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ABC Listen, Podcasts, Radio, News, Music and more. Should you have to hand over your name and your face in order to see adult content online? Yes, this week on Download This Show all around the world, government's families, tech companies are reckoning with the wild, web of the internet and how to keep people safe, including things like yes,
a verification porn passport. So today, we're doing a deep dive into exactly how do you keep families safe online? What are the implications for everyone online? Limiting screen times, to banning smartphones altogether, let's find out what works. I'm Mark Finnell and welcome to Download This Show. Yes, indeed, welcome to a very special episode. I've downloaded this show and I'd like to introduce our guests now,
psychologists and founder of Digital Nutrition, Jocelyn Brewer. It's always a pleasure to have you back on the show. Welcome. Thank you, thank you. And lecture in social media at Monash University, Emily Van Teneagle, welcome back to the show. It's a pleasure to be here, Mark. There is a lot to work through in the show today, but we are going to start with this.
The idea that millions of Australians could, at some point in the future, be pressed to hand over their data in exchange for access to a whole range of things, social media, online porn, gaming, it's age verification, it has been in the news. The idea of using age verification to keep young people safe online, Emily, just what me through the origin of this idea? Like, why has this been an idea that's been moved recently?
When we start to think about technology as a danger, we immediately jump to solutions that are also based in technology. So at the moment, and I think the conversations around age verification are largely driven by this idea that adult content and porn is something that is damaging in some way, especially to young people. When we have that idea, we want to jump into a tech solution to this problem. I think that's where this idea comes from. Right. Has it worked anywhere in the world, Jocelyn?
Not that I know of, not yet. A couple of years ago, lots of countries press pause on trying to develop the technology, because they couldn't find ways to actually make it watertight and narr.
And lots of people would say, oh, but we do this with booze or cigarettes and things like that. Why is it so difficult? And as Emily is saying, it's like, because we think that the technology is the solution, rather than, you know, no surprises here, I'm going to say that the psychology behind it might actually be the solution as to why we are so elured by being in some of these spaces.
And how we actually make things like porn much more salacious because of our fear around young people accessing information about sex. Emily, I mean, there has been examples of different jurisdictions around the world attempting something like this. I know in the US, it's happened out of curiosity. How has it played out around the world from your point of view, Emily?
Look, there have been lots of different ways of approaching this. And there are so many companies that are leaping into this space and promising that they can take a photo or a video of somebody and tell you how old they are.
A destination software is not accurate. We know this because people and their faces is just so difficult to accurately estimate. However, that hasn't stopped this whole industry of companies jumping in and saying, yes, we can tell how old somebody is just by looking at them. I think there's a whole range of issues at this. I mean, it has been dubbed the porn passport by some. There are a whole range of issues that come with asking people to upload.
Dangerously personal data in an attempt to access this content. Does that not create its own kind of worms for Jocelyn? It does. And there's a really huge issue with our trust of technology. Ultimately, our distrust and our fear of using certain sites, whether it's porn or social media, remembering through that we're not just verifying that a young person is in fact young, but we then have to verify adults who are choosing quite freely to access whatever kind of sites
and pleasure and that I'm kind of from interests as well. So that's where it becomes a little bit tricky to do that. It also has a whole range of issues in the sense that yes, hypothetically, you could put it over certain very famous porn sites, but you can access porn on things like Twitter. And that's going to be a lot harder for them to police in what is already a fairly hard to police area.
Exactly. Recent researchers found that while most young people encounter pornography, surprise on porn sites, actually 60% of young people are finding it on social media, both deliberately and unintentionally. We know that there is a lot of adult material on Twitter. And to be honest, that's something that I don't really want to change because sexual cultures are really important.
And actually adult content creators are finding spaces like Twitter so important when other huge tech corporations like Meta, completely block and ban adult content. That actually cuts off a lot of important avenues for people using it. So it's always that case that there are so many different people and groups to balance here.
Simply suggesting that we can eradicate porn from a platform or that we can ban young people from looking at it. Those things might be helpful fantasies, but I don't think that they translate into a real world scaling back of harm. I should say that there are companies that provide this idea of verification and their argument is that we already do this for banks, for example.
And the social implications right of banking details and somebody's face and name being attached to visiting an adult website are fairly different like the implications. And I guess there I say the psychology of it, Jocelyn are quite different as well. Yeah, absolutely. The psychology behind it of saying, well, this is not as important, let's say, or it doesn't have as much utility to our daily lives as something is banking.
This is more about choice and pleasure and downtime. I think that's where the psychology shifts to say, well, this is almost discretionary. I think there's those psych blocks to how we think about what's what's necessary here. So if we do sort of operate from the starting position, the kids looking at adult content at an increasingly young age, so as young as eight in some cases, people say that we agree that that's probably not a great way for people to discover intimacy in the first instinct.
What actually can be done about that Emily are there if this strategies, you know, pour us at best, are there strategies that have been known to work to either fend off how long it is for people see that content or arm them better when they do see it. I mean, the only good strategy here that we can talk about is education and talking about this kind of stuff.
You know, for me, it is, it's so complicated, I think, to assume that we can just separate adult material and porn away from other kinds of media. And, you know, we do this all the time. We acceptionalize pornography and we like to pretend that there is media and then somehow in a separate category, there's pornography.
And porn is media and when we are developing media literacies, which we know are so important for the way that we learn about the world and our place within it, we really need to be including porn in that kind of space. We don't need to talk to children necessarily about porn hub when we are having conversations about things like, you know, when you see someone acting on the TV, they're not really, they're not really that person and they're just pretending.
We can have those kinds of conversations about media and we can build media literacy in those ways. The more that we do that and the more that we realize and remember that porn is part of those conversations, the more it will be easy, you know, later to have the conversation like, you know that when you see people having sex on the internet that they, you know, this is not how sex usually looks.
So this is set up in a particular way that these are actors. They might be really having sex, but they're having a particular kind that's supposed to be visual. I do understand just on a baseline level, this sort of alarm, like we're all parents on this conversation right now. And I think there even in the last couple of months I've noticed my kids are sort of at the age where they are going to statistically speaking start seeing this stuff right.
Does technology have a role to play in stopping that or mitigating that or is it purely about dealing with the mind first, you know, the education first? I think absolutely it does. So if you know the basics of parental controls across the apps your kids are using that they're on YouTube kids, for instance, rather than open YouTube that you have some of those basic things set up, you are going to mitigate the risk of accidental porn exposure.
But if you have a kid who wants to go go Barbie during the splits, then you want to find a whole range of content that isn't necessarily what your seven year old is looking for when she wanted to see Barbie during the splits. You know, I think that yes, we can use technology up to a point, but we also have to have had those conversations as well because there is no watertight solution.
But knowing that that can happen actually primes a kid to be able to deal with that in a better way if they have that trust with you to be able to come to you and things grow wobbly. And that's the key there is not kind of outsourcing some of those fears, I guess, true technology and saying, well, I put that on there for I don't have to have the conversation. The conversation has to sit side by side with the parental controls.
Just to come back to age verification, Emily, with the various attempts of bringing in age verification for adult content across the internet that's happening not just in a that's being proposed, not just in Australia, but around the world. Do you think any of it's actually going to take hold, Emily? I hope not because no matter what kind of service is offering to verify somebody's age, we haven't found one yet that we trust.
We haven't found one yet that is accurate and we also know that, yeah, like Jocelyn suggesting, if you simply say, okay, well, we've got this age verification technology that can stand in the way of having these really important conversations and age verification systems simply add this layer where they lock, sometimes the wrong people out of the wrong spaces and they don't support healthy sexual development because they don't educate.
Download this show is what you're listening to. It is your guide to the week in media technology and culture. This week we are talking all about how to keep kids safe online and it's worth wanting out that not just in Australia, but around the world. Several government ministers have proposed the idea of banning the sale of smartphones for children under the age of 16s.
There are polls that show, particularly in the UK, that there's a lot of public support for an idea, but is it necessarily practical and what problems, if any, does it solve Jocelyn? I know this has been mentioned in the UK and other places. Is it just something that politicians like the sound of or is there any actual evidence for it that actually works?
I think it's a quick win, right? It's something that you can say, but again, the policing of that, I would love to meet the 16-year-old who can walk in and buy an iPhone at the moment. You don't get much change from about to grand. So we're again, back to talking about this is a parent's kind of issue because we need parents to understand when you buy the phone.
It's actually not necessarily the phone that the kids want. They want the internet connection and then they want the apps and games downloaded to that device. So we need to get better at defining some of this. Are we worried about the phone or are we worried about social media or worried about porn?
I guess we're worried about all of it when we get into this fear response. So again, kind of putting this simplistic limitation in place doesn't then necessarily prepare a 17-year-old for what to do when they do get a hold of the phone with all the, you know, a Couture Monts on it and have absolutely no skills and training in how to use that in a safe and savvy way.
It is an interesting experiment, isn't it Emily? I know there's been a popularity around what they call dumb phones. Operate his phones but don't necessarily give you access to the internet and it's kind of a better for your mental health. But if you gave a dumb phone as a start a phone to sort of 13, 14, 15-year-olds, or just like what kind of reaction do you think you would get Emily?
Yeah, exactly. The introductions to smartphones don't necessarily come from, you know, his phone. This is the first time you've ever seen one and now you own it. I feel like so much of this culture comes from parents having their own smartphones because that's certainly the way that my child has been introduced to phones is not even two yet. I haven't given him a phone.
But he has seen adults in his life use smartphones from day one. And so I think, you know, if you gave a young person a dumb phone and said like, hey, like, you know, learn how to phone call people and I don't know, said text messages before you actually get into smartphone staff apps, games, internet browsing. I feel like the response would be more about, but I already know what a phone does because I've seen my parents use one.
What do you think would happen if you suddenly turn around and go, yes, you are 13, you can have a phone, but it will not have any of the internet. What do you think the reaction would be, Joslyn? I think that they would be horrified. It's, you know, kind of a given. And again, these are the implied understandings that we have is that the phone comes with all of the things that are fun that kids want to do with it.
And one of the strategies that April suggests is to narrate your parenting. So when I go and pick up my phone, I'm going to check the WhatsApp group to work out with the netball training still on or I'm going to pay the credit card bill or all those kind of boring things. Whereas kids see our phones and go, great, you can put Minecraft and roadblocks on there. I can, you know, play these other games.
So, you know, I totally agree with Emily in terms of kids introductions to technology isn't necessarily, you know, handing out iPhones in the maternity ward, like some people think that I promote. It's actually about how we demonstrate and kind of role model to kids what this, the utility of the tool, the incredible tool that we have in our pocket stars.
And that that slowly rolls out kind of like, you know, the way we would lunch drive a car and things like that, that the skills that you need to actually then take ownership and have your own kind of be your own digital citizen, so to speak. What would you say to somebody that says, well, there's 50,000 bits of research that says excessive screen time for young people, stunts learning, stunts emotional development.
Jocelyn, what's your response when you come up against stuff like that? Oh, it is a long and complex one for the short version. I got the time. This is our aim. We're here for it. The short version is that a lot of the research on screen time does look at self report of time spent online, usually by young people.
Now, humans are really, really terrible at estimating how long time is. And certainly when you're doing an activity where you potentially in a flow state, where you lose track of time or become time blind, we're not particularly good at that. We're trying to compare green apples with red apples with oranges with mandarins and then say, oh, here are the correlations.
It's not very good for us. So we need to get better at the way we research things with the groups of people that we're comparing and then the kinds of activities that they're actually doing so that we can understand the impacts more.
Generally, the screen time kind of limits come from folks who were researching sedentary guidelines and exercise physiologists and people like that who said out of the 24 hours in the day, we need to make sure we get enough sleep and we need to make sure we get enough exercise. How much time is left over and what can we afford to displace in order to be on screens?
So the, you know, two hours a day for five to 17 year olds, which is still kind of traditionally held up as the amount of time that we should be spending online or kids should be spending online has come out of that kind of research, not actually looking at what we're doing and it's, it's negative impact. Emily, is some of it derived from the fact that time is a manageable parenting technique? Like I just speaking from experience, I know I can say you have one hour starting now.
Girl, why so, like, is some of it from a parental standpoint that we've arrived at screen time as this sort of concept? I think absolutely. It's when, when we start to think about screen time, as Jocelyn's mentioned, it does not take into consideration. What are you doing with those screens?
I think the pandemic and our related screen time, because we were all locked in our homes, at least in Melbourne, really changed some of those conversations around what screen time does and what it's for, because what does screen time mean when that's the only way that you can access school?
Like there are so many different things that the flattening concept of screen time doesn't really get into. And of course, if you pull back the lens even further, you have to think about what is going on in the house. To manage this screen time and who is responsible for that, because we know that it's parents and we know that it's usually mothers who are tasked with managing the screen time of children.
And that, of course, involves putting a whole lot of pressure and expectations on mostly women who are already juggling a whole lot to say, you know, it's your responsibility to get your kid. Switch off the tally, take away the iPad, don't let them on your phone. And then what you have is a whole lot of pressure around like, okay, well, what support does that mom have?
You know, what support do those parents have? And I feel like that sort of thing really complicates the screen time conversation as well. Download this show is what you're listening to. It is your guide to the week and media technology and culture. We are talking about keeping kids safe. It's a special episode this week. And of course, as much as we focus on the activities that the kids are doing online, there's also the activities that parents are doing and sharing their kids online.
And I think there's an interesting development over the last sort of five, 10 years of sort of almost like two camps, people that use social media almost as like an extended group to share with people what's going on in the lives of their family. And then there's people who are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't post anything. Please don't post pictures of our kids. And is there any guidance you would give parents Emily about what is safe and isn't safe?
Or is it depend on how open your settings are and what the purpose of you being on social media is? Yeah, there are a lot of different kinds of cultures of sharing. And there are a lot of ways, of course, that we can share things about our children. I mean, as a baseline, I would certainly suggest that parents be conscious about sharing things that are, you know, personal information that might have an impact if it gets into the wrong hands.
Don't be sharing addresses, for example, birth dates are something that uniquely anchors a person when you combine it with their name. However, you know, sometimes it can be naive irresistible to post something about, you know, a birthday or like celebrating a child or even thinking about the moment when you became a parent.
But still, I would, I would always caution parents against sharing things like what school your child goes to, what their address is, what their birth date is, things that are so commonly used to prove our identity in so many ways across digital and other spaces. So whether you're into sharing photos of your child or, you know, monetizing their unboxing videos on YouTube, I feel like there are some things like those personal identification details.
That should be kept out of the picture. So Justin, are you prepared to turn your children into content? I was not. I, in fact, wrote a blog about why I was never going to share a photo of my child online seven years ago and about three years ago, four years ago in the pandemic, that all kind of changed.
And, you know, I had such an amazing kid. She's so worth sharing. And I think that psychology is really the kind of motivation behind it's just so irresistible, you know, for a lot of parents. And I think the pandemic, yes, was a turning point then, where for many of us who were really I was quite cautious about how I represented her online, partly because she didn't, wasn't old enough to really say and have a say over what was shared about her.
And so you weren't having those same connections with people and we did start using social media to kind of capture some of those moments. So there's lots of ways that you can share, you know, your kids and those beautiful moments without necessarily putting identifying information and start of the school year is always that classic one where the advice has gone from, you know, blurring out the school crests and things like that to even sending those photos in black and white.
And that's why I identified what the school colors are. I've never heard that before. That's actually quite smart. Yeah, just absolutely right just to add that extra layer because most of us can guess, you know, where your kids go to school. And again, depending on your family context, whether you, you know, have a really maybe big presence and you might have some creepy people who want to be friends with your kids or you have maybe some domestic disputes and family stuff going on where you just need to have that extra level of the school.
And I think that's really important for us to all consider that we can be targets for nefarious means. We're at a stage now where there's like new technologies like artificial intelligence that's constantly reading facial data. Do you ever worry about, you know, the pictures that you post at 10 or 12 or 5, do you ever worry about where how far those pictures can go and what algorithm that picture is training Emily.
I think when it comes to the consequences of sharing pictures of children, certainly there's a range of fears, but the ones that hit the deepest I think are always going to be the ones where pictures of your child get into the wrong hands and make you feel uncomfortable in a social and a personal way. There's of course attendant concerns about things like are you training artificial intelligence and automated software based on the data sets of your child.
You know, there's a lot that can be gleaned, I think, in a kind of visual sense from so many photos of a person as they're aging that it gives machines, you know, even more ammunition to be creating and manipulating imagery. But for most of us, that's a secondary concern to what might happen if my child or even my family was put into a kind of social or physical harm because the wrong person got their hands on these images.
It's interesting that you say that because I made a decision a couple of years ago when our kids were small. Initially, it was like, don't post pictures of them in the grid. And then it was like, actually, I'm just going to clear a space so it's purely a workspace where it's just all it's, it's just about me and the stuff that I do.
And I think it derived from the fact that my kids are edging ever so close to the day where, you know, in a couple of years, they will be allowed to have their own, you know, Instagrams and Facebooks and things like that. And I thought, in my mind, Jocelyn, I was thinking, I'm going to create a buffer of about five to seven years where there's none of their faces online. Is that, does that make sense to you or am I just a bit mad?
No, it makes a lot of sense. And partly that's because it's like you do you in terms of how you want to share and not share and, you know, show up, you know, have your own identity. And my message is generally be aware and be educated about the potential implications. And then you create your own prescription for how you want to do that. And obviously it like in my situation that has shifted really specifically over time.
And I have a private account that I've had since, you know, whenever Instagram came out. And then I have a public account where you might see the back of my kids head or you might see bits and pieces of my personal life. But most of it is like me and the stuff that I'm, you know, sharing and interested in and, you know, all that kind of jazz.
So there's lots of different ways to go about this. But with kids who are edging into that age, it's really important that they have a say over what is shared about them and that you have again those conversations. You know, do you want to do that again and we'll capture that so we can, you know, even share it with within family WhatsApp groups and things like that.
So it doesn't have to be public. It doesn't have to be, can be something that you have conversations about that are then guiding your kids for when they choose to have those own their own accounts. How they want to show up. I have a permission from a psychologist now. It's good. So when it comes to keeping kids safe online. We've talked through a lot of different issues, Emily. But for you, what's the most important things? What stands out to you, Emily?
Always trying to remember that when we're talking about children, we're also talking about families is something that we need to keep in mind, right? Something that I am thinking of when we are having this conversation around sharing ting is that, you know, Jocelyn's so right to say you should develop your own kinds of code of ethics, you know, what am I prepared to share about my child and my family.
And by extension myself, a challenge for me when I became a parent almost two years ago is that my decision to withhold a lot of information about my child also impacted me as a parent. It was suddenly really hard to access the spaces like Twitter or X that I used to and share about myself. And actually, you know, share when things were getting really difficult for me because those early days of parenthood are so challenging as you adjust to a monumental shift in your life.
It was really difficult for me to suddenly not have those spaces that I used to turn to to share like, you know, just a little gripe maybe or a little complaint or like ask for help or ask for support. All of a sudden because I didn't want to share my own experience of parenthood was really impacted and I felt suddenly isolated in a really new way.
And so I think, you know, it is always of course really important that we center children when we're thinking about online safety, but they are the center and there is a bigger context that we need to be aware of as well. Children are part of families, children are part of society. Of course, we want our children safe. We also want healthy families and healthy groups and healthy societies too.
For you, Jossson, I know you have a mountain of things you could tell people, but what are the key things that stand out in terms of keeping yourself and kids safe online? I think it's really to know the content that your kids are consuming. So just like when we feed them, we hand them an apple, we kind of know what's in an apple. When we let kids go into spaces, let's say like roadblocks.
That isn't one game. That's 40 million different experiences. We need to have a basic understanding of what they're consuming. Digital nutrition is really about imagine that games and social media came with nutritional labels. What would we be looking for? What are some of those virtual vitamins? So if your kid wants to play a new game, they want to download a new social media platform, get them to do a little due diligent report.
They need to go and tell you a whole bunch of information about what it is, how it operates and why they need it, what needs it's going to actually meet. So then you can have a conversation about what it is they're going to consume. You don't have to do the hard yards as a parent, but you can get them to be practicing some of that media literacy and having so that you have a better understanding of those experiences.
Without necessarily just saying go over there and be quiet for 20 minutes on the iPad and we don't actually know what kinds of content and they'll use an attitude sometimes they're being exposed to within those spaces. I'm really looking forward to the 34 page report that my son's going to give me about what he built a Minecraft. Yeah, actually I kind of am. So we are out of time, but huge. Thank you to our guest this week.
Jocelyn Brewer, psychologist and founder of Digital Nutrition. It's always such a pleasure to have you on the show. Jocelyn, thank you so much. You're so welcome. And Emily Van Dynaigel, lecturer in social media at Monash University. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure. Thanks Mark. I'm Mark Vannell and I will be back next week with more Download this show. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.