Safeguarding in the digital age: Protection of children from online harms ‘an unmitigated disaster’

Speaking about the systemic problems in the technology sector, Kidron said: “Unless we start to understand how the tech itself is driving the problem and deal with it upstream, in the design and regulation of services, we will always be playing catchup while the kids pay the price.”

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While using social media and other online platforms, “children are nudged into giving up more and more data about themselves, and more and more time in their lives,” Kidron added, in a stark warning over predators’ easy access to children on social media sites such as Snapchat.

“We could say childhood is driven by commercial interests and in the relentless pursuit of that, anything goes,” she added. “I do mean anything: political lies, health lies, violent content, pornography in the hands of eight-year-olds, introducing strange adults to children, publishing their locations to predators.”

According to Kidron, 75 per cent of social media available in the UK uses an algorithm which routinely introduces strangers to children. This includes Facebook’s ‘People you may know’ feature and Snapchat’s ‘Quick add’ tool.

Kidron said: “These are literally providing a gateway for adults who want to talk to children based on their data.”

She explained that once introduced to an individual child, “the predator often uses that connection to then go through the child’s friends and pick out who they want to be introduced to next. The child is both at risk themselves but they also carry the responsibility of having introduced a number of their friends, either for predatory behaviour or extortion”.

Between 25 and 28 per cent of children in the UK said they have had requests from strangers online, according to Kidron. “Many of them find them upsetting,” she said, “and some of them lead to tragedy.”

In a further warning over harmful information available to children online, Kidron said that while the “impact is enormous for society as a whole, for children who are not yet fully mature and who get a disproportionate amount of their information from online sources, it is both bewildering and distorting of their understanding.”

Seventy-four per cent of children said that they had seen something harmful online, Kidron said. Additionally, nine per cent of children said that they had seen content describing ways of committing suicide.

Through research commissioned by the 5Rights Foundation, Kidron found that “children were being targeted with helpline adverts because they were algorithmically deemed to be vulnerable. But those same children were being targeted with hard-core pornography and self-harm material.”

“We need to regulate,” Kidron said. “The sector and self-regulation has been an unmitigated disaster.”

There are plans to protect children from threats of bullying and grooming under the Online Harms Bill, but Kidron said progress “remains too slow and is not comprehensive enough.”

“We need a much bolder approach,” she said, “which sees governments set standards and enforce standards.”

She said that the technology sector has been “unbearably and immorally slow in coming forward with redesign,” but if “they could see the government adopting these approaches with a clear intent to enforce against them, the sector would move ahead of regulation and children would see changes sooner than we could get legislation in place.”

“We must harness voices, and demand of our politicians, the change we want to see,” she added. “The Online Harms Bill, in which the government has put a lot of political capital, will not be worthy of its name unless it makes a real difference to children’s experience online.”

Snapchat and Facebook have been contacted for comment.

Safeguarding in the digital age is taking place until Thursday 15 January between 1pm and 3pm each day.

Tickets to the online conference are still available. You can view the remaining sessions live, while all the sessions (including those you may have missed) will be available to view on-demand in your own time for up to three months.

View the programme here and book your tickets here.