Who Does The Online Safety Act Exist For?
Who is the Online Safety Act for, exactly? In the U.K., where nearly every child over the age of 12 has a mobile phone and spends time consuming video content on YouTube and TikTok, the ideas and experiences they are exposed to matter. Yet, in focusing on the sites that host them, are we missing a trick when it comes to the broader tech ethics and real-world impacts we're seeing on not just children but society as a whole?
Children's Online Safety
Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash
With research from Ofcom showing that 59% of 13 to 17-year-olds surveyed had seen "potentially harmful content" online in the previous month, putting in place rules for websites, social media sites, and gaming platforms seems like a no-brainer. Mirrored in the U.S. by the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, platforms and organisations from Instagram to Minecraft have a duty of care in blocking, removing and remedying the impacts of what young people are exposed to.
Yet, their role in protecting children's online experiences isn't the only one. Content creators and commenters, who generate everything from ideologically influential to harmful content, are also responsible for the information shared and engaged with, as well as the algorithms and forums that promote and enable it. While the idea of policing content and prohibiting free speech is a tricky one, the consequences of their role is also worth considering.
While online challenges can seem innocuous, reports of young people dying as a result of their participation are increasingly common. That. And online bullying is just the tip of the iceberg. Hateful, violent and abusive material - inciting racist, homophobic and misogynistic beliefs - abounds, influencing children's perceptions and behaviours towards people with different lived experiences from their own. Netflix's much-lauded show, Adolescence, paints a harrowing picture of the real-life consequences for its victims.
Yet, the impact of digital content can be internalised too. Content glorifying eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide has been too accessible, and with age restriction barriers being fairly simple to skip around, to pornography too. Here, sexual abuse and violence are normalised, deepfakes ride roughshod over the concept of consent, and cyber-flashing is made easy through ephemeral content. In the process, children's relationship to their own mental and physical wellbeing, as well as healthy, intimate relationships with others, is profoundly warped.
With the technology owners purposefully embedding functionality that breeds addictive scrolling to maximise engagement (and profiting from the ad revenue it generates, creating accountable roles within organisations alongside the threat of legal and financial consequences is a start. Yet, with individuals and groups still creating content without consideration of the consequences, further legal measures beyond the Online Safety Act are required to account for the wider system at play.
Until then, the onus is on caregivers and schools to navigate a digital world they didn't grow up in or learn through, and manage the current and future consequences we're only starting to understand the social ramifications of. With their lives and professions equally under strain as a result, gauging the perspectives, experiences and hopes of both the children and the adults in their lives will be fundamental to understanding and enabling an internet that enables young people to grow healthily, learn safely and thrive in society.
With early efforts from Ofcom focusing on pornography sites, children will still be suffering the consequences and teachers and parents will continue to bear the brunt of the technology industry's efforts and legal system's inadequacies in ensuring young people are safeguarded from humanity's worst proclivities.
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