Jakob Forssmed is critical of how children today are "flooded" with distorted beauty ideals and advertisements for makeup and advanced skin care products in social media.
This has consequences such as, for example, worse self-esteem and eating disorders, he believes.
I think it is extremely urgent to break the destructive symbiosis that exists between social media giants, influencers, and the beauty industry, says Forssmed.
Wants to see a list
As responsible for one of the Christian Democrats' policy groups, he is now proposing that Sweden introduce a special "child protection list".
You create a list of product categories that are very unsuitable for marketing towards children under 15 years old, and then we see that beauty products are such a category. You should not be allowed to use child influencers either, says Forssmed.
How can you determine that an advertisement is specifically targeting children under 15 years old?
You simply have to make an assessment of whether the advertisement is targeting that age group or not. Such rules already exist when it comes to alcohol and tobacco.
Jakob Forssmed also wants Sweden to introduce a law stating that all advertisements where the body shape has been altered through manipulation must be marked.
We need to clarify when it's not reality that children meet, when it's enlarged or reduced bodies that fill their feeds.
Does not cover everything
The Christian Democrats' party board is expected to "shortly" make a decision on Forssmed's proposal. After that, he intends to drive it forward in the government to make it a reality.
Much of the content in social media will, however, not be covered by the proposed rules, since it is created in other countries.
Not all material will be covered. Therefore, it's incredibly important to also work directly with the tech companies from the European level, to change how the algorithms work and get rid of this type of distorted beauty ideals from the platforms, says Forssmed.
