Sonia Livingstone: I’m actually so horrified by that metaphor of policing. You know, the first wave of parental controls  were all about various forms of kind of spying and secretly monitoring your child and then punishing them when you found they’ve done something wrong. But what are children doing?  You know, they absolutely believe that new technology is their way ahead and should be under their agency and control. It’s become very pernicious that the discourse has somehow set parents and children against each other in some kind of mutual struggle.

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the Web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society in turn is shaping the web. 

My guest today is Sonia Livingstone, who you just heard talking about the tensions internet use can cause between parents and their children. Professor Livingstone is in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, specifically focusing on children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy, and rights in the digital environment. Professor Livingstone currently directs the Digital Futures Commission with the Five Rights Foundation and the Global Kids Online project with UNICEF, and her recent book with Alicia Blum-Ross, Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears About Technology Shape Children’s Lives, was published by Oxford in 2020. Sonia was a keynote speaker at the ACM 2012 web science conference and was awarded the title of the Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2014 for services to children and child internet safety. Welcome, Sonia.

Sonia Livingstone: Thank you so much, Noshir. It’s great to be here.

Noshir Contractor: Well let’s take on that last statement: your recognition for your services to children and child internet safety. What prompted you to focus so much of your attentions on this particular topic? 

Sonia Livingstone: I began my career thinking about media audiences, and I focused on everybody. And when I did one project on children and the changing media environment, I discovered how much all kinds of stakeholders and the public were actually kind of keen to have and engage with the kind of knowledge that us academics produce. The question around risk to children, risk and harm and internet safety, has been building and building as an area where there can be real kind of action consequences from the evidence that I and my colleagues produce, and I found I wanted to get engaged in that and influence that process as well.

Noshir Contractor: And it’s a great example of taking the research that we do as academics and making a real difference in the world, and when you talk about the digital futures, you focus on several dimensions. Can you tell us a little bit more about play and education? 

Sonia Livingstone: I guess I like being where things are contentious. So the Digital Futures Commission, we chose these two topics to focus on as oddly contentious. Our focus on education data, that began as trying to think about a way that the move towards data could be positive for children and how could their data be used from their learning in ways that would benefit them in all kinds of ways and turned into a kind of a dystopian exploration about how value is being extracted from childhood and big tech is profiting from you know everyday activities. And, I mean, play seems like the essence of childhood, but if you talk to parents about playing online, they don’t want their kids to break rules or make new friends or experiment and explore or get into trouble, you know all the things that are part of play suddenly become really difficult in the online context. The purpose of the Digital Futures Commission is to try to think our way through the difficult, naughty, instances in order to, yeah, maybe redesign the web.

Noshir Contractor: One of the issues that you discuss in detail in your work is the amount of agency parents give their children in these contexts. Can you talk some more about the role of parenting in this particular situation? 

Sonia Livingstone: One thing that we learned from a public consultation we held with children earlier this year is how much they kind of want the kind of commercial games made for them to give them more agency. Agency is really hard for children to exercise online. When Alicia and I wrote the book about parenting for digital future, and we were one Britain one American, we had a lot of discussions about the difference between a kind of an American ethos, which is perhaps more protectionist and talks more about parent kind of right to manage and organize children’s digital activities, whereas in Britain and in Europe we’re a bit more kind of child rights focused, and there is more emphasis I think on children’s agency and autonomy, even though that might mean some greater – both risk to the child and also privacy between the child and the parent, and that does kind of change kind of how one can take a child rights perspective, which is what I always try to do my work, but also what the responsibility and role of the parent is in this situation.

Noshir Contractor: When you use the word childrens’ rights, is it only about protecting children, or is it also about giving them certain privileges rather than just focusing on protection? 

Sonia Livingstone: With the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child I’ve been developing this document, it’s called a general comment, which offers guidance to states on how to think about children’s rights in relation to their digital environment. So the purpose of the Convention  is to remind states that children have rights too, in other words, that human rights do apply to those, and people get it, I think, for the right to protection, but they don’t get it so much for the right to privacy or for the right to offer civil rights and freedoms, the right to expression, freedom of thought and assembly and so forth. And the Convention on the Rights of Child adds some things that are specific to children, so one thing is that children should have their rights considered according to their evolving capacity, and another really emphasizes the child’s right to be heard, because children by and large are not attended to in forums where decisions that affect them are taken. And then I guess the Convention adds a number of procedural rights, if you like ways in which, for example, remedy must be child specific. And buried in the Convention are a few extra rights, like the right to play. States kind of need to adjust their mechanisms to recognize children’s rights otherwise actually they’ll be infringed.

Noshir Contractor: And so you really are engaging both on the children’s rights issues with parents on the one hand, as well as governments, and also industry, I imagine? 

Sonia Livingstone: In all that work I did on internet safety, it really was kind of quite policy focused. It’s kind of increasingly becoming important to think more about the industry side, the design side. So many policymakers over the years, say to me, “Well we want X or Y to happen, but the industry is always pushing back saying it’s too late, because things have been set up in this way.” So I think the whole sizable movement now of “by design” – privacy by design, safety by design, security by design and so forth – is an effort that I’m keen to capitalize on so that we do begin to ask the questions about users, people, children also, from when digital products are first designed. 

Noshir Contractor: So is there any success story small or large that you can point to that came out of these efforts at helping to influence design, especially when dealing with industry? 

Sonia Livingstone: In Britain, we have a new code which embeds privacy by design for children, and in fact requires that providers treat children in a what’s called an age appropriate way. So we saw a whole raft of changes from social media platforms, turning off the possibility of unknown adults contacting somebody identified as a child, turning off autoplay for children on YouTube. So we’ve just proposed playful by design, which adds not only that the hygiene factors have got to be dealt with safety and privacy and security ethics, but also that build in imagination, choices for children, so they can determine their own kind of pathway through digital play and ensure that things are more diverse in terms of the emotional kind of experiences on offer and the forms of representation. So we’ve kind of identified, you know, not just how to eliminate problems, but also what would be good, and so we’re now working with games designers workshop that and co-design tools. In some ways the business models are, of course, against us. But I’m written to every day by a range of providers, large and small, who say, you know we want to do the right thing by children, but what is it and who’s going to guide us and where do we go for resources. And that’s the need that we’re trying to address.

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that you’ve discussed also is screen time and what you call “healthy screen time.” A lot of the publicity that we get is about parents policing their children, and platform developers making screen time available for users to monitor and assess. But at the same time, you’ve also said tell parents to stop policing children. 

Sonia Livingstone: I’m actually so horrified by that metaphor of policing. You know, the first wave of parental controls so called were all about various forms of kind of spying and secretly monitoring your child and then punishing them when you found they’d done something wrong. But what are children doing? You know, they absolutely believe that new technology is their way ahead and should be under their agency and control. It’s become very pernicious that the discourse has somehow set parents and children against each other in some kind of mutual struggle and, interestingly, research shows how unproductive this is, because if parents do take that kind of authoritarian approach, that’s when we see children find ways to go online. I don’t know that I really want to talk about healthy screen time so much as thinking in a more nuanced way about the content that children engage with with screens and the kind of context in which they do that, and that always requires an evaluation of what are the merits of the content and what is the child getting from it, and I think parents are actually really keen on that too, but I think as a society we haven’t given parents very many sort of bearings in how to make that judgment, so they don’t know what’s a safe or unsafe website, and we have a lot of marketing that makes a lot of false claims, so they feel kind of without them moorings in making parental judgment.

Noshir Contractor: You’ve said on some occasions that “coding is the new Latin.” Talk a little about how children are dealing – and what we can do as you said to focus not just on the hygiene practices of protecting them, but also unleashing their creativity and innovation. 

Sonia Livingstone: That “coding is the new Latin” was said to us by several parents in our Parenting for Digital Future book. I think in a number of parts of the world, certainly here in Britain, there’s been this kind of big push over the last 10 years to introduce coding into schools and informal learning settings, and this is often taken up with great enthusiasm by both children and parents who, when they’re kind of handed this sort of sense that there are these technological skills that they could gain that are going to be the Latin of the future, you know they’re kind of very keen to try to take them up. But, as we tracked in our book, there’s also all kinds of ways in which relatively privileged middle class parents can put more resources behind it, so it becomes yet another form of concerted cultivation. And we did trace this kind of very disheartening series of small but really consequential ways in which poorer kids kind of got dropped out or couldn’t make the connection between what their teachers wanted of them and what their parents were able to support them in, so the opportunities are there but inequalities are really major challenge.

Noshir Contractor: It won’t be the first time in history that technologies have had these differential impacts based on socioeconomic status, for example.

Sonia Livingstone: In a way, because it’s a familiar problem, it doesn’t necessarily gain the attention, though we are having some interesting debates here about the idea of digital poverty and that one should kind of specify what is the minimum technological support that a family might need just as one might look at their minimum kind of economic needs or nutrition needs.

Noshir Contractor: What you’re discussing takes on even more meaning and importance when we think of all the emerging economy countries and the kids in those countries and where their futures would be headed. 

Sonia Livingstone: Most of the research I’ve been talking about is yes, Global North you know it’s 10 percent of the world’s children. When we did the work on children’s rights for the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, we did a global consultation focusing on countries in the Global South, and what was really fascinating to me was the incredible range of challenges that children are perfectly articulate in telling us about, you know very often around access, cost, the difficulties of living in rural or impoverished circumstances, different family composition, different cultural values, all kinds of diversity in what it is that children want from technology. You know as a field, we’ve got a lot of mind stretching and diversifying to do in terms of setting the frames, and that of course has to be a global conversation, one that’s much more inclusive and collaborative.

Noshir Contractor: I would be remiss in not asking you for your reaction to the recent stories especially about the so-called Facebook Files and Frances Haugen’s comment about the research being done internally by Instagram, pointing to the fact that they are turning 10-year-olds into social media addicts, and that’s a quote. 

Sonia Livingstone: You know, as an academic I believe research should be independently funded, peer reviewed, and fully published. There is something very problematic about industry doing research which reveals problems with its product that damages its users and yet it doesn’t make that public, so I think, you know, she’s done the world an enormous favor in making known what we kind of knew already. That said, clearly it wasn’t great research, there’s plenty of research out there in the world, done independently, which shows that social media content can be harmful, especially to vulnerable teenagers in certain circumstances. I think really no researcher is going to stand up and say social media makes children addicted or social media is the sole cause of harm, so you know we have to have a more nuanced debate, we have to think about the quality of the research, we have to think about the power of the public conditions under which research gets property reviewed and critiqued, and then we need to keep in mind that any harms, anything going wrong in the lives of our children is multiply caused. Social media is just part of a really bigger picture.

Noshir Contractor: On the one hand, you are encouraged by the fact that these private companies and platforms are at least making an effort to do some research, but then, the quality of that research remains suspect, and yet, the dilemma is that these private platforms have access to incredibly large amounts of data that would lend themselves to a lot of rigorous research, and yet a lot of the research that you said that is being done by academics, is not leveraging this data. Is there an opening for academia to start a dialogue with the private platforms in order for them to make their data available for rigorous research that is more transparent than studies such as the ones Frances Haugen is reporting on?

Sonia Livingstone: I think, sometimes at least the politicians kind of representing the interests of the Academy have said, give us your data. And the platforms say you know, “We have an awesome amount of data, what do you want, and what are your questions?” And so I think we need to get clever in a way about specifying what data we want so that it becomes more precise. I just wonder if there are analogies that we could learn from. In the transport industry, did they work out how to figure out the safety of cars and traffic and trains and planes, you know, using industry data but also having independent scrutiny? You know, there must be some kind of precedent, it feels like we’re inventing this discussion de novo and we’re not doing a very good job at it. 

Noshir Contractor: Well I think that’s a really good idea to look for analogies in terms of being able to set up better academic industry partnerships. In closing here Sonia, can you talk a little bit about what’s next, what’s coming down the pike in terms of the Digital Futures Commission? What’s next on the horizon? 

Sonia Livingstone: I think for the Digital Futures Commission, what I really want to do is kind of distill from what we’ve learned about play and what we’re learning about education data, what that guidance would be for innovators and designers so that they have got the place to turn when they want to know how do they get it right for children. There isn’t synthesized guidance. And I think for me, the intellectual question coming up is really, how much are children not exactly the Canaries in the coal mine but a way in which society can think about vulnerable internet users generally, because there are clearly all kinds of parallels with other vulnerable or disadvantaged groups when it comes to digital design and technology policy, and it’s still an open question in my mind whether, you know, each group has to kind of fight its cause or whether there’s a way of kind of coming together and recognizing that the days of digital design for rather privileged, you know able bodied people, whether those days are done, and I don’t know what that new world will look like, but I think it’s going to be a really fascinating debate.

Noshir Contractor: Well again, thank you so much Sonia for taking time to talk to us about this incredible, intricate relationship between children, parents, government and policy makers, and platform developers, and I think you’ve really helped us a great deal in trying to rethink and reimagine what these relationships should be with the goals of helping preserve the rights of children and indeed to unleash their creativity moving forward. So thank you so much, Sonia for talking to us about this today. 

Sonia Livingstone: Thank you so much, this is just the journey and many people on it, but it’s always fun to discuss it with you, thank you.

Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Susanna Kemp. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today in the show notes. Thanks for listening.