Byron: said the government should seek to influence social networking sites into drawing up codes of practice. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Social networking websites should be encouraged to adopt voluntary codes of practice to help protect young users, according to the government review of child internet safety conducted by Dr Tanya Byron.

Byron said in the report that despite the concerns about the volume and diversity of online content, the majority of material is hosted by a handful of very popular sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and YouTube.

She added that a realistic goal for the government is to concentrate on reducing the availability of inappropriate or harmful content by influencing those sites.

“The incentive for signing up to one of these codes would be the opportunity for companies to promote themselves as responsible businesses with an interest in child safety,” said Byron in the review.

“It would be against the interest of children if codes were so prescriptive that they stifled innovation and meant companies based their safety measures on compliance with a lowest common denominator … so an effective code would include a set of safety principles on which companies could base their approach.”

An example of how a code could work in practice is with the privacy policy on social networking sites, which might agree on a higher default setting for users under 18.

One site might meet the code by only allowing invited friends to access young users’ profiles, while another might allow users with shared interests to connect but with clear guidance on how to limit the information they give to strangers.