How a BBC documentary titled Careless Machine is asking deep questions about online safety of children?
The BBC documentary Careless Machine left me deeply disturbed.
What stayed with me was that, in the pursuit of growth and advertising revenue, the wellbeing of children felt negotiable. If content that appears to exploit children can repeatedly pass through ad approval systems, if warnings are raised and meaningful action is delayed, we have to ask ourselves a difficult question: When it comes to children and social media, what are we optimising for?
It also made me realize one of the reasons why governments across the world, from Australia to several European countries, and now states like Karnataka are considering stronger restrictions or are beginning to debate limiting children’s access to social media.
This conversation is often framed as freedom versus regulation and is looked at as interference in free choice of teenagers.
However, I think it is the wrong question and we are missing the point.
The real question is:
What kind of digital ecosystems are our children living with?
If the incentive is to maximise engagement, if algorithms use outrage, fear, shock and addiction keep children online longer, and if harmful or violent content continues to find its way to young people, then bans are only stemming the symptom and not addressing the deeper issue.
We have reached a point where governments are stepping in because the communities responsible for children’s wellbeing have not acted quickly enough.
As an educator, I know that children do not become resilient because we expose them to increasingly unsafe environments. They become resilient because they grow within safe ecosystems that gradually expand their agency, judgement and independence.
That is true in their offline environments like schools and families. It cannot be any different online.
At Sparkling Mindz Global, we say that it takes a village to raise a child and it takes a committed community to raise confident learners and changemakers.
Today that community must include technology companies, governments, schools, parents, advertisers and civil society.
Instead of asking only whether children are ready for social media, perhaps we should ask whether social media is ready for children?
Until the answer is yes, the conversation about bans will have to continue, because society is trying to protect childhood.
Technology should help children flourish, not compete for their attention at any cost.
Contributed by Sreeja Iyer, Founder of Sparkling Mindz Preschool, School, and Afterschool.
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