Safer Internet Day to focus on children 

Safer Internet Day on 6 February will promote a more secure information society for children. The campaign aims to raise awareness in all sectors of society (governments, Internet providers, parents and children themselves) on how to protect children in the online world.

The campaign is part of the Commission's efforts to promote a safe use of the Internet as laid out in a 1999 action plan. The plan puts the emphasis on self-regulation by the Internet industry and encourages schemes to monitor harmful content such as child pornography. Software that can filter harmful content was also to be developed by the industry under the action plan.

Safer Internet Day will coincide with the promotion of POESIA (Public Open-source Environment for a Large Safer Internet Access), a software recently developed by researchers from Liverpool that can filter content in multiple languages.

Such initiatives were preferred to straight regulation as enforcement of rules would have proved extremely difficult with regard to sites set up on the other side of the globe which most of the time, are anonymous.