“I wouldn’t like to be a girl today,” she admitted. Vera Jourova, Vice President of Values and Transparency at the European Commission, before those attending the Forum for a Safer Internet that was held in Brussels last Thursday. She says that she was overweight when she was little and they picked on her at school. “But when I got home I felt safe. My mother told me: you’re chubby, but you’re smart. You’ll go far. And she was right.”
Things have changed a lot. We live in the era of eternal availability: There is not a place or a minute of the day in which we are not within reach of the Internet and its content, some very useful, others very harmful, with its social networks, discretionary videos, ubiquitous instant messaging services…
No less than 10% of Spanish kids between 10 and 16 years old claim to suffer cyberbullying on a recurring basis, according to ASAPME data published this year. On the other hand, the 40% of young people surveyed by Save the Children have been victims of cyberbullying occasionally in childhood, for the first time between the ages of eight and nine, with girls more affected than boys.
We are not just referring to attacks coming from the school bullies on duty. Two of the most frequent forms of digital harassment are the recording of physical or verbal attacks on a minor and its dissemination over the Internet, or the grooming, which consists of deception or sexual abuse online by an adult towards a child.
The role of the Digital Services Act
In the words of Jourova, the danger that the Internet poses for minors can be summarized in four big C: content (misinformation, pornography, violence), contact (cyberbullying, grooming), behavior (addiction, imitation of risky or harmful behavior), commerce (personal data, encouraging people to buy online).
To address the first, the Digital Services Act has been operational in the EU for a year. “We have investigated platforms such as Facebook or Instagram to detect addictive design and inappropriate content,” said Renata Nicolay, director general of DG Connect, of the European Commission. For now, they have prevented TikTok from taking out its “super addictive” version, TikTok Light.
For his part, Constantin Gissler, representative of the association of European digital companies DOT Europe, is committed to parental controls. “Algorithms should be programmed to protect children and not put all the weight on families,” he said in the forum.
In Gissler’s opinion, “the responsibility should be of the companies and we must ensure that they are ethical through legislation, imposing sanctions until their platforms are safe for minors.”
Subscription against addiction
Renata Nicolay spoke of “technological capitalism” to emphasize how the business model of large digital platforms is based on consumer addiction.
The solution, he proposes, “would be move from free access to subscription services. In this way, companies would not seek to keep the user hooked for as long as possible nor would they need to resort to such addictive designs.”
As Spanish representation, Irene López Medina, member of the board of directors of the Association of Mobile-Free Teenagers of Madridstressed in his presentation on the addictive design of digital platforms, which make “screen time compete with valuable activities for the child’s full cognitive maturation, something that does not occur until the age of 20-25.”
Also, we know that “the teenage brain does not have full capacity for self-regulation, motivation, willpower and decision making, since its prefrontal cortex is still developing,” he indicated. “As a result, it is biologically impossible “for minors to autonomously regulate their screen time and access to content.”
And what about the benefits that the Internet can bring to learning? “I would have them if the child was spending all the time with the tablet or cell phone consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. But we know that is not the case. What they do on the Internet is to be with social networks and video games, not with an encyclopedia,” he emphasizes to Public Lopez Medina.
A leaflet with adverse effects
As part of the measures to be taken, López Medina proposes that “digital companies, As with medications, “They must demonstrate that their platforms are safe for use by minors, that they are not addictive, that they do not contain inappropriate content, etc.”
While the regulation arrives – and is put into practice – “what we are left with is bet on education and training for families and minors on how to prevent risks”.
Cybersecurity for children
“The European panorama is opening new paths and the Member States are organizing ourselves to be able to have supervision, monitoring and a mediation channel between users and the large platforms,” he tells Public Cristina Gutierrez, head of cybersecurity aimed at minors at the National Cybersecurity Institute of Spain (INCIBE), which also participated in the forum.
As Gutiérrez explains to us, this forum is very interesting because “it brings together the parties involved in the European strategy to build a safer internet, with representatives from the industry, cybersecurity, public authorities, parents’ associations, the education sector and young people.
#Protect #minors #digital #jungle
