Why the Internet Should be Made Safer for Children – Not the Other Way Around | Baroness Beeban Kidron

[Kris Perry]: Welcome to Screen Deep, the podcast where we decode young brains and behavior in a digital world. I’m your host, Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens.

Today, I am both honored and humbled to be speaking with Baroness Beeban Kidron, member of the UK House of Lords, an award-winning filmmaker, founder of the 5Rights Foundation, and one of the world’s leading voices on children’s rights in the digital age. Through her work as a filmmaker, legislator, and advocate, Baroness Kidron has helped shape groundbreaking policies like the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code and has challenged governments and technology companies to put children’s developmental needs at the center of digital design. Most recently, she’s the author of Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back. In this episode, we explore how today’s digital world was not built with children in mind, how platform design influences children’s development and decision-making, and what meaningful online protection should look like.

Beeban, welcome to Screen Deep. It’s such a pleasure to have you with us. 

[Beeban Kidron]: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here and thank you for that very kind introduction, Kris.

[Kris Perry]: I so admire your leadership in the UK and EU on children’s online safety, which I suspect builds on the personal inflection point in your book – after smartphones started being widely accessible by young people – of walking into a silent room of 15-year-old girls.

[Beeban Kidron]: It was 2012, and I guess that was the time where a mobile phone became a price point that an adult might hand one to a child. And I walked into my own kitchen, and there were four girls, and they were all looking intently at their laps. And I think it’s hard for people to think about it now, because that is a norm that we all see on the subway, on the buses, in our houses, whatever. But at the time, it was really shocking, because I’d never seen four girls in the same room not talking. And I just had this thought – it kind of popped in my mind. I thought, “I wonder what it’s going to be like to grow up here,” meaning here in my kitchen, but also there.

And of course, once I thought about “there,” I did start wondering, “What is there?” And, you know, “How do we know what there is?” And because I was a filmmaker and, you know, in between my kind of Hollywood feature-film-type work, I used to make documentaries on things that interested me. And there I was, three weeks later, camera in hand, off I went. And I had a period which was so formative to me – and in a sense is the basis of everything that happened next – which was I spent hundreds of hours in the bedrooms and lives of children. And I watched and I witnessed what they were doing, and it was gorgeous. Falling in love, and going on meetups, and being creative. And it was really, really scary, and, you know, people putting themselves in danger, going, meeting with strangers. And it was everything in between, from pornography to self-harm and so on.

And what I realized, on that journey – because, you know, I also talked to a lot of the founders of the digital world, but what I really kind of realized then was – a technology had been invented for adults, by adults, on the basis that all users would be equal. That was, like, the idea of it. And suddenly I go, “Hang on a minute. If we assume all users are equal, then we’re treating a child as if they’re an adult.” And I came out of that experience feeling that we had sort of allowed a generational injustice. And I have to say, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it, at that point, no one was that interested. But I have to say, from a personal point of view, I never made another film again. And I became, you know, a “mad,” if you like, advocate for children against Silicon Valley, which is quite a hubristic position to take. 

But to be honest, Kris, at the time, I actually tried to go to established politicians, to go to the children’s charities, to go to the tech companies, to go to academia. And it was really, it was Kool-Aid time. Everybody thought tech was the new big thing. And everyone thought I was the middle-aged woman who didn’t get the new rock and roll. Things have changed now, thankfully, but it was one of those things. Sometimes you see, and you cannot unsee. And what I saw was that we had done a great disservice to childhood.

[Kris Perry]: So one thing that really strikes me about your biography is that you are a storyteller. You’re a really effective speaker. You’re an influential leader. And you’ve taken that storytelling skill and you’ve brought it to this issue where we’re at a tipping point in many ways, aren’t we, in the world around what technology has done to childhood.

You started something called the 5Rights Foundation. And I really think that was instrumental in launching so many of the tangible outcomes of your passion over these many, many years. Tell us a little bit more about the 5Rights Foundation, and your impetus for starting, and what they’ve accomplished in all these years.

[Beeban Kidron]: Well, I mean, that’s a big chunk of work right there, but I think there are two or three things that maybe are unique. First of all, the 5Rights Foundation, although it is an international NGO at this point, it was started on the understanding that children needed adults to manifest their voice in this discussion. And so it was actually not started first as an organization – it was started as a series of workshops with young people, in which they sort of told me – us academics, a group of us –  what they were thinking about. And I try to use the principles of deliberative juries, i.e., people who don’t necessarily know what their rights are but have a lot of lived experience. And so I would say, “Oh, well, do you know this? And do you know that? Look, should we look at terms and conditions together?” And, “What do you think’s right about that? What do you think’s wrong?” And then they go, “Oh, but Miss, you know, this is right. And this is wrong. And this is what would happen.” And I just do remember in those early days watching an 11-year-old boy invent two-factor authentication, way before it was a norm that we used it every time. And what he was saying is, “Can’t they check with my parents through two-factor authentication that I’m a kid and treat me accordingly?” And I just go, out of the mouths of babes comes a lot of truth. So right at its heart, you know, 5Rights Foundation was, “What is the problem as kids experience it?” And a lot of the legislation that I’ve drafted is on the back of their experience. So, that’s one thing that I think kind of goes, you know, like writing through a stick of rock, you know, through 5Rights.

I think the other thing is that we really early on just accepted the concept of existing rights for children. That I know America doesn’t sign it, and I believe that to be a terrible problem and mistake and dereliction, actually, of duty in my view. But, you know, more profoundly, what happened after the war and as the whole kind of rights mechanism got developed, that people realized that children were not just little adults. They were entities who had experiences and needs that actually were related specifically to their age.

And the rights framework really guards against a few things that happen in the child protection space. First of all, there are rights to do with access, and participation, and flourishing, and play, and personal development, and engagement. So there’s all these things that we want for children, yeah? Then, there are the things that they must access like education, and health, and so on, you know, and a roof over their head. And then there are the things that we must protect them from. You know, violence, and sexual violence, and economic abuse, and other forms of inequity and bias. And so, here you’ve got this framework that actually goes, you know, childhood is not just about stopping the bad stuff, it’s about how do we create a world in which the good stuff can happen? And again, that goes through 5Rights like that. So you have the children’s voice, and then you’ve got this sort of really rich version of what good looks like.

And then, I think very early, and again, I work with a lot of people from the academic child development community, who I have to say, along with teachers, were really early to this issue, really early. And I think that that has been a sort of another sort of, you know, marker in the sand from 5Rights, which is largely focused on legislative and regulatory change and creating standards and so on. So, it’s a bit of a dry organization in one sense, but the other thing has been the child development milestones. And again and again and again, what 5Rights is looking at is, can a child reasonably meet its childhood development milestones with the tech it’s using? And if it can’t, that is a harm. It’s not that harm is active, it’s that actually opportunity cost, when the cost is not developing as a child, is actually a harm in itself.

I think that those are the elements, you know, that really make it a very strong organization because you’re not making up what good looks like. You’re actually drawing on such rich resources of childhood experience, development, rights, and so much academia that has fed into those things.

[Kris Perry]: I mean, are those five rights that came out of your organization applicable in the digital environment only? Obviously that was your impetus for launching the 5Rights Foundation, but what are the five rights that apply to the digital environment?

[Beeban Kidron]: Well, it’s an interesting question. I mean, I think the original five – gosh, this is a test – right to remove, right to know, right to safety and support, I think it was the right to informed and conscious use, and the right to digital literacy. And actually, if you look a little bit closely at those, they actually do sort of map onto the broader UNCRC rights. So, they’re a distillation rather than an addition. And they were put in the language of the digital world. And I would say that what was important about that moment was that everyone was running around saying, “Do we need children’s digital rights?” And I was going, “No, we just actually must impose their rights and their needs onto these businesses.”

And I think that’s one of the tricks of the trade of the tech companies is that they have done absolutely their best, and put hundreds of millions of dollars into doing it, to persuade us that they’re not companies, they’re not corporates, they’re not businesses, that they are somehow these ethereal beings that provide services out of the goodness of their heart. Because if you take any other business and go, “What are your responsibilities to children?” They’re actually very well articulated and they include, you know, everything from specific duties to overarching duties of care, and know your customer, and product liability, and all these really important things that tech has somehow avoided.

And to be honest, a lot of my book is actually to do with trying to say, “We will never win this battle unless we win the battle of tech exceptionalism,” which is this idea that it sits above democratic demands. And equally, we will never win the battle for children unless we recognize it is actually the same battle as the creative community are having about copyright,  as the working, you know, in a very broad sense, right across the piece, people who are going to be displaced by AI. And also mis- and disinformation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, the big issues around security, and national security, and what these systems mean for that. And that always kind of makes people go, “Oh my God, it’s a tsunami. I can’t deal with it.” And what the book tries to do is put it in bite-sized pieces and say, “Yes, we can. Yes, we can deal with this.” Because we understand it as a system, we treat it as a system.

[Kris Perry]: So for those of us who were around in the late nineties when the dot-com fever first really took off, can remember that sense of optimism and equality and freedom that accompanied the first wave of internet technological change that you described. There was this feeling of freeing society from the shackles of traditional gatekeepers and allowing free information exchange that was really exciting. It felt real. Yet, here we are, thirty years later, and the big tech companies, that design and host the digital lives of most of the world, are less scrappy progressive upstarts that are built on publicly funded knowledge and creativity. That these giants, you know, they’re watching over everything, and they seem to be involved in every part of our lives now. And they’re kind of controlling the narrative, too, about themselves, and about us, and, you know, whether or not they’re even harming children. So what’s the brief history of what’s going on at this moment and this opportunity and this optimism, how did we get from that to this?

[Beeban Kidron]: You know, it’s funny, because I have this first chapter which tells that story. And I’ll be honest with you, I had it in the book, and out the book, and in the book, and out the book. And I just couldn’t work out whether people really wanted a little bit of a history lesson. And in the end, I left it in the book. And the reason was I know very, very few tech detractors that were not once tech optimists. Like you just described your own journey, like my own journey. I was sitting here in this very room with a webcam, you know, when it first was possible. And no one else I knew in the world had a webcam, so I couldn’t even ring them. You know, it was ridiculous.

And I think the reason that I did write about that is actually just very simple, which is it’s not the technology, stupid. It’s the business model. And I think that that story of corporate power taking over, not only something that was public, and optimistic, and quite democratic in its intent. But really interestingly – paid for largely by the American public, I might say, – tax dollars went into the development of a lot of the technology that has since been privatized. And I think that’s a really interesting point. It could have belonged to all of us. Actually, it did belong to all of us. And gradually, it’s been put behind private doors. And as it has been put into private doors, they’ve also built these very, very powerful, sort of what we call “vertical stacks.” But again, you don’t really need to understand the technology. You just have to notice, you know, that Amazon has the robots. It has the way of anybody finding your product. It charges the person who has the product. It charges the person who buys the product. It actually takes a cut from the person who delivers the product and so on and so forth. And it doesn’t pay half as much tax as if you actually bought it on your high street.

And so a lot of the things that are inherently, feel like progress, become actually really points of extraction. They become points of control, and financial extraction, those two things. And that’s the story that I try and tell. And I try and tell it in some pretty ludicrous ways about, you know, how I get stuck in Montecino without the Uber, you know, that just keeps on cancelling. And in fact, it happened to me last night in Edinburgh. I tried to get an Uber. The guy was standing in front of me. I said, “Can I have a ride?” He says, “No, you’ve got to go to the app.” And I literally stood for 12 minutes waiting for an Uber, while that guy stood empty. And you go, “Who is this serving? What kind of convenience is this?” Not the guy and not me, but someone in the middle who was getting the money. So, I know this sounds like a long way from child protection. I know it sounds like, “What is she talking about here, about the money?” But I think that is what happened, Kris.

[Kris Perry]: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent.

[Beeban Kidron]: The journey is how did they get so powerful? How did they get so powerful and unaccountable when, actually, it’s all about the money? It’s not some great societal service.

[Kris Perry]: Yeah, I mean the commodification of the internet is something that happened so subtly. It was so gradual. And then, as you point out, there comes a point where you realize everything you’re doing, every interaction you’re engaged in, whether it’s trying to buy something, or go somewhere, or reserve a time, whether it’s with your doctor or your dinner, or – it’s all being done through an interface that was created by a technology company so that, indeed, they can extract not just your time, but your money. And I really appreciate that you took it to more of a personal place, because what we’re doing in this conversation is trying to connect that shift to what’s going on for kids and whether or not they’re being protected, whether it’s their data or their time. And it’s not the technology, it’s the business model. Thank you for making that point.

You’ve compared, in fact, this moment to the tobacco moment. And I really think that’s a useful analogy. Can you explain a little bit about why you think they’re the same?

[Beeban Kidron]: So, I think that at first blush, you might say, “Hang on a minute. Tobacco is always bad, and tech isn’t always bad.” And I would absolutely agree with that and I hope that’s already been made clear. But the tobacco moment is actually about corporate knowledge and what’s happening right now in the courts. And I think that why I see it as the same is, for decades, the tobacco companies went, “It’s your personal responsibility, you must smoke less.” You know, use your phone less, be a better parent, yeah? Then they say, “It’s about free speech, it’s about your right,” and people say that about tobacco, you know, et cetera, et cetera. 

So there’s this incredible parallel except, recently, people are asking the same questions that they started to ask about tobacco. They stop talking about personal choice and they start going, “Hmm, what did you know? When did you know it? Did you know it was hurting your customers? Did you deliberately hide it from your customers? And did you continue to sell it for your customers, even when you knew it would hurt them?” And that was what changed tobacco. And we’ve seen it in other places in society, and other legal things, you know. Maybe I would have said asbestos, but there are other sort of legal cases like that.

But I think that what has happened, the big tobacco moment, the big tech moment, is that now the courts are not saying, “Did the parent parent well? Or did the child do as instructed?” They’re saying, “Hang on a minute, you guys. Are you deliberately rolling out these products to kids, knowing that they’re addictive? Knowing that they get anxious? Knowing that it sort of, like, clusters into certain sorts of behaviors and harm? And why are you not responsible for it?” So, I think they are now finally being treated like a manufacturer.

[Kris Perry]: Yeah, well, the consumer protection model, is it like that legal theory seems to be one that has quite a bit of traction. I really appreciate this idea that there are addiction industries and they use a similar playbook. And I love this point that – when did they know? Why did they keep doing it?

You mentioned earlier that tech platforms are treating all users equally, which has led to de facto treating kids like adults. But children are not adults. And, what specifically are the design patterns present on today’s internet that are most risky or harmful to children and young people? And why are children’s brains more at risk from these patterns?

[Beeban Kidron]: Well, answering the second part first, you know that children, by definition, have more plasticity in their brains. So if you’ve not fully developed all your habits, yeah, then those habits are available to be created. And I can’t remember whether it’s seven or nine, but those early years in particular set habits that are very difficult to turn around in later life. That’s a little bit less true after that age, and then again and again and again. So, you know, the younger the child, the more plasticity there is, the more habit-forming it is.

And that’s why, and I know you and I share this, because we’ve discussed it before, you know, an absolute horror about what’s happening in early years. And I have, as the research starts coming out, I have become quite outspoken on saying very, very young children, just don’t give them, you know…video call Granny. That’s it. That’s it. Like, it’s a special treat, but do not have babies and toddlers and little kids with screens. So I’ve become very virulent on that. I think we are going to see that as a form of abuse in a generation or so.

But more precisely, I think you can take it all the way down to features. And the one thing that I would just say as an aside before I name some of the features, you know, many of them are not that big a deal on their own, but they work in a sort of concert, yeah? So if you imagine Elon or Mark or one of these guys, Sam, you know, back in Silicon Valley, like the conductor. If you have, for example, infinite scroll, no way of stopping, no automatic thing, no breath to interrupt, autoplay, streaks, notifications, those social measures or, you know, the sort of our flight-or-fight mechanisms that mean that if something actually flashes or buzzes over my shoulder, I’m going to go like that, I’m a human being. So those sorts of things.

I think that as children get a little bit older and they get into the part of their lives that kind of, I would guess early, mid-teens, where peers start to be more important than – or, as important as – their family structure, then all the social reward stuff and all the watching each other stuff absolutely is devastating. And I think, again, you know, keeping them engaged. The addictive bit, so the addictive bit in early years, the addictive bit in the tweeny bit, the addictive bit when they’re socially comparing – you know, the addiction is the problem at every stage, and then the other more detailed problems hit in according to development.

And I think there’s something else which is harder to describe but perhaps the most important thing of all, which is everything a child does in this world is treated as a signal through a lens of commercial interest, yeah? So if they’re home on a Friday night, if they’ve just removed a selfie because they didn’t like the look of it, if they’ve been just tagged and they somehow drop out of the conversation, those things are signals that maybe they’re not having a great time, so it’s a really good time to advertise cosmetics. Make yourself feel better, yeah? So that’s an example. I think we’ve got other examples where the signal is someone is 13, they’ve bought trainers, they like working out. That’s married to some other commercial signal that decides they also like pornography or very thin girls, yeah? They may or may not like that, but it’s all built into this sort of tribal set of signals that say, “Well, it’s a really odds-on chance that this kind of person will like this.”

And so the subtle thing that I’m trying to say, which is between design and content, is that actually if all you are is a series of signals to either addict you further or monetize your behavior, what you are not is a free human being to pursue your own interests. And for me, fundamental in this battle, yeah, is the freedom of thought, the allowing a child to actually have a nothingness upon which they impose themselves, is the bit that we are really depriving our children of. So some of this is mechanics, the addiction bit, the content bit, the not exploiting children, the giving them different business models of tools, not taking all their time, all of those things are – I am a legislator, so they’re legislative, they’re regulatory, they’re standards and so on. And then there’s a cultural bit, which I do think is up to you and me and parents and, you know, even kids themselves as they go through life, which is actually, you know, holding onto the idea of a child, not as a node in a system, but actually as a project in action, a project in the making, and actually making sure that we all give it conditions in which it can make because part of the making has to be from the self, from within.

And I hope to the people listening that doesn’t sound sort of kooky, but I absolutely – I get this from children – they feel that they’ve been crowded out of their own childhood, yeah? This is not some middle-aged woman giving you their wooden toys and cardboard boxes and, “What I did when I was young…” Forget it. Nobody should do what I did when I was young. But I am saying that the children themselves, you know, I speak to nine-year-olds who feel they’ve had a lost childhood. Come on. It’s an evil.

[Kris Perry]: To that cultural point, why do you think that a society that in some ways has become incredibly, and maybe even overly, safety-conscious when it comes to kids and cars and smoking and alcohol and cannabis or even just walking alone to the store, for example, has just basically let kids roam free on the adult internet for the last fifteen years?

[Beeban Kidron]: I mean, do you know what my real answer to that? I don’t know. For the last 15 years, I feel a bit like sort of a mad woman screaming into the dark. You know, actually, you know, and thankfully, and along the way, I’ve met so many people who are fighting this fight with me. And in fact, in my book, I list some of what, you know, the guerrilla fighters.

But I think that the less personal answer and maybe the more practical answer is to say this, is in the beginning there was this optimistic moment. I think everybody let it go on before they realized it was captured. Once it was captured, then these guys had phenomenal access and money into the political class and then just when everybody, everybody knew it was bad – not in a good bad way, but bad, yeah? – then the sort of “hang on a minute, it can get people elected,” right? I did an event yesterday with Sarah Wynn-Williams, who wrote Careless People, and in her book, the moment that Mark Zuckerberg realized he put Trump into the White House, you know, that – irrelevant whether you’re a Trump supporter or not, the idea that Mark Zuckerberg could put anyone into any legislative situation really talks about the distortion of power.

And a lot of what I’m trying to persuade people now is we have two things. We have two things. We have our attention and we can spend it. We should spend our attention like money. I’m not saying get off everything. I’m saying, “How many apps do you need? How many influencers do you need? How many message sites do you need?” Da, da, da. Maybe we just concentrate ourselves on a smaller thing. That will take a lot of the noise away for us and give them a lot less power. And all the, you know, making it private, making it silent and all of those things.

But the other thing we have, those of us who still live in democracies, is our vote. And what’s been absolutely extraordinary is, as I’ve gone round in the book, I’ve gone, I keep on doing this in public audiences, and I go, “Hey, who voted last time because of the party’s tech policy?” Hundreds and thousands of people, no one. And what I am saying is, we actually do have some sway on the politicians who are just a little bit in love with tech, yeah? And they’re in love with it for two reasons. One is it’s the mega-growth industry and they have not worked out that it’s growth at their expense, so they want a bit of it. They don’t want to be left behind. They’ve also worked out it can help them get elected. It can help them speak to their people. It can spread their message. And so they’ve cared a little bit less than they should, that it can also spread hardship and abuse and hate and child abuse and so on. And so I think that it’s up to us to be the guerrilla fighters, and it’s up to us to spend both our attention and our political capital very, very carefully in the couple of years ahead.

[Kris Perry]: Paint a picture for us of what meaningful improvements to child safety online would look like and how can and should current platforms adjust to better protect children’s health and well-being?

[Beeban Kidron]: The first thing I want to say is the narrative that this is an inevitable outcome of the technology, I reject. I believe, Kris, you reject that. That is a wrong narrative, it’s a false narrative, and it’s a self-serving narrative. So is the idea that tech’s going to save tech, yeah? The only people who can fix this problem. So I would invite you to think of it the other way around and say, “How do we make technology safe for children?” Rather than, “How do we make children safer on technology?” Which, I know you didn’t quite say, but I’m just trying to say where my starting point is. And then that becomes quite easy because I’ve got the child in my mind, as it were, and I think, well, the first thing you do is you make it private by design. You make it safe by design. You don’t put – it’s not you take off or you ban or you this – you just don’t design it with all the things that create problems for children. It means assessing the risk before you roll out. It means setting standards and sharing interoperable standards. So when it has a standard, you know, that we know it meets it. And it means if age really matters, it means having real age assurance. And I don’t mean via parents. And I will say this, I know in America, everyone’s very keen on parental controls, but I am afraid not everyone has parents who are able, not everyone has parents who are attentive, and children don’t have the right only if they have the right parents, yeah?

Secondly, you don’t say a car only has to be safe for a certain set of drivers. You say a car has to be safe and then whoever drives it has to be a decent driver. That’s a better balance, and that’s what we want. There’s always going to be role for parents. There’s always going to be role for the culture of the family. But I guess what I’m saying is, different experiences at different ages really matter. Persuasive features should not be used inappropriately. They shouldn’t be profiled into gangs and commercial tribes. You must limit unknown adult content. You shouldn’t have recommender systems that are recommending things for particular commercial or social outcomes or harmful material, for example. A huge one that they could do today is actually really put effective “report and redress.” And I cannot tell you how many whistleblowers have sat in this room and told me that they actually said, you know, “We told them, we told them, there’s a predator, we told them, we told them, they’re hurting them, and we told them, and they just didn’t care.” If we had really, really robust reporting, redress, and executive responsibility, oh boy, would we be in a different world. 

And then finally, I would just absolutely be really robust about the fact that these are products, they are liable for their product. They are even liable if their product is misused in ways that they could have foreseen. The whole kind of, and you sort of touched on it before, the whole very developed magnificence of the consumer rights and corporate responsibility regime would suddenly be there. So in fact, one of my projects here in the UK is to see whether we could extend product liability law to apps. I would love to see that. I have plenty of ideas you can see. It starts with making it safe by design and it ends with making tech leaders responsible. That’s the journey. Instead of putting it on kids and parents.

But I think that in that, I really want to make clear that I don’t think that we want to disappear children from the digital world. You know, I really don’t think that’s right. That is not the same as saying, “Oh, well, this is lousy, so let’s have them all on Instagram.” Those are two separate points. And I’ll just give you an example that here in the UK, it is now official guidance not to put pictures of your children on the internet because of the way that those pictures are being used and abused. And I’m involved in a case where somebody’s daughter was scraped from a Facebook family page and used by incel, which are, you know, particularly groups of misogynist men, and used to relieve sexual pleasure over the picture of this child, right? So now we take children off the digital world. Well, I come back to you and say, “What is the state of magazines and comics, of TV, traditional TV and da da?” All of it’s moved here, and then we take children out. You know, we’re doing the Pied Piper here. We’re actually disappearing children from the digital world. So I think we have to be very robust and say, “No guys, you don’t get to disappear our children. You get to treat them with respect or not at all, and it’s on you.”

And the final thing I’ll say is please note that at least a third of people online in the world are under 18. This is a big market, right? Now it may be that serving that market if they’re out of the way, yeah, will be less profitable because it will be less avaristic. There’s still plenty of people and plenty of margin and plenty of money to make just by making age-appropriate tools for families, for kids. And frankly, for me, because I get a shedload of abuse if I’m on them.

[Kris Perry]: Yeah. But it does seem like things are a bit better in Europe. As you know, in the United States we have a law called Section 230 that prevents us from holding tech companies accountable for content on their platforms.

You’ve done so much important work on getting legislation passed that addresses tech design in the UK. Can you tell our listeners briefly about those legislative changes?

[Beeban Kidron]: I think that that’s why, you know, in our little piece about the tobacco moment, that’s so important that actually, even in America, people aren’t looking at Section 230. They’re saying, “Hang on, you know you were creating damage, and it’s a design factor, consumer fact.” So I think that’s been a really important change. 

Here, I introduced something called the “age-appropriate design code.” It’s higher privacy for children. And I think it’s really worth taking a look at and it’s on the 5Rights website, but it’s really worth looking at the detail of that because actually there is a correlation between privacy and safety. If you’re not extending the use, if you’re not overexposing, if you’re not doing all those things that I mentioned in loops and autoplays and so on, you are in effect using privacy to keep them a whole lot safer. A lot less time. A lot less exposure. So we did that.

We’ve also passed something called the Online Safety Act, and I was very involved with that for almost eight years. I think that that has done some really significant things, one of which is change public opinion completely on what is appropriate online, including that adult companies, pornography companies have to have a extremely effective age assurance, it’s called. And there is a measure of what that is. But it’s done a lot of other more subtle things, which we probably don’t have time to go into, but it’s everything from enabling coroners at the inquest of a child to ask tech companies for data in relation to that child and what they were doing online and what they were recommended and so on, which would be very interesting in disclosure, we’ve had that once in one of our inquests here. And a lot of things to do with actually levelling the bar between AI and non-AI and also between rules about illegal content offline and online. And we’ve just created a lot more parity and a lot more control. And hopefully to come soon, it has created the possibility of independent research on some of the platforms. So that’s just a sort of a sprinkling. 

I’ve more recently put forward things on chatbots. The government have accepted it in principle, but not in practice yet. And I have done quite a lot of work specifically around all sorts of regulatory issues around child sexual abuse material, which has made it a lot easier for the police to bring charges in the UK to offenders. It’s a whole cacophony of things. And I think there are some things that are really interesting around creative copyright and around personal identity and the ownership of one’s own identity and so on and so forth. But, you know, it stretches forever, the legislative programme. And we are in a couple of weeks about to start a cyber security bill. And we’re trying very hard to use that bill to bring in some other requirements, including red lines for AI. So here we are really, really at pitch battle on all of these issues, and we are hoping that our new Prime Minister is more amenable to some of them than the last one.

[Kris Perry]: Yeah, I mean, and your work has been an inspiration to lawmakers in California, in Illinois, in Michigan. I mean, there are many age-appropriate design code-style bills traveling through state legislators here in the United States. And as you probably heard just a week ago, the United States Senate marked up the Kids Online Safety Act. It looks like something could actually start to happen there. And Section 230 is getting challenged in court. We talked about the judicial process earlier. You talked about whistleblowers. There’s movement and it’s happening through many different governments, very different means, different legal theories.

And what I want to know is – and I don’t want to be pessimistic because there’s so much to be hopeful about at this moment, as people like you have been leading the charge for over a decade. But are the tech companies responding by changing their products? Is there actually meaningful change? Are they coming to the table? Is it really starting to happen or is this going to have to happen to them?

[Beeban Kidron]: It’s a really difficult question. I mean, yes, they have had to change their products. I can point at that through the age-appropriate design code, through Online Safety Act, and many of the things I’ve just mentioned. We have increasingly, you know, very good standards from the IEEE and the, you know, the EU and UK equivalents of standards organizations, because a lot of people are not tech companies, but use a lot of tech, and they actually want to do the right thing. So there’s also a whole kind of voluntary move to have some decent standards.

Having said all that, we’ve let these guys be not just princes, not just kings, but emperors of our world. You know, that’s what we’ve allowed. And every story from history, the emperor lose their minds. You know, power corrupts. They don’t touch the floor. And they think they are above and immune, you know, and that’s absolutely – that’s not me catcalling, that’s what they say about themselves. You know, it’s all on record. So, no, this is going to be something we’re going to do to them. It’s something we’ve been doing to them, and it’s something we need to do faster, cleverer, at greater scale.

And, you know, one thing that I will say to you, Kris, that may not seem obvious – it was when Keir Starmer’s government stalled on a number of legislative things that I would have expected to pass in our parliament because he was trying to do a deal with tech for a UK-US trade deal that I sat down and wrote a book that said, “Guys, this cannot be just my job. This is your job, too. And if you understand it this way, you also understand what you can do, and here’s a list at the end of my book.” That in a sense is me saying, “Look, leadership’s great, you’ve been very kind to me, you say I’m an inspiration, but then be inspired, everybody,” you know, because it’s not a lone woman’s job – nor am I a lone woman, there’s loads of people who do what I do now. But I do think it’s important for people to feel that they are walking towards the world they want. And you know, it is really extraordinary because, literally, their power is us.

[Kris Perry]: I really resonated with a moment you describe in your book, having a bit of naivety of thinking if you just tell everyone what you found out about the harms to children, it’s all going to change. They’ll understand it and they’ll take the steps necessary immediately to fix it. So, knowing that that’s not exactly how this is unfolding, what gives you the most hope about the moment we’re in, and what can we do to improve children’s online and offline lives?

[Beeban Kidron]: First of all, I just really want to say, I get so much joy from my contact with children. You know, “Come on, guys. The people my age, we’ve messed up. We let too much happen in all sorts of areas of life.” And these guys are fierce and they’re fed up with us. And I love they’re fed up with us, and I take the criticism. So it gives me hope that there’s a bunch of people who actually are looking at society differently, and they’re saying, “Actually, you know, maybe we want a little bit less better, maybe we want not to be so hard on the planet, maybe we want to be not so exposed, and maybe those big guys should not be quite so big.” So that gives me hope.

The other thing that gives me hope is every now and again, I come across a technical product – I’m just using it in my working or personal life – and it’s different. And it’s different because either I or someone I know or someone I don’t know has made them change it in law, by regulation. And I kind of go, Hmm, you see?” And I think that’s something that’s really important to say. We kind of said at the beginning, it’s the business model, not the technology. This is a built environment. It can be built differently. It can be instructed. Even AI can be instructed and weighted differently. It is built to optimize for what it does now, and it could be built to optimize, to support childhood, yeah? How great would that be? And I guess that’s my vision. And although I keep on straying in the conversation, say, “Hey, don’t forget, it’s not just kids, it’s creative, it’s jobs, it’s national security, it’s democracy itself.” And I do believe that and I think we must all see it as a line. I do also believe if we don’t get it right for kids, we’ll never fix the rest. So all those people who are disinterested in kids, you just come back over here and be a little bit more interested, yeah? And all those people who are only interested in kids, just raise your eyes and have a look around. Because if they’re right and 40% of humanity loses their jobs, then we got a whole lot of other problems, including the kids in the families of people who lose their income.

So I am just saying it’s one world, there is a bit of a villain in the narrative here, and we got to go slay Goliath, and it’s not going to be just one David, it’s going to be all of us. I really want to finish by saying I’d love everybody in the world to buy my book, but actually, if you have a copy of my book and you want to copy out the last chapter and just share that, which is the, “What we can do,” feel free, you have my permission. This is really an act of advocacy. I think you need the arguments in order to understand what to do, but really, I’m mainly concerned that everybody does what we need them to do now, what we all need for the kids.

[Kris Perry]: Thank you to our listeners and to Baroness Beeban Kidron for this important conversation today. Today’s discussion reminds us that the digital world children grow up in is designed. And if it’s designed, it can be redesigned to better protect children’s health, development, and well-being.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to Screen Deep wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. It helps more parents, educators, clinicians, and policymakers discover these important conversations. To learn more about Baroness Kidron’s work, including her new book, Users, How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back, visit the episode show notes on our website at childrenandscreens.org. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time on Screen Deep.