Hi, my name is Scarlett Ashbury. I'm 14. I like to talk to people. I like to role play. I like to look at fan art of things that I like. I like to watch Youtube. My
name is Helena Ashbury when she asks for an app. I think I drive her nuts particularly when she was younger. You know that I'll go off and research and you got to the point of where I'd say, well I'll have a look at it and she'll go, you'll just look until you find something that says that it's dangerous and then you'll tell me you can't have it.
She always looks at parent reviews. Don't do that. If you're looking at the parent reviews that are gonna be talking about, oh my child is addicted to the stop. Oh my child been talking to this old guys like you're looking for bad reviews, you're gonna find them. Hi Taylor. Today I'm going to tell you about a parent named Helena. She's an engineer and she describes herself as having a decent grasp on tech. But she still feels like when it comes to newer media there's stuff she just doesn't get.
I grew up without any of this. You know, I mean Atari came out when I was a kid and I entered the online world when I was probably about 21, and it was the dial up modem and all that kind of thing and the Internet was cool.
Taylor. Do you remember when the internet was cool. It still is good answer. Good answer. Helena has a 14 year old daughter. Scarlett and Scarlett has spent a lot of time trying to educate her parents about what she's doing online. They do not understand instagram at all. Like they know what it's for, they just don't know how to use it at all. You look annoyed because it's so easy, it's not even that hard. Have you tried to teach them? My mom was like, oh well I keep seeing these
people dancing on my screen. This this is not what I'm not, I don't follow them and like your urine reels, that's not nobody watches reels, what are you doing? She goes, well, I thought that was the home button. There is literally a house button, It's a house press the house to get to your home screen, It just makes sense. Have you had moments like this with your son? Oh, absolutely. Some of the tools he uses what we do as you know. Yes. Is he a kind teacher? No, no, he's very impatient.
So it's a trend. Then today's story hinges on this fact that many parents just do not understand the world their kids live in and some of the fears and tensions that come out of that. I'm taylor Owen an academic who studies technology and who is desperately trying to keep up with a very online eight year old Nicole Edwards, A journalist whose parents are remarkably tech savvy. This is screen time. There are huge questions playing out right now over the
place of technology in our lives. Facebook was scheming to bring even younger users into their field. You're basically giving out your personal I. D. Two games so they can make money for it. There are some people that I would like to block in real life, we could work together. But it will add the third tensions because in the app market their job is to sell, sell, sell. They're like I just don't understand this is their platform, this is their life where's the limit?
Mhm. Every parent is struggling with these questions, governments around the world are trying to keep up and the scale and pace of change is only increasing. In this show. We'll talk to parents and kids about how they navigate the digital world and to the researchers and policy makers who can help us understand the consequences. Helena had a story that I think illustrates how a lot of parents feel about their Children navigating the internet.
My daughter asked for a Fitbit probably about three years ago now and she was a Tween and already as a parent worrying about her being on the device is too much and not getting enough exercise. So it seemed like a great idea to me, so totally embraced the idea and she got a Fitbit and I guess it it was probably two or three months later and for some reason I came across on her phone that she was getting messages through the social media side of Fitbit, which I had not realized
really. It hadn't sort of clued in with me that there was a social media side to it. And my daughter was getting messages from men I guess men or boys on on the app that could be you know, as outright as will you be my girlfriend, Which just totally stunned me, you know, And we sort of laughed a little bit about it. Like what are they really expecting they really expecting you to say? Yeah, okay.
I had no idea. You could message someone on a Fitbit. Did you know that? I didn't, I didn't. There's a legal academic named Evelyn do eric who likes to say that everything is a content moderation problem with technology right now. And I think as all these different tools we use, whether it be like a peloton or a Fitbit, all of these platforms are trying to become social and the second you try and become social, you have to deal with bad content and how you're going to
decide what can and can't be said. And it's no longer just instagram and facebook are exercise bikes and our cars and anything that creates a connected environment. Absolutely. And to be clear, I'm not sharing this story to alert parents to the danger of fitbits or anything like that,
you know, thankfully nothing happened. Scarlett is fine, but Helena's story, I guess that a key thing that came up a lot when I spoke to parents about online safety, which is this concern that there's a hidden threat lurking somewhere on the internet. Here's Helena thinking that she's letting her kid have something that's pretty benign, only to find out that there are strangers on it who are propositioning her child. Yeah, and I think it sort of gets it to
kind of really critical things here. It's like one we, as parents don't always know sufficiently how technologies are kids are using are used and what the potential is, right? So not knowing even the fit, but had a social interaction aspect to it. But the second is just how to measure harm. Part of the challenge we face in this debate about online security and kids is that
we conflate all sorts of different kinds of harm. So, child exploitative content and sex trafficking on one end of these really acute horrible things that happen online and that we feel like this visceral need to protect obviously our kids in our society from and will go to great
lengths to do that. But then there's just all these other harms that teenagers face in this world online, of the propositioning the cyberbullying the trolling, the kind of gross behavior that exists disproportionate to it doesn't in the physical world and that might require a different kind of response. So, assessing harm and risk is really difficult at any time, but I think it's really hard for parents in this environment, where they don't know always what's going on.
They don't know how these tools are being used and they don't know if their kids are subjective to these acute or more sort of systemic harms and how they should respond accordingly, right? And Helena's strategy here. And the reason that she even found out about these messages is that she checks Scarlett's phone um which is something she does periodically, both of them are aware. And when Helena brought up what she found to Scarlett, it didn't go well,
I think she felt she'd done something wrong. And I think because I did freak out because it was totally unexpected. So she was very upset and I got upset me. And these things just sort of escalate. I think it was a bit of a shock to both of us.
Scarlett didn't want to talk to me about the Fitbit thing. But she did talk about her parents monitoring her internet, use her parents do have these rules, like not to give her information out to strangers. For example. And one of the things her mom said is that they keep her computer in a common area so they can casually glance at it when they want to. She mentioned that sometimes she looks over your shoulder when you're on your laptop, how do you feel about that?
It's it makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong, even if I'm not like I could just be chatting with my friend just talking about normal things that I could talk with with my mom and she hovers over my shoulder, I just go, what did I do? It's worse when my dad doesn't know because he breathes into my ear and just stands there and stares. My mom just walks past. My dad is just standing there like with with with bug eyes. Yeah, I looked into his face and he's just judging me and I'm like what?
I don't understand why, No. And then he'll ask a dumb question like, oh why is she wearing that shirt? I don't know why shouldn't she wear that shirt? Do you have a problem with the fact that her shirt slightly is like slightly revealing? Is that a problem? Can you just go away? I'm trying to watch you to leave. And this all brings us to this big worry that I hear over and over from parents
probably she's the first generation that's grown up with it, always being in existence. Like there's never been a world without the internet for her, without iphones, without all these devices. I've got no frame of reference for it and we're all making it up as we go along and it's so difficult and we're probably getting it wrong? What can you do? I wonder am I being too strict, but you know, is it really gonna work? Am I really gonna protect her?
So there are two parts to this question on the one hand, is my kids safe in these spaces that I have no reference for. And on the other hand, am I worrying too much? Like at what point do parents just let go? Those are questions parents are clearly struggling with and need to ask themselves, but they're not the only players here. Tech companies are also evolving their own tools for what
they allow and don't allow. Then governments as well are trying to decide what rules they should put in place for the companies and the tools they design and for kids of varying ages and how they engage in those spaces. The first person I wanted to speak to about this was Sonia Livingstone who is one of the world's leading experts when it comes to kids in technology.
Okay, good. Alright. I'm pressing record on the phone.
She teaches social Psychology at the London School of Economics and directs the Digital Futures Commission. She is in many ways at the center of the kids in tech policy debate both in the UK and around the world and as someone who lives in the UK, she had a really interesting perspective on how different societies view parenting.
So my understanding is that in europe we have more of an expectation that Children can have the independence to figure things out for themselves and in north America. You can tell me if I'm wrong about Canada there is more a sense that the parent kind of has the right to know everything that's happening to the child, including on the phone until the child kind of passes a threshold or proves himself.
I mean, I guess I do have that kind of child rights focus that says Children can only really develop and gain their agency and autonomy by having the leeway to make some mistakes, not terrible mistakes. You know, we want some kind of safeguards around it, but they've got to have some freedom to stretch their legs as it were and that might mean that they make some mistakes and then you want them to come to you and say,
hey, this happened and that was a problem. We don't even know what it's like for a child to grow up, always being watched and checked and kind of controlled. That's
and what effect is that having
that has its own effect. Yes, and parents watched anxiously and guiltily. And so I see that these are really hard challenges for parents to manage. But I think there has to be an element of standing back and making sure you're the person that the child will tell if anything goes wrong.
How do you think parents should think through acceptable risk online? And is that the right construct to be thinking about this from just making small mistakes for kids which are part of growing up versus being exposed to real potential harm here, which is sometimes the case.
I used to say that the analogy was crossing roads and walking down the street and so on, but actually parents have been making a different decision there too. So I think we all know that as Children, we were allowed to be able to kind of walk to the streets or to the shops or to the park unaccompanied and now Children are much more accompanied. So in a way the risk and the fear of getting it wrong has spread its online and it's offline. So, you know, I'm a social scientist, I believe in
the summer of statistics, there's no more road accidents. Two kids now than 30 years ago. There's no more abductions by pedophiles now than they were 30 years ago. There is more exposure to online kind of risky content But there is not really more things going wrong in children's lives now than there was 30 years ago. So I think parents, you know, if you can stand back and give the child a bit more leeway, the paradox is that you'll have a stronger and more resilient child.
A lot of the worst risks. They're incredibly rare, just as you know, the chance of your child being knocked down by a car on the way to the buy an ice cream is very rare and it is so beneficial that the child can make that journey by themselves.
Mhm, wow, interesting. Yeah, it's really hard to get a worldwide picture of this, but it's certainly true that if we're looking at Canada and the us both child abductions and road deaths are down. But what strikes me here is that so much of the public discourse around safety online revolves around these sorts of really acute harms that Sonja is talking about.
For example, you remember that Apple got into some controversy last summer when they introduced new measures to fight child sexual abuse material, which involved collecting some information directly from the phones of their users. This set off a huge debate about the balance between security and privacy, but I talked to someone who thinks this is the wrong debate to be having.
This is Valerie Steeves, professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa, sorry, I was watching the clock, watching the clock and then naturally I got tied up in something on my computer just when it was time to log in. No problem. That's so nice to meet you find that's lovely to meet you too. Valerie does a lot of research around
human rights and technology. She also co leads the equality project where she talks to kids policymakers and experts about ways to promote privacy and equality online. She makes the argument that this entire discussion is a distraction from the broader problems kids actually face online and that in fact it's in the interests of tech companies for us to be focusing on these kinds of security issues.
One of the things that fascinates me that I don't think anybody really talks about very often outside of academic circles is the fact that companies made a very conscious choice to stop talking about privacy and start talking about security company started saying your child is at risk of being attacked by a predator. Online company started saying you should be concerned your child could be talking to a stranger online.
I've collected data for years and all of the evidence indicates that when kids say they're talking to a stranger online, they almost always means someone in the context of their social network, their grandmother in Lebanon, that they've never met a person, their cousin's friend who also plays volleyball in the town next door.
Now, if you think about it from a company's point of view, this makes perfect sense because if you get parents afraid, then they will consent to their Children being placed under surveillance. And companies very conveniently come and say, don't worry, parents will watch your child. We've got this will take care of your kiddies. And it legitimizes this constant collection of the minutia of
young people's lives. So I think when we talk about the harms that Children face, it's important to realize that this is a constructive dialogue, you're being told your kids are at risk of these harms because it makes somebody money. Now in a previous lifetime, I was a criminal lawyer and I can tell you that from sex traffickers that I have talked to, that the Children who are vulnerable to that type of attack share a certain set of characteristics.
One of them is not the mere fact that their online Valerie says those characteristics include childhood trauma, a history of sexual abuse, low self esteem, running away from home and minimal social support. In other words, if your child is vulnerable to that and they go online, you should be really worried if your child is not vulnerable to that and they go online, we haven't seen a case where that's worked out badly
for you or your child. One of the markers and vulnerability is not the fact that your kid speaks to their friends on Tiktok. The real problems you should be worried about is the fact that everything they say on Tiktok is grabbed by the platform and used for its own purposes, usually not for the child's well being. So the recent news about Facebook, you know, intentionally gathering data and using it against young people to give them a bad sense of self for a bad body image. Well,
that's good marketing. That's been around for 20 years. I mean, there's nothing new about this. These corporations are purposely injecting a child's social environment with these highly stereotypical media ties images to manipulate them for commercial purposes and to create sticky places where they get addicted and feel drawn to out of their own sense of insecurity because they drop more data about themselves when they're there. So it's a two pronged attack.
You mentioned Valerie steve speaks to kids to did she share any of their thoughts on this? Absolutely, she did. And essentially she says they've caught on to what's happening and they're starting to adapt. Well, I've seen a real shift over time actually in 2001, when we first started talking to kids,
they talked about companies as trustworthy online friends. Oh, it's a corporate side, it's got a dot com, I can trust that company by 2015 when you sit down with kids and talk to them about corporations on the internet, they call them creepy old men that they are just trying to manipulate us, Have you ever read a privacy policy? It clearly wasn't written, so I could understand it, you know, they're just trying to hoodwink me kids now talk about technology as kind of a necessary evil in
my life. Yeah, I have a phone, I love talking to my friends, but I'm really careful what I do. In fact, in the last four years or so we found kids are withdrawing from online interactions. They have a fake online public persona that is really bland because they're trying not to attract any bad consequences, right? But at the same time, I remember about five years ago, somebody saying, you know, it's really sad now, all I can do is talk to my friends in
person comes full circle. It does and I think that that's actually a really good sign because it shows you that kids are thoughtful and that they are not being Hoodwinked, that they figured a lot of this out. But the reason they have is because they've lived the consequences. Like I've talked to lots of kids who over the years suffered horribly because they posted a bikini shot and then they were just ripped into shreds by peers and
strangers online. And so what they've learned is don't be online. They're looking at the internet much more as a flat entertainment medium. You have to really be sure of who you're talking to in the environment you're in to say something. You actually think that's what kids complain about. It's a burdensome, unnecessary, difficult world that we've created for them and we've created it largely because it works really well for tech companies.
That's super interesting. It reminds me of something Scarlet said when I asked her if there's anything she worries about encountering online. Not really. I mean, I know there's bad stuff, but I don't really worry about encountering it because I just block them. Yeah, it's nice to have that power. There are some people that I would like to block in real life. It wouldn't that be nice if you just straight up block people who don't see them, don't hear them,
don't know they exist. That would be great. Yeah, she's right. I also wish I could block people in the real world, don't we all Scarlet also runs some servers on discord, which is a chat platform with these really long codes of conduct. Number one. Be respectful, civil and welcoming. Number two, no inappropriate or unsafe content. Number three do not misuse or spam in any of the channels. Number four do not join the server to promote your content.
Mhm. If people break the rules, she has a series of warnings which escalate to them being banned, she seems like she's figured out how to keep things manageable and civil. This is something that really struck me in a lot of these conversations is just the sophistication of the self governance that's emerging in these spaces. People have real rules and guidelines for how they want people in their communities to behave.
Kids included. Absolutely, absolutely. The final thing I want to talk to Valerie about is whether there's anything parents can do to make things a little bit better and a little safer. She had a piece of advice that's pretty simple. Don't be a hypocrite. The first thing you should do as a parent is, take a real look in the mirror and take an inventory of your own tech use because one of the consistent things we hear from kids is how much they hate the fact their parents use devices.
I remember when my kids were in high school and they came in one day and I was answering an email on work on my phone and boy did I catch it hot, you know, like I can't believe it, you know, you're not paying attention to me, I want to talk to you about this. And I realized that as soon as my kids came home from high school I put my phone in a drawer, I didn't want it anywhere near me. Not because they sat down and talked to me every day, but because like it's not about, there's no such thing
as quality time. There's only quantity time you need to be there because between 1105 and 11071 night, they might want to tell you this terrible thing happened at school. If you're not there, you don't get it. The interesting thing is from kids point of view if I'm on my phone or if on my ipad and my computer, I'm not there because I'm somewhere else. I'm on the screen, right? And the last thing I want to ask you is really stems off that is
what parents can learn from their kids here. And I think that modeling behavior is probably one of the big ones, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's actually in all forms of parenting, it is our strongest tool. Kids don't really hear the words you say they watch your actions and the way you live. So if we model a healthy relationship with technology, it's easier for them to navigate this world.
Keep in mind that it's becoming increasingly common for kids to talk about disconnection About three years ago, I got a call from my friend Val Michaelson and who was at Queen's, She was working with a group of kids that wanted to do some youth participatory action research. And they were interested in social media and how social media affected them. I've heard kids for years say, you know, I worry that all these devices make me lazy. I worry that they cut me off from my friends.
I go over to my friend's house and everybody's on their phone that's boring. So we worked with this group and they decided that they wanted to try a disconnection challenge. They wanted to completely unplug from technology for a week. And they were thrilled. This is amazing. It's gonna be so cool. We will see how technology affects us. And one kid said, oh, except for school. You know, my teacher is not going to let me not use the internet for school. Okay, So no technology
except for school. Yeah, it'll be amazing. Oh, except my parents will never put up with that. Because when I'm in ballet, my mom always wants me to text her to let her know when to come. And they went, oh, I can't because my coach sends me my schedule on my phone. I can't because my boss tells me when I need to come in on saturday on my phone and they turned to the two adults in the room val? And I And they said, what is wrong with you adults? Why are you always forcing us to use technology?
So Nicole, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about those conversations. Yeah. You know, one thing that stood out to me is is the creepy old man archetype and how it's undergone a pretty interesting shift. You know, where once upon a time kids imagine the stereotypical internet predator as a man waiting for them in a chat room today. Instead the creepy old man is actually the tech company gathering their information and watching what they do.
And I think that shows how sophisticated kid's understanding of online harms has become. I completely agree. And it really struck me that people who have spoken to kids over a decade see a real change in how kids see this space and see harm in this space where originally there was this digital divide where the kids understand technology and parents didn't and parents were scared of it and kids weren't. And it seems way more sophisticated now where
kids are actually concerned about some real things. They just don't frame it the same way as parents. It's not this kind of predator and a trench coat. It's like you say it's more nuanced. It's the type of trolling. They receive the type of bad behavior, the data collection, the invasions of their privacy. And I think we switch our terms of our conversation to theirs. It can be a much more constructive place for talking about online safety.
Absolutely. The other thing that I found interesting is something Sonia Livingstone said about giving kids privacy, you know, I think before hearing from her, I was pretty guilty of thinking of it as a one way street where parents demonstrate their trust in kids by giving them autonomy.
And she kind of brought to mind for me that the more we create spaces where kids are able to play and make mistakes and not feel too surveyed, the more trust kids will have in their parents and in the adults in their life because they'll know that they don't need to hide the fact that they've made a mistake or that they've encountered something in an online environment that makes them uncomfortable because their parents have given them the freedom to go
out and have those experiences. And so there's that kind of built in confidence that comes from the fact that they know their parents trust them to Rome. So I get that and I understand the point that they were all making that we need spaces online where kids can take risks and have privacy and have their own identities. The challenge I face, I think as a parent is you want those risks to
be acceptable. You don't want to let your kids loose in these places knowing that there's all these benefits they're going to get. Well also they be subjected to real potential harm. And so that for me takes us into a conversation about governance. How do we collectively want to set the rules for some of these spaces? So yes, kids have freedom and privacy and are able to have independence and take risks but also not be subjected to the worst harms we know potentially exist in this space.
And that we're gonna be talking about next episode when we really dive into some of the governance opportunities in this space that are being deployed around the world. So stay tuned. Mm hmm. Thanks for listening to this episode of screen time from tvo Antica Productions and the Center for Media Technology and Democracy at McGill University.
I produce this show along with our senior producer, kevin Sexton production assistants by Emily Marantz Research support by Sonia Solomon Kody, Hakka and Helen Hayes mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Our executive producer is laura rigor Stuart cox is the president of Antica, Katie O'Connor is the senior producer of podcasts. A tvo Lori. Few is the executive producer for digital tv. Oh, if you like what you heard tell a friend.
Yeah, yeah, nobody reads the terms of service is nobody literally, it says terms of services and just click accept immediately because nobody cares. I barely have the patience to make a sandwich. I'm not going to read that. Mm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm