•A 14-year-old boy poses at his home near Gosford in Australia as he looks at social media on his mobile phone
Making the digital world safe for children is an urgent priority, the United Nations said today, adding that those those responsible for online harm must be held to account.
UN rights chief Volker Turk said states had to force tech giants to embed child safety, and said child harm was the direct result of business practices and design choices, reports AFP.
“The digital world that connects children to learning, community, and creativity also exposes them to real risks to their safety, privacy, and wellbeing,” Turk said in a statement.
“Online harms to kids’ safety, privacy and wellbeing are not innate or inevitable; they result from design choices and business practices that undermine safety, including addictive design features, such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and persistent notifications from apps.
“Enhancing protection of children online is an urgent priority that we need to make sure not only gets done — but that it gets done right,” he added.
The UN high commissioner for human rights called for tougher measures by countries and tech firms to make online platforms safe places for children, through better regulation, oversight and accountability.
“Blanket social media bans are not a one-off panacea,” Turk added.
“Simply limiting access to platforms that remain unsafe cannot stand as the endpoint in effectively protecting children.”
He called for platforms to be made safer by design and ensure that data is protected, while “those responsible for harm can held to account”.
‘Micro-Targeting’ of Kids
Turk said simply focusing on age restrictions would leave unaltered the designs and algorithms that made the platforms unsafe in the first place.
Tech giants must embed safety “by design, instead of shifting the burden to parents and children”, he said.
The UN rights chief also said experience so far showed that bans could be easily circumvented and voiced concern that such bans could even end up pushing children to riskier, even less monitored platforms.
His office produced a set of 10 guidelines entitled “Getting Children’s Safety Online Right”.
These included ensuring the maximum protection of children’s data as a default setting, while the “micro-targeting” of children for commercial purposes, based on a digital record, “should not be permitted”.
They said emerging concerns such as restrictions on artificial intelligence chatbot use or addictive design features may warrant age restrictions.
Measures should be subject to independent oversight, with legal consequences that serve as deterrents, the guidelines said.
There should also be access to remedy for children whose rights are violated.
“Whatever regulations are adopted, it is essential to avoid inadvertently causing further harms. For example, age verification done wrong can both fail at its goal and endanger the privacy of both kids and adults,” said Turk.
