amendment in my name and just say that the Scottish Conservatives will be supporting the Government and the amendment in the name of Tavish Scott today. I welcome this debate today as an internet watch foundation champion, and I acknowledge the excellent work that they carry out. Undoubtedly, the IWF is one of the most successful hotlines in the world. It has reduced the amount of child sexual abuse content hosted in the UK from 18 per cent in 1996 to less than 1 per cent since 2003. I would thoroughly recommend that every member in the chamber signs up to be one. As Mark McDonald said, they carry out such amazing work and I would strongly urge people to do that. The internet is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. I am sure that we will all agree that we will be lost without our emails, social media and online shopping. You can access information in a matter of milliseconds in volumes that are beyond our minds capacity to quantify. It is a fantastic tool for educating children and young people. Children and young people can be virtually transported to the four corners of the world, deserts, poor ice caps and mountains high, just with the use of Google Maps. They can watch inspirational speeches from the likes of the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill on YouTube and other monumental events in history. Children and young people can learn to cook, learn a new language, video call a friend on the other side of the world. The internet provides endless opportunities to broaden children's minds and let their boundless imagination flourish. However, while the internet provides the vast sea of opportunities for children and young people, it does, as we know, have a sinister side, which has brought us here to debate. From the start, we need robust and concrete guidance for teachers, parents and guardians to ensure that children and young people are not harmed by the internet and those who abuse it. I welcome the national action plan on internet safety. It is a step forward in developing an effective way of supporting children and young people whilst tackling the problem of abuse on the internet head-on. I hope that the plan helps children and young people to be affected by bullying. As the minister stated, that is at the core of that. We must tackle the ever-increasing problem of cyberbullying, which has emerged over the past few years. According to NSPCC, one in three children have experienced cyberbullying. That is a serious problem that blights children's lives and must be nipped in the bud. In years gone by, bullying mostly stopped at the school gate. Children went home and could escape the problem. Sadly, now in the digital age, the threat reaches beyond this and into our homes. Children and young people can be bombarded with harmful texts and offensive messages on social media 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Particularly using apps such as Snapchat, Explicit and Inappropriate Media have been sent to children and young people.  Children and young people who are abused online are often silenced by their abusers and are scared to turn to their parents for help. The anxiety and stress that builds on children and young people is often something that they cannot describe or explain. It can leave children and young people in the awful position where they bottle it up, which results in mental health issues later down the line. Given that, I welcome the plans list of actions in order to tackle online grooming and children and young people need to be informed of how to be aware if someone is not who they say they are. If we are to ensure that our children and young people are safe online, it must be done in a collaborative way, with parents and teachers working together. We must properly implement the national action plan on internet safety, but we must go further than that. It is often easy, particularly for those of us of a slightly older generation to the minister, to be passive and not to take an interest in how our children use the internet and social media. It is imperative that we strike the balance between monitoring our children's activities but at the same time allowing them the freedom to explore the internet with the necessary knowledge to spot dangers and know how to avoid them. A robust set of guidance and advice would work well to ensure that we can educate parents too on the dangers that can arise from the misuse of the internet. Moreover, the guidance should encourage parents to learn which social media is appropriate for their child, with one in five, eight to eleven-year-olds having had some form of social media. It is more important than ever to make sure that parents are aware of what potential problems could arise from young children using social media platforms. Children and young people are often not aware of the pitfalls having an online presence, so their parents have a duty to inform them and keep track of any posts. On a constructive note, although the action plan is a positive step forward, I believe that it should go further. In order to support parents, I believe that the Scottish Government should provide a parent-friendly website in order to assist parents in the ever-changing world of social media. It could give advice on topics from social media security to spotting signs of online abuse. Teachers, as the plan mentions, must be better informed to educate children and young people on internet safety too. A recent, as yesterday in the Education and Skills Committee, it was highlighted by trainee teachers that there was very little on nothing on internet safety on the PGDE course. I welcome the minister's commitment today to provide proper training. Moreover, another significant problem that the plan could go further on is revenge pornography.  Sexting and issues associated with sending explicit images has to be addressed. During 2015-16, there were 1,392 counselling sessions on sexting, which is a 15 per cent increase on the previous year. That is very worrying, and we simply cannot allow that to increase any further. Often, younger children are forced to send images to an abuser and struggle to turn to a parent or teacher when asking for help for fear of being given into trouble. Advice for children and parents must be available, a part of the plan, to help children and young people if they are victims of revenge pornography and sexting. In conclusion, I welcome the plan that was put forward by the minister today, and, although it should be commended as a very positive step forward, it is a delivery in implementation, which is important. In my party's amendment, we mentioned that the Parliament must be updated regularly on the progress of the implementation of the national action plan. It is crucial to ensure that real progress can be measured and identify areas where improvement needs to be speeded up. It is vital that we can report back to the constituents on the plan, as many parents want to see real action taken on that. Furthermore, we welcome a delivery timescale in order to determine whether the action plan is being delivered on time and to give better clarity to the public. The plan does not mention cost implementation, and we would like to see that published in the near future. Therefore, when all considered, we have a duty to ensure that the plan is well adopted by all stakeholders to tackle and stop the problems that can arise in order that our children and young people are safe online. I now call Tavish Scott to speak to and move amendment 5515.1. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I broadly agree with the opening remarks of both Mark McDonald and Annie Wells on the broad spread of internet safety for children and young people. I wanted today to concentrate my brief remarks on young people, how they grow up and how they learn, as much as the legal aspects, the issues of safety and the issues of prosecution that both the minister and Annie Wells mentioned in their opening remarks. Without question, social media, the online presence that everyone now has is a double-edged sword. I do not know how many parents my colleagues across the chamber share time with, but it is on one hand the greatest thing that we have ever had, and on the other hand the greatest pain in our lives in terms of our children, in terms of the pressures and in terms of the resilience that we expect of our young people and seek to encourage young people to have. I started looking into this last night and found a Times Educational Scotland investigation into the issue. It began with this, which I thought was important to bear in mind in terms of context. In 370 BC, the Greek philosopher Socrates warned that this new ffangled business of writing would lead to forgetfulness in students if they no longer had to remember everything. The advent of the printing press in the 15th century and television in the 20th century sparked the same moral panic. Technology was a dangerous force set to rob our young of the senses, turn brains to mush and leave society in ruins. None of that happened, the opposite happened, and it will not happen with the internet either. However, Mark Woodall of Nallywells is quite right that the safeguards that we need to put in place are more so with the internet than they have arguably been with learning to write, the printing press or, indeed, the television screen. What also strikes me from looking at what has been done about young people learning and young people growing up on the internet is that there is not much research and that is an area that the Government may wish to consider for the future. However, one social scientist did observe again to the Times Educational Scotland that one of the problem areas in terms of linguistic skills that is linked to the growth of the use of the internet is that the basic skills that we would have expected and do expect of our young people in the ability to listen to someone, to concentrate on what they are saying, to make eye contact and, indeed, to have human interaction. It is about the social clues that you get from people when they are talking to you, non-verbal clues, body language, negotiation skills and turn taking.  I thought that there was much merit in those arguments. The evidence argument seems important to me to consider for the future in terms of how we develop some of the proposals that are in the action plan that was talked about earlier. We could go as far as the new president of France, who said in his election campaign that he would ban mobile phones for all children under the age of 15 in school. He could leave them at home and they could not take them to school. We could do that, but as we lowered the voting age to 16, I suspect that there would be an extremely unpopular policy that no Government of any political position would bring in. However, Macron is making a serious point. He makes a serious point and teachers reflect that to all of us about the use of mobile phones in schools, what it means, how it invades life, how it invades multiple-point classes and some of the very dangers that Annie Wells rightly highlighted. How do parents care as teachers and, above all, young people cope with the vast influx of information that is at their beck and call? Training and guidance has been mentioned vital. That is why I was slightly taken aback by the evidence that young teachers gave to the education committee yesterday when they said that in their courses, and no one dissented from this, there is no training on internet safety, on online safety, as we train the next cohort of men and women who will be the teachers of our future. I am grateful to the point that the minister made in his speech earlier on, but what I do look to is a change in the action plan or at least a consideration in the action plan to one of the action points that should specifically and quite clearly draw out the need for some kind of module in training. All the controversy yesterday was about the teacher training only having literacy as one component weak during the course of that training. That could be equally said to be important in terms of training. The minister's action plan says on page 14 that children and young people will learn about the safe and responsible use of different technologies, including the internet and social media, as part of their broad general education under curriculum for excellence. He is right about that. The action plan is, of course, right about that. However, what it does not say is from whom. The point that I want the Government to address in the future is to make sure that teachers are properly supported—and that means, of course, existing teachers—but as importantly, to build in a degree of knowledge and understanding at an earlier age—in other words, in teacher training—and that that should take place for the start of the new teaching academic year. Similarly, I would hope that when the action plan describes the importance of resilience, some considerable attention is given to exactly how that will be taken forward. That leads me to the second year that I want to suggest to the minister, where I believe that some change is necessary. That is in the use of youth workers to assist in secondary schools, both in broad general education and in the senior phase of secondary schools, for youth workers to assist, where at the moment pupil support structures across most of our secondary schools—if not all—and guidance staff tend to always be promoted teachers. I believe that there is a strong argument now, given not just the need for this area of internet safety to be addressed at that phase and at that time during school, but also the challenges around mental health, the other challenges around suicide prevention and other social challenges that we now just lay on school all the time. I hope that the Government would consider carefully, particularly in the context of the clusters that I think are the right approach for the delivery of the future of education, how youth workers can be more involved at that phase, both in terms of internet safety but in some of those other areas as well. That youth workers point best made to me by Jim Sweeney and Youthlink, who made three points to me for this debate today. They said that there is a greater need for further resources for the development and delivery of up-to-date training for youth workers in supporting young people's safety and wellbeing online. I am sure that that is a point that the Minister would readily accept if I take the usual challenge around resources. Secondly, Youthlink Scotland rightly argued that there is a range of training out there and guidance around child protection and policies around social media. However, there is not a consistent picture across the sector. All youth work organisations have child protection policies in place. That is absolutely the case in Shetland, with varying degrees of incorporation of social media. Is there an argument? Indeed, there is an argument about consistency. Youthlink Scotland co-hosts with young Scotland's digital youth network of practitioners, and they are looking at how they can future-proof digital social media policies in the coming months. That, if I may say so, takes me right back to the start. To argue, as I hope I have for better teacher training, means also recognising that point that this world never slows down, never stops, it keeps evolving, it keeps developing. To do that means that no part of teacher training and a course design can ever lay in aspic. It must steadily evolve, and that in itself is, of course, a challenge. However, I hope that, in the design of that, our teaching institutions can work with Government, Youthlink Scotland and other agencies, and rightly, as the Minister made the point, with young people themselves in designing the broad thrust of a proposal that can make the difference for the young people and the safety that we all depend on. Could you move your amendment, please, Mr Scott? I will move my amendment. Thank you very much, and I call Ian Gray around seven minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. This is an unusual debate in a lot of ways. It is an incredibly difficult topic, but not because we differ on the importance or the analysis or even what the solutions might be. No one among us, I think, will disagree that our children are at risk, all children are at risk, rich or poor, urban, rural, boys, girls. None of us will argue anything except that we must act to protect them. The problem is that we are all struggling to understand those risks and struggling even more to develop our responses, where we normally divide, driven apart by our competing certainties. In that, we unite, drawn together, really, by our shared bewilderment. Yet, this is an issue that goes to the heart of the human condition, the challenge of how to be a good parent and ensure the safety of the next generation. It goes too to one of the core dilemmas of modern life, the balance between privacy and security, connectivity and interaction. Parenting has never been easy, and there has always been that contradiction between keeping our children from risk and allowing them to engage and grow in the world. That is as true of cyberspace as it is of physical space. We are, after all, just beginning to understand that perhaps we have become overprotective of children in the real world, curtailing their freedom to play and learn outside the home. When it seems quite suddenly to many of us, the greatest risks appear to be in that very home, their bedroom, their school or even in the pocket where their smartphone lies. As Bernardo has pointed out in his briefing for today, and indeed as the Government motion acknowledges, the rapid development of digital technology is an incredible opportunity for our children not just a danger. It can provide access to knowledge and information for them in a way that we could not have imagined when we were young. However, the risks are real and not exaggerated. Those are risks that we struggle to understand. Often conducted in a language of acronym, abbreviation and slang, which is opaque to us. There are risks that seem to multiply every day, just as we come to terms with understanding the potential of the digital world for predators who groom children for their own ends or who multiply the abuse of their victims exponentially online. Then we are confronted with the reality of sexting and cyberbullying, for the risk lies in our own children and grandchildren's actions and the malice of their peers, not strangers. How do we proceed? I think that we have to start by admitting that we find these risks frightening and difficult to understand, but we have to confront them and find a way to gain that understanding. Back in 2011, the OECD report, The Protection of Children Online, provided some first-class analysis of what they call the topology of risks. It shows us that those risks are multifaceted, but they can be understood as a first step to addressing them. The diversity of those risks takes us to the next principle to which we must aspire. Absolutely everyone has a role to play here—parents, Government, teachers, police, social work—simply everyone and not least children themselves. The Scottish Government's action plan recognises that, with a series of resources and events aimed at increasing parent awareness, with our participation in the work of Parents' Own International and the Internet Watch Foundation. However, I wonder how many parents are aware of those initiatives and are actually engaging with them. Mark McDonald. I accept that point, and I think that I accepted it in my speech. That is why what I have committed to doing is to working with parent and carer organisations, which I think are often those who are best placed to reach out to some of those parents who perhaps wouldn't access some of the opportunities that already exist out there and perhaps are not as well publicised as they could be. That is why I have made that commitment to engage with those organisations to try and attract more parents to take an involvement. I agree. I appreciate our response from the minister very much, because it is crucial here—and I really do not mean this as any kind of criticism—but it is crucial that we find a way to go beyond ticking boxes. There is a danger for all of us that we allow ourselves to be satisfied with that, so that is heartening to hear. The plan 2 has the crucial commitment to the training of professionals in recognising and responding to inappropriate behaviours, bullying or predation online. However, as Mr Scott made clear, the education committee only yesterday heard from trainee teachers who do not believe their basic preparation for their profession covers this at all. My colleague Daniel Johnson will say some more about that evidence later, but it does make the amendment in Tavish Scott's name both sensible and desirable, and I certainly hope that the Scottish Government will take that on board tonight as well, and I think that it will. For all of us, though, one of the hardest realities to come to terms with is the degree to which it is children themselves who can put themselves at risk or, indeed, become the perpetrators of abuse. As Barnardo tells us, children and young people are increasingly turning online for information about sex and relationships. The truth is that we have to be prepared to create an open and realistic attitude to sex if we are ever going to expect them to be open about problems that that may lead them into. We really have to find ways, if necessary, legislative to ensure that every child receives high-quality, age-appropriate sex and relationship education, because every day we fail to do so sees the risk to children exacerbated by their own uncertainty in finding their way in this aspect of life. Finally, the minister is right that we have to demand much more in the way of responsibility from the companies that provide, create and, of course, profit from the digital technology, which is the platform for those risks. How we do that is a whole other vast and difficult topic, I think. No one can deny, as the minister indicated, that the companies have engaged in the likes of Internet Matters, the Internet Watch Foundation and other partnerships, but that seems to me to scratch the surface of their fundamental responsibility. They do have a fundamental responsibility for those corporations, which are unavoidably the enablers of the risks that we are discussing. I said that this is a difficult and often bewildering topic, but that does not mean that we should talk about it less but that we should rather talk about it more. The Parliament can allow ourselves to be a box-ticking exercise, and the Conservative amendment is absolutely right to demand that we return to it regularly. After all, given the rapidly accelerating development of digital media and the fleeting shortness of those wonderful but vulnerable years of childhood, time is not on our side. We now move to the open debate. Although speeches generally are six minutes, I say to members that we do have some time in hand, so interventions are available and perhaps welcome in a bit of debate. The past two decades have seen a tremendous growth in Internet use, and that is in no small part thanks to the combined proliferation of social media, ever-increasing broadband speeds and exponential improvements in handheld technology. I think that most of us in the chamber today might recall those days of dial-up modems 15 or 20 years ago, when getting even a low-speed internet connection could largely be a game of chance. But nowadays we rely on the internet for almost anything—shopping, travel, even booking a haircut. As internet use has risen, we have seen the arrival of a criminal element who take advantage wherever they can. Defined as cybercrime, the actions that individuals and groups take include the theft of intellectual property, attacks against essential services or critical infrastructure, identity theft and fraud, bullying and finally sexual exploitation. In the context of Scotland's young people, it is likely that those last two points will be most relevant and most emotionally damaging. The 2015 report by Barnardo's and the Mary Collins Foundation's Digital Dangers examined some of the ways that children can be sexually exploited or groomed online in a few cases without even realising exactly what is happening. The case of a 14-year-old girl who was groomed online by an older man and subsequently had sex with him may sound typical, but the facts within this case make for surprising reading. The perpetrator was no less than a medical professional who was working with children and young people, while the girl herself is described as a high achiever at school with supportive parents, a close extended family and a good network of friends.  On the second occasion, the rape was watched by the perpetrator's friends and sexually explicit photos were taken and subsequently passed around Mary's school. As a result, she disengaged from education entirely, has been diagnosed as clinically depressed, has a total lack of self-confidence and motivation and spends her days on social media, messaging unknown males and sending explicit images of herself on request. It seems that Mary is only comfortable in her online persona and cannot engage with the offline world. I am sure that everybody in the chamber today will feel tremendous empathy to us, Mary, and anyone in a similar situation. The teenage years are formative and whatever experiences we undergo during these years shape us for the rest of our lives. It is very difficult to transcend an experience that is overwhelmingly upsetting as that of Mary's. A major part of the issue in protecting young people online is building up a layer of trust with parents. Teenagers want to feel independent, but at the same time, parents want to respect their freedom. Knowing where to draw the line has its pitfalls. The digital dangers report contains several cases where parents have intervened, some in the nick of time to stop abuse, others where the abuse has already started. The report gives some of the reasons why young people did not tell anybody about the abuse that they suffered before it was discovered. Those include the highly sexualised nature of the communications, both written and pictorial, feelings of complicity, lying about their age, being in love and having emotional dependency on their online so-called partner, fear of peer group and family responses to their actions. In fact, in some cases, the report refers to the young person who remains supportive of their abuse even after discovery, which highlights how comprehensively and insidiously someone can be groomed, particularly when they believe that they are in love and are afraid of the response of family and friends. From the evidence given in the digital dangers report, it is clear that keeping children safe online is a highly complex issue with a range of factors to be taken into account. Much of that is reflected in the Scottish Government's recently published national action plan on internet safety for children and young people. The plan builds on the actions that were previously set out in the 2010 action plan on child internet safety and the 2011 and 12 Scottish action plan on child internet safety and responsible youths, which structured their commitments under three general aims. Giving everybody the skills, knowledge and understanding to help children and young people to stay safe online, inspiring safe and responsible use and behaviour, and creating a safer online environment. In the creation of the recent national plan, the views of a wide range of stakeholders were taken into account, including crucially, gaining the thoughts of young people through young scot, youth link Scotland and the five rights youth commissioners. This feedback has proven invaluable in seeing how Scotland's children and young people see the internet. One of the points made was that the internet provides many opportunities, but this is tempered by a feeling that the online and offline worlds are not distinct and that it can be difficult to log off or otherwise disengage from social media. One of the key issues mentioned in the consultation of young people and considered in the national plan is the requirement of social media providers to make it easier to report and block material. For all the background support and information that we can provide, there needs to be a clear and straightforward method for end users to report unsuitable material directly to providers and for the subsequent appropriate action to be taken. I am pleased to see that the national plan confirms that the Scottish Government has successfully made links with, like on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Google, to discuss internet safety for the young people who use the various platforms and how safety can be better promoted in this media. To date, the Scottish Government has already taken a range of steps to help to promote internet safety. For example, it provides £100,000 of funding to the Five Rights Coalition, which believes that children and young people must be empowered to access the digital world creatively, knowledgeably and fearlessly. We can support those rights by taking a number of measures outlined in the national plan. Some of the examples are working with parent zone international in the planning and delivery of an internet safety summit for professionals who work with parents. We will promote and update the 360-degree tool, a programme that enables schools and organisations to self-evaluate against a detailed set of e-safety criteria. We will work with the Murray Collins Foundation to pilot the click path to protection training module, which is targeted at professionals charged with safeguarding children who have been sexually abused and exploited online. Finally, we will work with the Crown Office and Procurate Fiscal Service to deliver a summit next month on sexual offending on young people. Those are just a few examples outlined in the Scottish Government's national action plan, and when all the evidence is examined, there can be no doubt that protecting young people on the internet is a complex issue, with many factors to be taken into account. The internet has become a near essential facet of modern life, particularly for those of a younger generation, and, as with many things that become significant at a pace that outstrips legislation, Governments can find themselves playing catch-up. However, while that is not an issue in which we can stand still, I do believe that the steps that are being taken are the right ones to help to ensure that Scotland's young people can browse the web and use social media safely and without fear of exploitation. I have Maurice Corry to be followed by Gillian Martin. First, I must say that ensuring that our children and young people are safe online is incredibly important. I can say this as a parent with three daughters and one son, who seem to live permanently on their internet devices, but I must say that they act very responsibly, what certainly seems that way, thank goodness. As more and more young people are spending their time online and as the internet continues to play an increasing role in our society, ensuring that young people are safe online is becoming a larger part of looking after the overall welfare of our young people. Access to the internet of the 21st century offers young people incredible opportunities that my generation were unfortunate to miss out on. Children today can benefit from access to unlimited education resources, the ability to communicate with friends and members of the family worldwide and across many global places, and the chance to organise social events among friends. We can see that, across the board, youngsters are taking full advantage of their access to the internet. One in 58, 11-year-olds and seven in 1,012, 15-year-olds now have a social media profile. On the whole, activity conducted on the internet by youngsters is carried out in a positive and safe manner. However, unfortunately, the online environment isn't always a welcoming one. This is highlighted by the fact that one in four children have experienced something that was upsetting on a social networking site and have come across racist or hate messaging online, where one in three have themselves been a victim of cyber-buddling. Those figures are just what the children admit to have seen online, as there are, without doubt, many children who will be unwilling to speak openly about their experience even to their parents. It is a big area and issue among our young people. For one, I am glad that we are debating it in the chamber today, as the NSPCC has noted an increase of 13 per cent in the number of counselling assessments where cyber-bullying was mentioned between 2014-15 and 2015-16. That is a huge rise and one that we have to take very seriously. I firmly believe that education is going to play a big part in helping young people to deal with issues that they are going to face online. That is why I am glad to see that the national action plan on internet safety for children and young people includes measures to help to boost education on that issue. Pre-empting the issues and helping young people to build their own resistance and resilience, as the plan suggests, is a good idea. I think that the promotion of the 360-degree safe tool in particular is an excellent way to help to ensure that our children are safer online. That tool allows schools and organisations online systems to be rated five to one on various aspects of internet safety. That will help to allow schools especially to home in on the areas that need to be improved upon to allow their pupils to continue to enjoy a safe access to the internet. Furthermore, if young people know how to identify the issues, they will understand how to address those issues. They will be able to keep themselves secure and safe online. That will allow them to continue to reap the benefits of access to the internet. I think that the work of parent zone is also worth mentioning at this point. It is an organisation that offers digital parenting training courses that aim to educate parents and others on how to make sure that children use the internet in a responsible and safe manner. Educating parents as well as children is hugely important so that they can set a positive example for their children to follow. I certainly would welcome that because I certainly was not a parent who was trained on that. I know as a parent myself that although my children are now slightly older than the targeted group, I would have appreciated the online teaching resources for adults. I know that it would have helped me to teach my children how to use the internet safely and understand it. I understand that there are many adults in the same boat as me who even today may not have grown up with regular access to the internet and need a bit of extra support. It is great that the parent zone is offering this service and so I am glad to see that the Scottish Government is going to hold a parent internet safety summit alongside parent zone international, which will hopefully be a stepping stone towards helping all parents to look after their children online. Deputy Presiding Officer, in conclusion, we welcome the Scottish Government's national action plan on internet safety for children and young people. We strongly encourage them to continue to work closely with charities, schools and parents. However, we note that the key to success in this area is not in publishing the plan but actually ensuring that it is action and implemented and works for every child in Scotland. Can I remind members that we still have some time in hand and that the alternative is that we all rely on Mr Stevenson? I will call Gillian Martin to be followed by Claire Baker. When you have teenagers, you walk a fine line between giving them freedom and trust to find their own path and keeping a watchful eye to protect them, as many people have already mentioned. I am a mum to a 14-year-old who does not like me mentioning her in my speeches, so you have not seen me, have you? My speech today comes from a personal place that of a mum who is struggling to know how safe my child is online and what I can do to protect her. I want to commend the Government on taking action with the measures that have been outlined by the minister today. Last month, in my constituency, a very brave young girl went public about her experiences online. She went to the press with the assistance of her mother because she wanted what happened to her to act as a warning to other young people. She was coerced by an older boy to take naked photographs of herself and send them to him via Snapchat. Those images were circulated widely by the boy and his friends. On realising what happened, the girl went to her mother for help. When what the mother found on her daughter's phone were messages from quite a few older boys of an inappropriate nature and there was constant badgering for nude images, very quickly those boys had the police at their door and investigations were taking place. The girl is only 11 years old. What happened to this girl prompted me to have a discussion on this with my own daughter and her friends who were around at my house that night. They told me that nudes for nudes was something that a lot of people at their school did, not them of course, and it turns out that the exchange wasn't just about getting an adolescent thrill between teens flirting with one another online, that it could lead to bullying as those with images would threaten others who'd sent them. Girls would threaten other girls, they told me. They spoke of one girl in their school who had a collection of images of her so-called friends that could be deployed at will should she ever feel the need to humiliate them online. This very frank illuminating and to be honest terrifying conversation prompted me to get together with my constituencies, newly elected members of the Scottish Youth Parliament, to work together on a project. After exam time, we are planning a closed forum for young people from all the schools in our area to allow them to highlight the issues that they face online. As a result of this forum, we are going to put together an action plan on how we can raise awareness on online bullying, which is absolutely rife, and how we can help parents, teachers and young people to know how to tackle the problems, myself included. Children need to be made aware that what they might do impulsively for fun can have serious repercussions. Once that photo leaves their phone in the centre to someone else, they have no control over where it goes and how many people see it. Additionally, we have to make people who solicit those images aware that they could face criminal charges. People solicit those images. They are not just the bogie man and the monster, they are not the older man or the child sex predator. They are young adolescent males who really think that they are doing no harm. I am not giving them any excuses for this, but you could, as an apparent of a 19-year-old boy, be absolutely horrified if he was in a position where the police ripped my door for something that he thought was just a joke or innocent. Those schoolchildren who encouraged that 11-year-old girl to pose for those photographs must surely now be regretting their actions. Just yesterday, a man was convicted in Aberdeen Sheddiff Court for sending a new image of himself to a young girl via Snapchat. Young adults not only put themselves at risk when they send images, they could also face criminal charges for sending and receiving images from an underage child. I asked my two members of the Scottish Youth Parliament to contribute to my speech, so I am going to end with their words. That is from Josh McRae, MSYP, who goes to Inverruri academy. He said, Many young people are unaware of the consequences of posting an inappropriate photograph of themselves or appear and had quickly an embarrassing photograph or video that can spread online. Finally, that is from Evie Robertson, MSYP, from Old Meldrum academy, which I think nails the issue. Evie says, Nowadays, young people often feel pressurised to say or do things and often broadcast them on social media, often seemingly harmless at first. However, it can then escalate to very hurtful comments and this often has a very damaging effect on the victim and their mental health. There is also the looming pressure to send indecent images to other people via social media. There is often very little that can be done to prevent the spread of images once they are sent. However, if we can educate younger children before they reach their teenage years, then we may have a chance to reduce the incidence of images that have been sent in the first place. Finally, Presiding Officer, before I sit down, I am going to frighten the life out of everyone with one statistic, I am afraid. The FBI and the US have said that, by their estimation, at any given moment, there are 750,000 child predators online at any given moment. Images can end up on their screens. Evie is right that educating children before they reach their teenage years is vital to protect them, as with many things, education is the key. I have Claire Baker to be followed by Kate Forbes. Thank you Presiding Officer. Today, we are debating the national action plan and internet safety for children and young people. In the document, there are lots of good projects. There are local, Scottish, UK and international projects all working in this field. It is a very complex picture and, to be honest, I was not always convinced that it is co-ordinated. That is not to question the dedication of the people and organisations who are working on the issue or the positive contribution that they are making on children and young people, but there is a lack of a strategic framework or strategic intent. I recognise that, in the forward, the minister says that it is an important step, but I would appreciate a clearer and stronger statement of intent and analysis from the Government. I recognise that the minister says that a progress report that we published in 2019 might set out further actions that will reflect the rapid evolution of online technologies, and I need to ensure that we respond appropriately. I am concerned that that does not keep pace with some of the challenges that we are facing. It is a wide-ranging document, but there are a few aspects of it that I wish to focus on. For all the positive aspects that the internet brings to our lives, it is too often used as a destructive tool, and child abuse and exploitation can be facilitated and supported through the internet, through grooming, sharing of images and videos, through using it to contact other abusers and then create networks. The internet gives greater potential for all this activity, and while the action plan focuses on Scotland, we know that child exploitation often focuses on some of the poorest countries in the world, the countries that sit outside the reach of our legislation. Alongside the vile industry—and it is clear to see that that is what it is—but alongside the vile industry, I would argue that it is a more complex picture of our society, where it is normalised among young people and young adults, where it intersects between what is legal and what is criminal. We have a society where it is common for celebrities to record sex tapes, where it is common for sexuality and self-worth to be interpreted and judged visually, where intimate images are leaked but it is acceptable and it is expected that the images had been taken, where pornography is much more widely available and the regulation of the internet is pretty ineffective in restricting access to that from children and young people. The risks that the majority of children in Scotland face with the internet are bullying and being able to access inappropriate materials. For those who are more at risk, we must ensure that there are comprehensive services to support those children who are victims of child exploitation and abuse, and we must always be vigilant. Young people who are sexually exploited by adults in this country are largely teenage girls, although Gillian Martin's example was of an 11-year-old girl, so I think that we need to be aware of that. I would say that they are largely teenage girls and pupubescent girls. Sometimes they are exploited by criminal gangs or organised groups. They need the intelligence and the prioritisation of our police force, the intervention of the criminal justice system, the authorities to recognise their vulnerability and none of us to turn a blind eye to that kind of behaviour. However, if we look at young people, 13 to 18 on average, their experience is quite different. Their social platforms are a significant part of their lives. The consultation with young people within the document tells us that they felt that the online and offline worlds are not distinct, that young people don't differentiate between the two. 78 per cent of 12 to 15-year-olds hold a mobile phone, with 65 per cent of them having a smartphone. That fundamentally changes human interaction and relationships to any experience that any of us has as teenagers must do. Maybe the action plan needs to distinguish between what protected online means for children and what it means for young people. For example, if you accept the importance and the primacy of the image, then sexting just becomes part of that culture. That is complex when you are dealing with young people and their relationships. We have legislated to address some of those issues. The Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm Act criminalises non-consensual sharing of intimate images, while the 2005 and the 2009 Sexual Offences Act both focus on preventing the exploitation of children and young people. As the action plan recognises, that is a complex set of circumstances. Describing examples of online exploitation as the sending and sharing of indecent images, including self-produced images, and once the child or the young person begins to participate in such activities, they leave themselves open to being blackmailed into further participation. That coerciveness might not always be obvious to the child and the young person. As the grooming is so powerful, they can come to believe it as acceptable behaviour. Within that example and the small set of circumstances, there is also the scenario where the image is self-produced, but it is lifted from its intended space and it is then promoted through child sexual exploitation websites. There is also a scenario where the image is being willingly sent to another young person who decides to share it with his friends. Gillian Martin described the reality for some young people, the severity of some bullying that takes place, the criminality of some behaviour that has been normalised by youth culture. I think that we need a more sophisticated understanding of young people, of the pressures that they are facing and the extent to which the internet has changed their relationships. I was aware of the research being carried out by Edinburgh University into self-produced sexual images by adolescents. That is an important piece of work in thinking about how we respond to that. There is also interest in research being done in Canada, where academics have been consistently monitoring young people's behaviour over a number of years to look at their change in attitudes towards relationships and sexuality. When I first came into the role of justice spokesperson for labour, I had a meeting with the Lord Advocate and the sister general and discussed some of those issues. I am pleased that the summit that we discussed on sexual offending and young people is being arranged for later this year. I think that that will be an important conference. We currently have a situation in which young people below and above the age of consent are getting themselves into serious criminal trouble because they are either not understanding the law or they are ignoring the law. Situations in which alcohol is involved, where filming is involved and where social media and the internet are being widely used, where actions that seem acceptable to the perpetrator and often to their peers are unlawful. I believe that the summit will be an opportunity to raise the profile of those challenges. How do we make sure that young people understand that the legal framework is relevant to their lives and to their experience? Are young people not necessarily accepting, but are they more tolerant of hyper sexualisation of young women and masculinities of young men? Is their understanding of relationships a cause for concern, or is it a sign of the times? We must be clear about the legal framework and be firm when the law is broken. An action plan for internet safety operates within our society, the way in which young people use it, manage it, live in it as a symptom of our society. We need a societal approach to change attitudes, to empower young people within their relationships and to limit exploitation within relationships in order to equip young people with the understanding that they now need in the modern world. Thank you, Presiding Officer. In one sense, the internet and I have grown up together. It all started with emails painstakingly typed out and then sent to the sound of the dial-ups muffled shriek. In my mid-teens, we would all go home from school and resume our school chat on MSN Messenger or the first online social media sites like Bebo. Since then, through my later teens and into my 20s, we have had a never-ending stream of enterprising means for communicating and sharing our lives more freely than we could have in the physical world—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. All that has grown hand-in-hand with mobile devices so that it is easier to access anywhere except in the not-spots of the Highlands. The internet is now thoroughly embedded in children's daily lives. It has transformed play and education. As the minister said, it is overtaken TV in terms of children's viewing. Children are going online at younger ages, still largely at home and then secondly at school. I still find it remarkable watching toddlers navigating an iPad for only the second time with greater speed and skill than their parents who have been using it for years. To a greater extent than the physical world, the virtual world brings out the best and the worst in people. There is greater potential for raising money for charities, raising awareness of global injustice and raising the educational attainment of people everywhere—literally everywhere. However, the ease of access, speed of development and the unregulated nature of the internet means that there is less restraint in its use. I want to touch on three very different risks and challenges. The accessibility of explicit content, the abuse of children—particularly in other countries—to meet demands in Scotland, and the normalising of perfect lives on social media. The internet facilitates and enables pure evil to flourish in the darkest of corners. At the heart of the most sinister, ominous evil online are real people, perpetrators and victims. Tavish Scott mentioned the important role of research in the use and regulation of the internet and research by independent comparison service useswitch.com a few years ago, in 2014, showed that 3 million UK families had discovered their children viewing violent and explicit material on the internet, with the youngest age quoted being two years old. Perhaps most worryingly, useswitch's research found that three quarters of parents could not name any parental control tools that could be applied to internet-enabled devices, and four in ten said that they had none installed. The Scottish Government's commitment in the national action plan to engage with parents and carers, to empower parents and carers to support their children's online activity and deliver an internet safety summit in Scotland is very important. However, if children can be victims as viewers, they are even more so as those who are trafficked to be sexually abused online.  Some of us went to a really eye-opening event hosted by Jenny Marra with international justice mission, and my colleague Gillian Martin has a motion which I would urge you all to sign condemning the cybersex trafficking. IJM rescue some of the trafficked victims, and 54 per cent of victims rescued in IJM cases are one to 12 years old. Victims can be exploited in any location, with a computer and the internet, or just a mobile phone. As international justice mission states, slavery and freedom are in the power of our phones, and the not-on-my-screen conversation that IJM has launched needs all of our voices. With the time left, I want to come back home and talk about something that is quite easily passed by when talking about the damaging effects of the internet. I think that it is very important that we are aware that it is not just the obviously unacceptable and explicit content that is of concern. It is also the way in which social media can distort normality. It allows us all to present the best of ourselves, the best filter for the best photograph, the best description of the best moments, the best new outfit for the best body image. There are great risks of cultivating personas and perfect lives on social media, which lead to anxieties around body image and self-esteem. That is for men and women, for boys and girls. That is when pro-self-harm, pro-anorexia sites and cyberbullying can thrive, because reality never matches the soft glow of Nashville or Sierra, which are just two of the many insta filters. Parents and teachers have a very challenging job to remind our young people again and again that their value is not found in the number of likes for our Instagram picture or the number of friends that we have on Facebook. Maybe that is a good reminder for politicians, too. Our value is found and our young people's value is found in their inherent dignity and worth with their unique characteristics and talents. That is where the national action plan is so right to highlight that only collaboration and a number of other speakers have touched on that as well, that it is only collaboration with parents and children at the heart between schools, families and government policy can meet those challenges and nobody can do it alone. I feel even older now than I did before Kate Forbes spoke. As a person who left school when one computer just had arrived and only the slight geeky mathematicians and people like that got to use them, I certainly have not grown up with the internet. It is way ahead of me. This is a deeply serious subject and I, like others, welcome this debate this afternoon. Like my colleague Annie Wells, I am an IWF champion. All of us receive briefings from the third sector from companies on a regular basis and I think perhaps the most harrowing one was the one that I received from them of the impact that child pornography has on so many vulnerable lives. Not just here, fortunately, it lesser here in Scotland but across our world.  It has revolutionised communication. It is now, as we have already heard, the preferred medium that most young people go to. My two-five-year-old girl can now switch on my iPhone and find some kind of YouTube programme quicker when I can stop them. At the moment, we are left with fireman Sam or telly tubbies or whatever, but as they grow older, that concerns me as a parent. Cyberbullying goes on. All forms of brilliant as we debated just a couple of weeks ago in this chamber is wrong, but cyberbullying goes with you into your bedroom, into your house, a Saturday, Sunday. Sadly, my niece, not living here in Scotland but in Norway a few years ago, was very badly bullied on Facebook. As a young teenage girl, she had nowhere to hide. She could not leave it behind at school. I think that there is a responsibility on educationless, on parents, on uncles and on aunts to be aware of what is going on and simply not to say, well, it always has happened. Today, I think that it has become a lot worse. Breaking down basic privacy of your bedroom can never help anyone. Along with my party, I welcome the launch of the national action plan on internet safety for children and young people. We agree that we want to see the protection that this hopefully will give. I am pleased that the minister and the Government have not only sought the views of experts, parents and teachers, but have gone deliberately out of their way to find out what young people think. After all, they are the ones that know far more about technology than perhaps, excluding Kate Forbes, anyone else, even in the chamber. We need to develop a plan that is appropriate, that works and that has the support of the majority of our country. The Think You Now website, which is targeted to children and different aid bams, again empowers young people and gives them information, but not only young people but perhaps as important information to adults as well. Again, I think that we all welcome the number of action points identified in the action plan. I welcome the Scottish Government's commitment to work with digital media providers and industry to ensure that parents, carers and families, as well as children and young people, have access to appropriate information and support. I think that there is still more that the digital industry can do to leave the way. I think that they are moving in the right direction, but perhaps we need carers and sticks as we go on this journey together. Awareness is perhaps the key thing. This is not something that just a few but the majority need to know about. I welcome the amendment in my colleague's name. I would come back and ask the minister to reflect on whether we need to put in shorter timescales to review it. Again, I accept that 2019 in some ways does not feel too long awaits, after all, only two years away, but two years in regard to what is happening with IT is probably too far. We do not want to get bungled down, as Ian Gray has said, by ticking boxes and filling out forms. However, I think that there needs to be some kind of review sooner than that just to see what progress we are making. As I have said, I welcome this. I think that it is the right step forward. I am very happy that I will be able to support not only the Government motion but the two amendments as well this evening. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Thank you, Mr Ralfor. I call Stewart Stevenson to be followed by Monica Lennon. Mr Stevenson, please. As you know—I do not know whether I should say this to Mr Stevenson—we can be generous with time. I am sure that you will have an anecdote somewhere. That is very generous. I will try not to abuse your trust. That is too, Deputy Presiding Officer. Officers have made that offer to me, so I would be very impolite not to make use of it. When we go online, we are confronted with a series of risks. It is worth saying that I worked on my first online system in the 1960s. I sent my first email in 1980, and I first did my online banking using a public network in 1983. I have a long history, and others will similarly have a long history. That might even be before some of the previous speakers were born. I will, yes. I trust that this is about his long history. I am just wondering in the context of his recent remarks whether he could confirm in relation to Tavish Scots' remarks whether he was indeed alive when Socrates first caused consternation regarding writing. Mr Stevenson. My great-uncle Socrates has said many wise things, and we will continue to draw from the well of knowledge of the Greek and Roman philosophers. However, let's return to matters more local, and in particular the internet. Many of us will know nothing of the real risks, and if we were to explain all the risks out there, we might not understand what they are. New risks are being created deliberately or accidentally every single day. One of the things that I believe—and I will turn to that in more detail later—is that we should detect better those who are creating risks so that we can hunt them down with the force of law. For children who are focused on today's debate, there are very special risks being presented with material—let me describe it simply as being beyond their age—carries with it the potential psychological damage that could endure throughout their lives. Their brains are plastic. The brain's future operation is more affected by present and past experience and knowledge than an adult's brain is. Children have not yet acquired an adult set of critical faculties that enable the filtering out and discarding of inappropriate material. They comparatively lack the power to discriminate. To express a very complex piece of science is probably over simply. Until puberty, many of our memories seem to be literal. We remember pictures and sounds—this is idyllic memory. As we become adults, our memory moves to an interpretive memory where we remember the meaning of our experiences and preference to simply retaining a picture in our brain. That is much more convenient because it enables us to create an index to retrieve information. So, just as we protect youngsters from physical danger, we need to protect them from psychological danger. What, therefore, are the particular dangers? As in the physical world, we want our young to avoid unsavory characters who might exploit abuse or otherwise harm them as individuals. We want them to avoid engagement with potentially corrupting material. We want to protect their personal assets however modest they might be. As adults, we mostly have the wherewithal to a fair degree to monitor and guide a youngster's contact with the world and the people in it. We understand the physical world pretty well, but the focus of the plans that we discussed today is towards helping our children to access the internet in a safe way. That is both necessary and helpful that we should do so. However, the online story is highly complex and rapidly evolving. There are about 4 billion people online, and there are many more identities than that. There are multiple identities that are bound on the internet. If you choose to interact with me on Twitter—this will be true for most of us here—in my case, at ZS Stevens—I will repeat that in case you want to hear it again—you will see a little tick in a blue circle next to my name. That means that Twitter has verified that I am who I say I am. That is quite an important thing. Relying in the case of Twitter removes a source of ambiguity of identity that enables much, but not all, of the risk in the online world. All responsible media providers need to make available similar identity-proved facilities. There is already a certification system available for websites—the best websites that you access via Http protocol 1080. There is an escos at the end. There is a lock appears, saying that that website has a certification. We now need robust and unbypassable software. Perhaps it requires a law that is perhaps enforced at ISPs in an appropriate point in the future that can restrict communication only to verified online entities, in particular entities that purport to burial people. Some international examples. Estonia suffered the most extreme cyber attack from Russian-based hackers some 10 years ago. The history is more than I have time to explain. Today, its e-resident and other initiatives are transforming the small Baltic state into a world leader in creating a safe online world for citizens in their business lives. At 100 euros a pop, it remains too expensive for mass deployment for all. This is an Estonian e-resident card. It is a paper copy of one. I have not spent the 100 euros. However, in the post-Brexit world, a lot of UK citizens are looking at becoming Estonian e-residents because of the advantage that it gives. Jamie Greene did not directly refer to it, but essentially that system gives you the ability to electronically sign anything that you put on the internet. That protects the integrity of your communication and protects the receivers of it. The website WIRE describes Estonia as the most advanced digital society in the world. There are other small nations that are near neighbours, Macedonia, Serbia, Albania and Croatia, that are doing legislative work in this area and looking at electronic systems. They have what appears to be a disadvantage but, in this circumstances, an advantage of having comparatively undeveloped infrastructures. They are leapfrogging present technologies into different futures. Let's look at India for another approach. In 2009, the Indian Government lost a massive project called ADAR to provide a digital identity to everyone based on an individual's fingerprints and retina scans. As of 2016, the programme has issued 12 digit identification numbers to 1.1 billion people. It is believed to be the largest and most successful IT project in the world that has created the foundations for a digital economy. It is voluntary, but almost everyone from the totally illiterate to the billionaire banker wants to be part of it. Indeed, they are currently running a competition for youngsters to produce 30-second videos to support other youngsters to get engaged with the internet and the ADAR system in an appropriate way. By possessing unambiguous proof of identity and inappropriate technology, Indian systems can affect cashless transfer of value without banks, without central record and without worries. They can open bank accounts without the hassle that we have to, because they have an assured identity that they can use to do so. That is the kind of initiative that creates potential for a safe environment online generally for adults and for children alike when they are online. What can technology make possible? It is here today that it just is not implemented in this way. For every image, for every textbook, for every blog, for everything on the internet, we can today mark it uncorruptibly and verifiably so that we know who the individual who has produced it is. If we could do that, that creates for law enforcement the possibility to hunt down the wrongdoers if they can require that it is to be done. Can you? Yes, you can. You could require the internet service providers through which all internet traffic flows to always check that they only pass through to their subscribers things that have been digitally signed. Of course, there are some difficulties with that. We have anonymous hotlines. We need to have them as part of the check and balances of our system. Can that be dealt with? I will come back to that in a moment. Software, verified identity and law can complement the kind of plans within our Government's paper. There is no time to waste. We could be world leaders in this, although others have got out of the starting blocks fairly easy. I am very happy to support the Government's plan as it is. Let me just talk a little bit about how you deal with hotlines and whistleblowing. I will give you a little bit more time. I feel I am at a seminar and it is very interesting. I will not give other people extra time. No, I am nearly there. One of the ways that you can deal with proper use of anonymity is to license a restricted number of services that can receive material that is unsigned. They would have the responsibility of looking at that material and republishing it with their signature having verified that it is appropriate so to do. There are ways, even in the world where you require everyone to have an identity, that you can protect the rights of those who properly need to be anonymous. In my contribution, I have simply tried to say that there are some things that we could do in the long term. I certainly could speak for hours on the subject, but your generosity is much appreciated. Beware, there are many simplifications in what I have said. If you really want the seminar, I should be in the bar at five o'clock. That is what I call using up extra time. Monica Lennon, followed by Jamie Greene-Miss Lennon, followed that. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I fear that I will not be anywhere near as interesting as Stuart Stevenson, so no pressure there. I also welcome the Government's motion today, as well as amendments from Tavish Scott, who I do not know where he has gone, and Annie Wells. The publication of the national action plan on internet safety for children and young people will play a crucial role in making sure that our children and young people can be protected when they are online. Scottish Labour is committed to developing a comprehensive strategy to increase online safety in partnership with charities, internet service providers, parents and other stakeholders, so it is very much welcome to see this national action plan published by the Government. As we have heard today, the internet is now part of the daily fabric of life for the vast majority of people, and children born in today's world will never have known life without it. With that, of course, as we have already heard from many other contributions this afternoon, comes a range of new opportunities and risks that must be navigated. On the positive side, and there are many, the potential that smartphones and the internet opened up for our young people is boundless. They have so much accessible information at their fingertips, more so than any previous generation. The benefit that that brings in terms of the potential for increasing their knowledge and education is almost immeasurable. I see those benefits for my own daughter and her friends. I may go home tonight and set my 11-year-old a task to perhaps fact-check Stuart Stevenson's speech and perhaps he could come back with Mr Stevenson's family tree. That would be most interesting. That unfettered access to information and the rest of the virtual world needs to be balanced against the responsibility that all adults have to ensure that our children can be protected. As Bernardus Scotland has outlined in the air briefing today for today's debate, another member has mentioned including Ian Gray, that the concerns around children's safety online is often characterised by the fear that an adult stranger will use messaging apps or social media to give them a young person for sexually exploitative purposes. The media analogy that always seems to come to mind is that, as a parent, you would never let your young child go out on their own unsupervised in a place where they would be surrounded by adult strangers and be put in a potentially dangerous situation. However, with access to smartphones and the internet, even where there are parental controls on access, the outside world and its potential dangers is suddenly so much more accessible to young people in the very places that they should be most safe in the home and in school. I can think of many examples of children who I know in my constituency who have set up accounts, whether it is on Snapchat, Instagram or elsewhere, that their parents have no knowledge of and certainly have not given their consent to. So making sure that parents, professionals and young people themselves have the ability to recognise and respond to the potential issues around online behaviour is crucial, and that is why the actions contained in the latest plan are very much welcome. As previously stated, the amendment to the Government's motion in Tavish Scott's name is one that I also welcome. Teachers must be properly trained, supported and equipped to deal with issues around online behaviour of young people. As I have been listening to the contributions today, it has also made me return to the Scottish Labour's proposal for school-based counselling, a plan that Bernardo Scotland supports. I have heard several members talk about the impact on young people's mental health, and I know that all of us want to intervene early to make sure that young people get the support that they need and ideally within the school setting. Young people's lives are inextricably intertwined with other changing technology. Parents' teachers or any other adults involved in the care of children cannot properly help or support young people face the challenges in their lives. If we do not always have an understanding of the methods that they are using to communicate with each other, whether it be apps such as Snapchat or Instagram, the way in which young people communicate is key to many of the potential issues that can be damaging to them. The sharing of nasty or abusive messages or the creation and sharing of exploitative or embarrassing images over social networking sites and smartphones between young people can pose just as much of a risk to our children than that fear of stranger danger. The fact that young people have access to these ways of communicating at such a young age, when they are still developing and maturing, makes the case for age-appropriate relationship education all the more pressing. I would like to pay tribute to Gillian Martin. She is not in her seat, unfortunately. I hope that she is still listening. I thought that she gave an excellent and insightful speech. I commend the steps that she is taking in partnership with the members of the Scottish Youth Parliament in her area to tackle the issue. I have an 11-year-old daughter, the same age as the constituent that Gillian Martin referred to. Although none of us are naive to those things going on, when you hear it and you hear a very real example, it sends a shiver down your spine. It is horrible. All of us have a responsibility to make sure that young people understand the consequences of sharing sexually exploitative images of themselves and their peers. We have heard why there needs to be a greater understanding in the curriculum of young people's rights about consent and about what makes a healthy relationship. With young people more and more likely to be turning to the internet for information on sex and relationship matters, it is imperative that the education system is keeping pace with that. Around education is only possible if it is set in the context of understanding the pressure and expectations that the internet brings, as well as understanding how are young people perceived by the world through that prism. I know that the Scottish Government has committed to a review of personal and social education in the 10-year mental health strategy. It is crucial, in my view, that the review reflects the concerns that have been raised today in the debate and the cognisance of that in the action plan. It would certainly be a welcome move to have the curriculum updated to reflect the fast-paced changes in technology in recent years, so that our teachers have the support that they need to deal with those issues too. Perhaps that is something that the minister can elaborate on in summing up. The publication of the national action plan is a welcome step forward in the attempt to improve the safety of our young people when they are online. I look forward to seeing its progress over the coming months. Thank you very much, Ms Lennon. I call Jamie Greene to be followed by Ruth Maguire, and Ruth Maguire will be the last speaker in the open debate. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. First of all, I should refer members to my register of interests, which is a voluntary statement on my ownership of internet domains. The challenges in keeping young people safe online stem from the fact that technology and the pace of changing technology is so fast, especially over the last 10 years. When I was young, we had no internet, no mobile phones and, dare I say, we used to write letters to each other. For all the benefits that technology brings, it is fair to say that it brings many dangers. We spoke about that in great length today. Just this week in the Parliament, I welcomed a group of P7 students from Glen Garnock campus in North Ayrshire, a group of 11 and 12-year-olds to the education services in the Parliament, and every single one of them owned a smartphone. I asked the question whilst I was there, knowing that I had this debate coming out this week. When I told them that I was speaking in the debate about what the Government is doing to try and improve safety for children online, I said to them that they should know that not everyone on the internet is who they say they are. I have to say that I was quite surprised by the response. Lots of them were nodding in agreement, but some of them looked quite confused and bewildered by that comment. I think that therein lies the problem. I think that I support the action plan for that very reason. There are still many young people out there who have access to the internet and smartphones and tablets, possibly using apps that their parents do not know exist.  The word collaboration has been used many times today, and that is absolutely key. Therefore, I welcome the Government's commitment to work with the UK Government on the age verification provisions within the digital economy bill, which has recently gone through Westminster. I think that that is a very positive step. A collective responsibility falls on all Governments to ensure that the internet is a safe environment or as safe as it can be. I also welcome the Minister's commitment to engage on legislation or around legislation on the right to remove elements of that. My personal view is that much more can be done on this either formally or informally on this problem. The action plan talks a lot about working with various organisations and people. Of the 23 action points in it, 18 of them start with the line that the Scottish Government will work with. That is very laudable and I commend them for that, but what I would like to see is more detail. What will work with mean in a lot of those aspects? It is a good document, but it is not long enough. I am hoping that, perhaps in the closing statement, the minister might expand on some of the ways in which the Government will work with specific organisations. I think that the devil is very much in the detail here. I also think that we should consider additional legislation. If an action plan does not suffice or we as a Parliament in a few years' time think that we have not made improvements, what legislation could we look at? I am very open minded to that. The internet is home to many new innovations. I would like to draw our attention to one of them specifically, and that is dating apps on smartphones. They have become quite the norm, but they often fail on age verification. It is very easy to bypass safeguards. Some have no safeguards at all. When I talk about safeguards, the app simply asks for your date of birth. That is not a safeguard to me. Likewise, it is all too easy to hide behind the anonymity of an internet profile. Unfortunately, there have been a handful of tragic cases where things have gone horribly wrong. When I was living in London, the gay community was really rocked by the needless deaths of four young men who had met their tragic fate at the hands of someone they met on a dating app. That brought home to me and my friends how serious the issue is. However, we have to be realistic that young people are using the internet in the same way that adults are.  We should also have the conversation that many of those images are being created by teenagers themselves and shared amongst each other. We use the words evil and wrong in the context of this Parliament. However, in the context of an online world, perhaps the creators of the content themselves do not associate words like evil or wrong with what they are doing. I mention that for a very specific reason. We have to think about that in terms of how we approach education. Ian Gray mentioned this point, as did Gillian Martin. If we go into this with a sense of fear and shame on the subject matter, there is too much taboo when we talk about sex in general, not understanding why some of those images are being created by young people themselves. We should also mention briefly the fact that some people have been targeted by the sharing of some of those images. In some cases, I have heard some tragic cases of young people committing suicide as a result of the bullying and the threats being directed towards them. Many of them have got to a stage in which they do not know who to turn to. There is so much shame and stigma associated with telling someone that there is a problem. They do not want to tell someone that they took those photos in the first place, therefore finding it difficult to seek help. We talk about Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as social media, but the worlds of Snapchat, Tumblr and Vine and even online gaming communities are the real environments where many 21st-century teenagers live. Those are where many of the dangers lie. That being said, one in eight five-year-olds has a Facebook account. We all know that is completely in breach of the site's rules, but many parents allow it. We must educate parents as well, but is it prohibition or persuasion? It is the age-old conundrum. There is no silver bullet in legislating online content, but it is worth noting that the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee criticised internet giants for not doing enough, and the words that they used were completely irresponsible and indefensible. Some of them, to their credit, responded to that criticism by announcing investments in new staff to monitor online activity. One large social media site announced 3,000 more people. That is on top of the 4,500 that they already have. 7,500 people working for one company just monitoring activity online. That sounds great, but that same site has 1.9 billion users. That is also a site where recently someone broadcast live on their smartphone a murder. It sounds like something out of a horror movie, but it is happening. It is happening on the same sites that we post pictures of kittens in our lunch on. That is the reality of how technology has changed. I will conclude now by saying that the online world is very hard to police because it is ever changing, and with many more of our children being online, I think that the action plan is a really good start and I do welcome it. However, its implementation must be monitored closely. We cannot just pay lip service to the subject. We should be more frank about the discussion and we should do everything that we can as parliamentarians to support the Government on this. I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. Keeping children safe online is an important issue and something that should concern each and every one of us. We have all got a role to play. There is no doubt that the world of children and young people today is radically different from the world in which most of us in this chamber grew up. I share Iain Gray's reflection that perhaps we are overprotective in the outdoors in the real world and that we are not protective enough online. So much of young people's time is spent online on multiple devices and forums for multiple reasons, often simultaneously, whether it is chatting to friends or family, doing homework, finding out what is going on, or just playing games and watching videos for fun. The online world and the offline world are the one thing to our young people. There are many positive or even just benign aspects to the spread of the internet, but, as we have heard this afternoon along with all the opportunities, there are also risks and dangers to young people. I would like to focus on a couple of those in my speech this afternoon. Bullying and the negative impact of the internet on young people's understanding of healthy relationships. As has been previously quite powerfully set out, cyberbullying allows bullying to take on a whole new dimension. With many children and young people seemingly constantly attached to their phones, it can mean that they are not free from being attacked or persecuted. There is no safe space even in their own home. They can be bullied, even in their own rooms. In addition to explicit bullying that takes place online, the dominance of the online sphere also creates new measurements of popularity and self-worth based on who has the most likes, the most followers, the most friends, who is in what group chat. For children and young people whose posts do not get liked while others do, that can lead to feelings of low self-worth. Others have also touched on some of the unrealistic images that young people see. Moving on to healthy and respectful relationships, the education committee on which I sit has recently been considering personal and social education and sex and relationships education as a core issue within that. As part of the investigation work, the committee noted the increasing sexualisation of young people through their exposure to sexual images and information through the media and popular culture. That is before we even get to the easy availability of internet pornography. It really should be of huge concern to everyone that the internet and including pornography is such a significant source of information about sex for many of our young people. The NSPCC, giving evidence to the committee, quoted worrying research showing that by the age of 14, over 90 per cent of young people had seen pornography and about half of the boys thought that it was an accurate representation of sex. They also reported that girls were articulating that they were very worried about boys' impressions of and attitudes to women and that they were negatively impacted by the exposure to this pornography. The dangers that this represents when it comes to things like consent, contraception and basic respect and treatment of others can hardly be overstated. As we are all aware, portrayals of women in the media and of course in pornography reinforce negative gender role stereotypes and seriously risk our young people developing unhealthy and negative expectations of sexual relationships. On the one hand, this issue can be approached in quite a straightforward manner by working closely with social media providers, mobile operators and internet providers to try to prevent access to harmful content for young people. On the other hand, overturning dangerously false perceptions of sexual relationships based on pornography is a lot more difficult. Good and fit for purpose personal and social education clearly has a role to play in combating the messages received online and ideally in preventing young people feeling that they need to go online to further their knowledge. I trust that the forthcoming report of the education committee can contribute towards that effort. I have to say that it is all of our responsibility, it is society's responsibility, not just schools, to make sure that we are speaking to our children and young people about these issues and ensuring that they have positive and accurate information to help to counter things that they might stumble across online. I think that as well as talking to them—these are sometimes difficult conversations—we also have to be good at listening and sometimes hearing things that we do not want to hear. I think that my colleague Gillian Martin's speech illustrated that quite starkly. Trenching and understanding of consent is crucial in all of that. In general, it is making sure that young people and children are aware of what healthy and respectful relationships look like. I know that Police Scotland has been doing great work across the country in keeping young people safe online and across North Ayrshire officers are working with schools and other partners, including the child protection committee, to promote responsible use of the internet and keep children safe. Earlier this week, in my constituency, PC Young spoke to the first co-winning guide about saying safe online. We all know many other organisations working hard to protect our young people from the girl guides to respect me, Barnardo's, NSPCC and the commissioner for children and young people, and those organisations all have quite helpful information for parents about the topic. I welcome the Scottish Government's national action plan on internet safety for children and young people, and in particular the emphasis that it places on working in partnership with organisations to ensure online safety. I look forward to continuing to do what I can in my role as an MSP, as well as as a mum, auntie, family member and friend to protect our young people and children online. I move to closing speeches. I call Tavish Scott to close with Liberal Democrats for generous six minutes, please, Mr Scott. I say from the knowledge that there's no one in the media gallery and no one will be watching from the on the tellies in the media offices. Can I say how well everyone has spoken here today? Ruth Maguire just did it as well. Excellent contribution, very thoughtful, many strong, strong points. It just seems to me that there have been three themes this afternoon that I very briefly want to touch on in the six minutes, and that's not a Stuart Stevenson six minutes, that's a Tavish Scott six minutes, I take it. It's a Tavish Scott, which means seven minutes. Everything's stretching these days. In the six minutes or seven that I now don't have. The three points are firstly, and it slightly goes to Ian Gray's always philosophical introduction to his remarks, and that is about relationship and sex education in schools. Because what Ian Gray was rightly driving at and the education committee of which a number of us, Gillian Martin and others are on of late, have been looking into how best and how are we making sure that citizenship, that the challenges of being a teenager, of being a young person in 21st century Scotland are addressed through the support structures that we have in place. That, in a sense, is at the heart of this debate, the balance between privacy on one hand and the need for knowledge about what is going on on the other, the appropriate way in which we teach, encourage and help relationship and sex education in schools. Who does it? That is maybe my one plea to the minister that, again, as I entirely endorse many colleagues across the chamber who have said that this is a good action plan and that it drives at many of the right issues that need to be addressed. However, the key to any action plan, as I well remember from the past, is who does it. My suggestion is that on PSE in schools and on the importance of Ian Gray's philosophical point, it is that balance between teachers on one hand, on trained able youth workers on the other, and, yes, as many members have mentioned this afternoon, on parents too. I am one of those as well. We have to accept, as parents—never mind anything else in life—the challenges of that role because of online safety, because of the way in which we all use mobile phones, tablets and the rest, and more to the point because of how young people use that. People have made very sensible remarks about the dangers of sexting, of bullying, of the mental health scars that now exist, and of the psychological pressures that exist for young people. I just simply want to reflect how accurate those are. Gillian Martin is a very powerful contribution. I could think of a highly comparable example from my own part of the world while Gillian was describing the story that she did earlier in the debate. That experience is arguably some of the more arduous ones that we deal with as elected representatives. What do you see to your mum and dad who come to see you to constituency surgery, who have been through something like that kind of example, other than to go and have a discussion with your local police, the youth work team and others in seeking the best way forward? Yes, the school is always where you end up back to. That is why I have made the point—and I apologise to Mark McDonald for laboring this intensely—that I have made the point about training and teacher training for the next generation of bright-enabled men and women that we expect to look after our children in the future. The second theme has been on criminal activity. Many colleagues have drawn attention to the internet watch foundation to minimise child sexual abuse content online, and just to the range of work that many organisations, not least of which Police Scotland, play and how important that is. One of the action points that I think that the Government is absolutely right to stress is the point that Mark McDonald made in his opening remarks around the Digital Economy Act. He will have to refresh the chamber. I do believe that it did become an act in a wash-up before Westminster—I was about to say collapse for the election, that is maybe a little unfair—finished for the election. The point that the minister and others made is particularly important, is ensuring that the industry sees the protection of children as one of their core responsibility and will take the industry absolutely in the round on that. That is the point that I did think about when Stuart Steven was giving us somewhat of a tour de force of Europe. It is actually the point about India, because Stuart Stevenson's example on India was that 1.1 billion—and he will correct me if I get the numbers wrong—are now enshrined in a programme that is about giving them, as it were, a digital identity. That goes at the heart of Ian Gray's point, which is where is that balance between individual rights and privacy, and on the other hand, the state having a role in your future because it has an individual ability to assess where you are. Just for clarity, I think that I said it. The Indian system is voluntary. The state is not mandating that you must be there, but I think that its success is seen that almost everybody seems to have signed up. I entirely take that point. The third aspect of this debate and therefore of any Government's responsibility in this area is what does this vast growth in digital use and online use mean for reading and writing, the core responsibilities of our education system? Again, I find the evidence—well, there isn't much evidence in this area, but I did find one academic that I did want to share with the chamber to finish up with this afternoon, and that is Passe Salbag from Finland, who has looked into his information technology, is online content damaging literacy. Given that we are putting aside the political debate about literacy at the moment, everyone is putting a huge amount of pressure on for improvement in that area. Salbag's findings are that, according to some national statistics, most teenagers in Finland spend more than four hours a day on the internet and that the number of heavy internet and other media users is increasing in that country as it is doing in the USA, Canada and beyond. According to the emerging research on how the internet affects the brain and therefore learning suggests that there are three principal consequences, shallower information processing, increased distractibility and altered self-control mechanisms. If that is true, then there is reason to believe that increasing use of digital technologies for communication, interaction and entertainment will make concentration on complex conceptual issues like those on maths and science more difficult. I do not know whether that is true or not, but what I do know is that that is the kind of judgment that research needs to look into most closely. As Annie Wells was quite right, she said that the internet is a sea of opportunity. We can mix lots of metaphors here, but a sea of opportunity, so it is a sea of danger as well, and that is the literacy danger if it is one. All I ask the Government is to bear that in mind, and if ever there is a need to commission some research, it is into exactly that issue. Thank you very much. I call Daniel Johnson. You too have a Tavish Scotch six minutes, if we remember what that was. Thank you. Any comparisons with Tavish Scotch are of course welcome. This is a very important debate. It is a very important issue, one that any of us who are parents will recognise as being a huge concern, and one that is of course a concern for the whole of society.  The concern whether or not you are friends with the right people, concerns whether or not you are being invited to the right things, concerns about what people are saying behind your back. It is almost as bad as being a parliamentarian. The reality is that we all know those pressures of being a teenager. We have all lived them. The reality is that, for many of us of our age, we are thankful that we did not go through that while the internet was around, that we did not have those additional pressures amplifying those effects. I also call on everyone to condemn Kate Forbes for reminding us all how much more recently those memories are for her than the rest of us, and I thank Stuart Stevenson for putting that context back in the other direction. However, it is a serious issue. Whether or not we look at the more broad impact that those things may have around adolescent mental health issues, and I think that Tavish Scotch raised those very well, or through to the much more serious cases such as those of Breck Bednar, who was a 14-year-old boy using an online gaming platform and was introduced to another slightly older boy, who subsequently groomed him and then murdered him. That is the most serious end of the spectrum. Other members have done an excellent job of highlighting the issues and concerns. Again, I add my note of thanks to Gillian Martin for doing such an excellent job of highlighting some of the contemporary issues that people face at school around sexting and the use of social media. The task that we have for us is to look at the role of technology, how we can adapt it, and I think that the minister has been absolutely right to acknowledge its pervasive nature and that it is not separate in the eyes of many people who are using it. However, it does have advantages and possibilities. The ability to learn and acquire knowledge is huge, and we cannot ignore that. That is about embracing digital citizenship. I thank the Scottish Government for bringing forward this action plan. It is useful. As Ian Gray said, this is a subject area that can be difficult to understand. It can therefore be difficult for us to know what we can do and certainly difficult to reach out to everyone that needs to be reached. The plan enshrining the fact that we must ensure that children have the understanding of the opportunities and risks, that it looks to equip parents and carers, that it has that holistic, wider society view, and that it seeks to support children who have suffered and, most importantly, to deter perpetrators, those have to be the right things to look at. That is a very important start. It is a serious area, but it is also fast-moving. It is right that members across the chamber have also pointed out areas where, perhaps, the framework can be improved and enhanced. It is in that tone and tenor that I would like to make the rest of my comments. I would like to join with others in pointing out that I think that the Government could go further in terms of specifying who should be taking these actions and what those actions should be. I think that Jamie Greene put it very well in his comments. In my research on that topic, I was taken to a recent OECD report on the protection of children online. I think that it made a number of very important points around the way that policies should be made and implemented. It highlights the importance of policy, co-ordination, consistency and coherence, and the evidence must be at the heart of that, both in terms of measures and evaluation, because that is an moving piece. Unless that evaluation and those measures are at the very heart of the policy approach, it will never keep pace. With that in mind, I think that this is a good start and that it has much of that coherence and consistency that the OECD point out is important. However, as to point 12, which asks whether there could be more co-ordination, I would suggest that there must be more co-ordination. Indeed, I think that, around evaluation, there must be more of that embedded, so while it is raised in point 7, I think that we would like to see the Government go further. I think that Annie Wells' amendment around the need for measurement and establishing our progress is really very important. However, I would also just like to highlight Clare Baker's point about the need for a wider, more encompassing strategy. For one of the things that the OECD report does was to produce a taxonomy, which I think was a very useful framework for understanding the broad range of risks and aspects that we need to protect our children from and equip them from. In particular, while the debate has focused about cyberbullying, online grooming, the framework that the OECD produced also looks at consumer-related risks and information privacy and security risks. On the consumer-related risk point, that is such things as children's access to gambling and their ability to buy alcohol. Those might seem mundane, but they are nonetheless important risks that we need to look at and make sure that the action plan encompasses. Likewise, information privacy and security, we must make sure that we are preparing our young people to be responsible and well-equipped digital systems rather than wholly focusing on protecting against the bigger risks, the more obvious risks that we see and have been hearing about today. However, let me also touch upon Tavish Scott's amendment, because I think that it raises very important points indeed. As many other members have been pointing out in the chamber this afternoon, the Education and Skills Committee has been looking at teacher training, and I have to say that that meeting was one that raised a lot of concerns and alarms. Not least, I think that there are concerns around the expectations that we have on teacher training and the reality of what is really being delivered, the focus and time and attention that is being given to very important points such as literacy and numeracy. However, perhaps in terms of this debate, the most alarming thing is that one teacher was saying that they were given no ICT content whatsoever. I asked for a clarification, a qualification of that. Was she winning just within the specifics of cyberbullying? She said, no, none at all. I think that that is deeply alarming. Therefore, while I welcome the minister's commitment to look at the role of teacher training and the preparation of teachers, I think that we have to look very carefully at teacher training in the round. I think that it is of huge concern that an important topic such as ICT is not being covered at all, because the technology is pervasive, it is everywhere. Therefore, they need to be using teacher in terms of the delivery of their teaching, the medium for learning, expression of our children, and technology as a subject. However, above all else, within this subject, it is vital that teachers have that time, that focus, on protecting children and training them to be responsible digital citizens. Therefore, I would hope that the minister takes that away and that that is looked at with great care and sensitivity. However, above all else, what we must do is have a plan that enables everyone to work together, that we take our responsibility collectively, that we have a coherent plan. I think that that is an excellent start. While I have made a number of criticisms, they are genuinely being made in the most positive light. I thank the minister and I welcome the amendments that we will be supporting today. First, I refer members to my declarations of interest in that I am a director and chairholder of two online communication and collaboration platforms. I do not receive any remuneration for those posts. I am also a board member for the west of Scotland, NSPCC. I am pleased to have the opportunity to close this debate on behalf of the Scottish Conservatives and I thank Mark McDonald and the Scottish Government for bringing this important debate to the chamber. It has been a very consensual debate with a variety of really thoughtful speeches of Kate Forbes telling us of her journey through her technology and I compared it with mine and I think that Kate Forbes knows that she has made a happy man very old. I also enjoyed very much Stuart Stevenson's contribution to this debate in his own informed and inimitable way in words and erotic movements, some of which I understood. The debate really highlights the dilemma that we have as parents in allowing access to the internet for our youngsters and that was brought to starkly to light by Gillian Martin's testimony along with Colin Beattie and Jeremy Balfour. Of course, Tavish Scott, I have to thank him for bringing Stuart Stevenson's great-uncle Socrates to the chamber and with the expected quality that I do expect from him. What he did was highlight the learning capacity that we have in new technology and the internet can be a wonderful learning tool. For example, like many parents do, I was reading a bedtime book to my youngest last weekend about the South Seas and about diving for treasure when the book started to talk about sunfish and moonfish. My daughter asked me rather skeptically if those were real things and 30 seconds later, via an iPad, we were in the South Seas watching videos of sunfish and moonfish.  If I had tried to describe those rather strange-looking creatures, she would immediately have thought that dad's at it again. So there you go. The internet as a tool to prove that dad wasn't at it. But be warned because, of course, the converse is true. Our children are better online than we are and they can quite as easily show us up when we try to pull the wool over their eyes. What is really interesting to me about the mobile technology of the internet is that it is now encouraging outdoor learning and activity—I know that the chamber knows that I talk about this a lot—and through gamification of activity outdoors, the kids are now taking their mobile technology outdoors. What a fantastic way to learn. As Ian Gray highlighted, it is our struggle to qualify the risk of our children being online in our homes and outside. Where as a parent I get nervous is when the iPad becomes a tool for communicating between friends or even with unknowns, perhaps even in interactive online gaming. We think of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Messenger and WhatsApp and Viber and Skype and YouTube as some of the main communication platforms. Of course, there are many, many more platforms and apps available, easily downloadable, that allow unfettered video, picture and text communication. That is a dilemma that has been discussed across the chamber. As Mark McDonald has asked, how do we ensure that our children get access to this wonderful educational tool while protecting them from the worst in online behaviours? It is an issue that I have faced when we were building a sport, social media and IPTV platform several years ago. How do you allow subscribers to freely share training videos, livestream events, share pictures and conversations while ensuring that the platform is not used in an abusive manner? There are off-the-shelf software solutions that are quite sophisticated. We can identify skin tone to such a level as they will know if the person is wearing a pair of shorts or not and remotely decide whether that image is appropriate for uploading. There are some simple software solutions that can prevent bad language and the derivatives of bad language are being used and uploaded, but the truth of the matter is, for any fledgling or small company, the expense can be extremely prohibitive. That is not such an issue for those platforms where a stringent gateway to access is the paramount selling point for such as legal, medical or accountancy portals. They can afford to make access to their platforms a more demanding process because of their users' requirement of high levels of security as their primary concern. There is a balance to be made for platforms and apps between safety protocols and simplicity of access of use. The more safety and security protocols put in place, the more likely that impact is on the ease of usability. There is undoubtedly a reluctance in some of the major mainstream social media players to enhance safety and security for fear of driving off their users to their other competitors, as Stuart Stevenson highlighted. That inevitably leads to reliance on a level of self-policing on platforms where users are expected to report behaviour not in keeping with the platform's rules and regulations, and there are hugely different levels of protocols and successes. We have reports of abusive content being reported but not being removed from for some considerable time, but, as Jamie Greene alluded to in one of his earlier interventions, unfortunately there is little to protect the most vulnerable. To protect that user profile, the education of parents, as Tavish Scott has said, and carers, is still going to be the most effective strategy. Ensuring that when children and young people have access to and are using mobile and other internet devices, parents and carers are aware of the dangers and understand how to enable parental locks and safety features, as Monica Lennon has said. To that end, there are some excellent awareness-raising initiatives that are currently operating, which need more publicity and more encouragement to adopt. Ruth Maguire and Monica Lennon spoke about the children knowing what a healthy relation