BANFF – The internet is terrifying enough to me as an adult dealing with its underbelly of malice, lies, trolls, and subterfuge.
For unknowing children it’s too often a madhouse of horrors running the gamut from inappropriate content, to lurking strangers, to personality theft, to terribly wounding comments, to outright predators. Some times these web injuries even lead to suicide.
Yet from the minute they’re born, young ones are now exposed to digital surroundings that will inevitably be their way of life and since the World Wide Web plays an increasing role in our children’s and grandchildren’s lives, how do we keep them safe while engaging it?
The Banff World Media Festival panel “Creating A Safe Place For Kids Online” brought together experts in the field to examine questions such as: What is the role for companies who distribute or create content in ensuring safety for kids? What are some of the tools being used? What comprises a safe digital experience? Why does privacy matter?
Agnes Augustin (president and CEO, Shaw Rocket Fund) moderated the panel which comprised Annie Loi (chief commercial officer, DHX Media), Moyra Rodger (founder and CEO, Magnify Digital), Marie McCann (senior director, CBC Kids, CBC), and Sahi Samet (founder and president, kidSAFE Seal Program).
Augustin kicked off the panel with a few eyebrow-raising statistics…
a) one million Canadian children will be cyber-bullied this month!
b) more than 60% of parents have no clue about their kids online lives and viewing.
c) 70%-plus of children sleep with their smartphones.
She also made the welcome announcement that the Rocket Fund is kick-starting a kids’ online safety program in partnership with kidSAFE.
Loi referenced DHX’s 375 channels on YouTube, many of which are partnered with kids producers, and for that reason her company employs 35 YouTube channel monitors, more than on their broadcast TV side.
As a leading children’s content and brands entity, recognized globally for such marquis properties as Peanuts, Teletubbies, Caillou, and Inspector Gadget, educating children about the pros and cons is key for DHX, and one of things that disturbs Loi most is young people exposing themselves to unknown persons.
With kids “you’ve got to expect the unexpected… (luckily) most are pretty sophisticated”.
Thankfully, she says “there are tools with Google to assure that only appropriate ads are targeted at kids content… but problems arise with pirated DHX content that is modified and the resulting commentary underneath that content”.
Samet added kidSAFE’s online safety goal includes data privacy and data security and according to him “the number one problem is accounts that have been pirate or hijacked… stolen usually because passwords have been shared”.
He circled back to the ads issue as well suggesting that “targeted ads are often more appropriate than general, random ads”.
But protecting children can’t be done naively. “You will turn off kids with a looser experience… you can’t be too watered down or sanitized… because it actually trains kids to lie about their age to get the good stuff on adult focused Facebook, YouTube, Amazon,” said Samet.
And none of these worries are going to normalize soon since “AR and VR are quickly leading kids away from texting and typing to more voice chatting and a whole new set of challenges.”
“We don’t leave our children alone anywhere in the real world… why do we think it’s okay to leave them in the digital one?” – Marie McCann, CBC
McCann added in the tools department, the CBC (cbc.ca) has a parent’s site and “the safety of kids is a priority.” However she points to a foundation principle “ at the heart of this safety issue is common sense… we don’t leave our children alone anywhere in the real world… why do we think it’s okay to leave them in the digital one?”
So at our public broadcaster they’re monitoring and curating its kids online experience, so while elsewhere on the web “it’s a place run by algorithms, run by computers, at the CBC real people are involved.”
Coming back to an earlier thread, she says “we need to find a way to make our safe and monitored options compelling and engaging… otherwise kids will flock to Snapchat where that isn’t the case,” and while education is important, McCann cautions “we need to stop trying to just teach kids… kids don’t want nanny services… we need to understand, listen, to what kids want… and not bubble wrap everything… (moreover) kids have real play patterns (some of which can be kinda dark) and we need to acknowledge that too”.
Rodger, with her encyclopedic expertise in discoverability strategies to drive mandatory audience engagement, will forget more about the social media’s space in a day than I will come to know in a lifetime, and while she wants to “help content creators understand how to leverage data” she also wants to raise their awareness that “with kids that’s trickier.”
Her job is to “set producers up for success… and role out a strategy for ancillary online content that’s held to the same standards as core programming,” she said. After all, “kids under 8 can’t differentiate between ads and content… and what once was 8 year olds caught dancing to rock and singing into a hairbrush is now much more serious.”
Yesterday’s expectation of a private moment with your mother’s accumulated hair follicles is not replicated with today’s very public web and we simply aren’t doing enough to “teach children about the value of privacy.”
Other aspects of the panel discussion wove in the role of analytics and game playing, where the data collected can detect child players along the autism spectrum or with presented social disorders. Given that the gaming can now identify these psychological pinch points, do the game producers or the platform have an ethical responsibility to report these findings to patents or educators?
And how “unhackable” are these powerful analytics?
There were no answers to these two queries, just a few audible winces.
The role of governments also got plumbed.
And it seemed that the panel had just made a good case for sustaining public and educational media with our tax dollars.
But undoubtably, governments are stirring. At the least they are murmuring about playing a larger role in the area of thought leadership through curricula, health and community safety programs, and possibly their legislatures.
There are, of course, other approaches to keeping children reasonably safe on the “interweb” as my daughter calls it.
These might include:
a) making sure the protection features of websites and software your kids use are activated;
b) getting to know your child’s online environments and talking to them about inappropriate material;
c) discussing the hazards of posting inappropriate pictures, saying disparaging things, and damaging reputations;
d) reminding children that the web is a public space and what they do or say on social media can have negative implications in the future when it comes to getting a summer job or getting into university;
e) and even monitoring your own adult postings about your young ones, their activities, school location, photos, where they’re volunteering, going to camp, etc.
Finally, much earlier in my media career, somewhere in the antiquity of the ’70s and ’80s, I had to deal with increasing violence in children’s programming and the development of public policy to address abuses.
The medical and statistical research was overwhelming in establishing causal relationships between exposure to excessive TV violence and children developing inappropriate, asocial behaviour traits… or worse, and governments were making serious noise about meaningful legislative/regulatory intervention.
So as an industry we established voluntary broadcasting standards and tools to help us do a much better job.
Fast forward to today and ex Google and Facebook tech employees have banded together to try to protect kids from social media addiction with the Center For Humane Technology.
They’ve already caught the politicians’ eye and have launched a campaign titled “The Truth About Technology”. Major companies are getting behind this, such as Comcast and DirecTV donating $50 million in free media.
So if Silicon Valley insiders think we should be concerned, perhaps there are some parallels here with my Jurassic Age wrestling with the TV violence issue.
Or put another way… it’s just possible that those who ignore history are bound to re-tweet it!
