Today, the European Union’s (EU) Special Panel on Child Safety Online issued a report recommending that further action be taken to tackle the harmful design of social media platforms. Responding to the news, Lisa Dittmer, Researcher and Adviser on Children and Young People’s Digital Rights at Amnesty International said:
The expert panel is right to emphasize the need for children to be able to participate in a safe online environment. Banning teenagers from accessing social media is not the answer. As Amnesty International has long argued, it is the responsibility of tech companies to overhaul the built-in addictive and manipulative designs of leading social media platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to respect children’s rights and safety.
The expert panel has rejected a blanket ban for older teenagers and makes national level bans on teenagers older than 13 conditional upon continuous evaluation, recognizing them as a temporary measure at best on the path to enforcing design change. As the panel suggests, the focus must be on age-appropriate design, recognizing children’s evolving capacities and their desire and right to shape their online environments. Along with civil society groups and independent researchers, children must also be meaningfully included in any assessment of platforms’ risk mitigations and regulatory evaluations of what constitutes a safe platform.
