Love Island Amy Hart’s dad on why social media must be properly policed

Since she decided to leave the villa in July, she’s embarked on a rollercoaster ride, which in the main she has thoroughly enjoyed.

It’s hard work, but she’s never been afraid of that since her first part-time job at 14.

On Friday morning she received a series of abusive messages on social media. Through its excellent aftercare policy, ITV advises all the Love Islanders to ‘block and report’ all messages of this kind, which is exactly what she did.

A short time later a site admin staff member messaged her to say that the messages didn’t break the social media site’s community guidelines.

This is a family news website and much of the profanity used has been obscured in the pictures. But I think you get the picture.

This whole experience, from the start of the summer, has seen Amy toughen up.

She has a supportive family, great management and a strong group of close friends. She can rationalise all of this and move on.

But what if she was a 13-year-old, feeling vulnerable, unfortunately without the same support structure, and received these kind of messages? You can imagine the answer would be very different.

It’s everywhere we look, and if they don’t start policing social media properly it could reach epidemic proportions.

Returning to last Friday’s messages, I would like to ask the site administrators how any adult reading the text could state that the comments didn’t infringe any guidelines? Could I walk into The Cricketers on Friday evening and say the same thing to the lady working behind the bar? No. So why should social media be any different?