A simple plan that will protect children from evils of internet

I CALLED into my brother’s house recently to celebrate the First Communion of my youngest niece and nephew - separated by 11 months and thick as thieves.

They were in the garden playing football, white dress and communion suit long dispensed with - ready for the class photo on Monday morning.

In the space of half an hour, I was shown the sunflowers in pots on the kitchen table, the field of poppies that Lizzie had spent three weeks painting, and the homemade sponge cake liberally filled with jam and cream and sprinkled with icing sugar.

The communion money was stashed in a jar to pay for a treehouse that was going to wrap around an oak tree at the very bottom of the garden.

It all reminded me of my own childhood with six siblings all those decades ago, and prompted me not to give up on humanity just yet.

Almost all the parents in the local school had followed the advice to support the voluntary agreement not to buy mobile phones for their kids just yet. This was the result - happy, carefree, activity-filled childhoods.

Minister for Education Norma Foley has welcomed the decision of the country’s leading mobile phone operators to finally support her plan for voluntary agreements to keep childhood smartphone-free.

Vodafone, Three, eir, Tesco Mobile, Virgin Media and Post mobile have all confirmed that they support the ‘Keeping Childhood Smartphone Free’ guide for parents and parents’ associations of primary school children. These guidelines provide advice for the setting up of voluntary agreements between parents to avoid buying smartphones for their children while in primary school.

There has been a strong take-up of the voluntary agreements by parents and parents’ associations in counties like Clare, Dublin, Wicklow and Waterford. Minister Foley believes strong endorsement from the major mobile phone operators will lead to further voluntary agreements being adopted.

The concern is that supporting a voluntary agreement to keep childhood smartphone-free is a drop in the ocean of what is needed. 

It also takes the focus away from what leading providers of operating systems such as Apple, Google and Microsoft could do that would actually transform the access of children to addictive social media content, porn, cyberbullying, online grooming and all that other awful content that should be nowhere near the eyes and ears of children.

Technologist and academic psychologist at the University of Southern California, Ravi Iyer was a data scientist working on reducing violating content at Facebook before realising this approach, using upstream design changes, was not going to fix the problem. He now works in the U.S with technologists and policymakers to affect broader change. He was a key collaborator with Jonathan Haidt in writing the content in his book The Anxious Generation, on what governments and tech companies can do now.

Writing for After Babel this month, Iyer states what we all know. The current system for protecting children online does not work. 

“It relies on parents understanding and managing their child’s online experience across a wide variety of applications.”

This is exactly the issue. Parents do not feel comfortable with the options that currently exist. It is left to them to try and figure out on their own how to stop strangers from contacting their children and how to prevent cyberbullying. They need to work out how to protect their children from inappropriate content - when research published by the UK Children’s Commissioner last year found the average age at which children first see porn-ography is 13. By age nine, 10% had seen pornography, 27% had seen it by 11 and half of children by 13.

The new media regulator Coimisiún na Meán states that people may soon be required to upload a selfie to websites if they want to view pornography - to prevent children accessing it.

But Iyer confirms that operating system providers such as Apple, Google and Microsoft could put appropriate controls in place across platforms much more effectively than any parent can.

“It would not only be the right thing to do, it would also be a huge relief to many parents who want their children to have rich social lives that require the ability to interact with their friends (who are online) but do not have the time and energy to manage the myriad settings that exist across services,” said Iyer.

“Parents need a simple way to protect their children online that doesn’t require them to know the difference between Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube settings and how to manage them separately.”

What is needed to achieve both of these aims is device-based age verification that could provide parents with the controls parents want - without the complexity that prevents the widespread use of current parental settings.

Device-based age verification would require users of a device to need added protections across all applications used on that device. Jonathan Haidt agrees.

“Apple, Google and Microsoft could create a feature…which would be set to ‘on’ by default when a parent creates an account for a child under the age of 18. The parent can choose to turn the age check off, but if it is on by default, it would be very widely used (unlike many features in current parental controls, which many parents don’t know how to turn on).

“It would also allow sites to age-gate specific features, such as the ability to upload videos or to be contacted by strangers. Adults who visit a site that uses age check don’t have to do anything or show anything, so the internet is unchanged for them, and there is no privacy threat whatsoever.”

Robust device-based verification would also ensure that applications would no longer use dark patterns that encourage kids to stay hooked onto online content.

The only reason these protections are not provided by tech companies is the age old one - money. A recent study led by Harvard School of Public Health quantified the number of users on social media platforms in the U.S and the annual reviews attributable to them. It found that in 2022, YouTube had 49.7 million US- based users under age 18; TikTok, 18.9 million; Snapchat, 18 million; Instagram, 16.7 million; Facebook, 9.9 million; and Twitter (X), 7 million.

The study found online platforms collectively generated nearly $11bn in ad revenue from these users; $2.1 from users aged 12 and under and $8.6 billion from users 13-17.

Quite simply, younger users are too valuable for tech companies to consider introducing parental controls that would limit their access to online content.

It is up to governments to bring in legislation that insists that tech companies introduce robust device based age verification; and a single setting on children’s devices that appropriately treats those requiring more protection across applications rather than the currently unworkable, complex system.

So, what are we waiting for?

If you’re wondering about my niece and nephew’s reaction to no phones after their First Communion - they couldn’t care less. Once none of their friends had them, they were all in the same boat. More fun on the street and in the football team.

Dr Catherine Conlon is a public health doctor in Cork