Quire, a newsletter about young people online

A renewed spirit of enquiry into healthy online experiences for young people

I am usually uncertain that my answer is the definitively right one. As a child, teenager, student, and later a young adult, this seemed like a curse, especially when immersed in extremely vocal and dynamic academic or corporate cultures. Across multiple countries and institutions, I marvelled at how resolute some many people seemed in their answers, even as I kept enquiring within about whether there could be other sides to any issue.

After nearly fifteen years of working on the wellbeing of young people, from within companies like Disney, Google, Twitter, and Meta, I have started to see this instinct to enquire as a gift. Online behaviours are constantly evolving and our approach to building products or policies needs to keep up. We need to regularly question how people at different developmental stages experience the internet, what they need from us, and when we should get out of their way.

Two months ago, I started VYS, a youth consulting practice, and had many questions for the people I work with. I would shoot the breeze with clients, academics, friends, and colleagues, enquiring about their thoughts on the latest moves companies or regulators were making around youth safety and privacy online. I would quiz clients on how they wanted to factor some of these developments into their work, and those discussions became a part of our ongoing projects.

Increasingly, I began to feel that it was important for more people to be involved in asking and answering these questions. We just had an explosive child safety hearing in the US Senate - the tenth such hearing in three years - which trod over many of the same old tired questions. Youth safety and privacy is now a top global concern globally. Many countries have implemented or are reviewing legislation around safe product development, established guardrails around data collection and targeting children, and increasingly expect companies to build age-appropriate experiences. 

I want this newsletter to be a handy resource on what debates are happening in youth tech policy right now. If this is landing in your inbox, we have chatted about these issues in some form, and you are also interested in these issues. I hope this newsletter can help you enquire about how we can build safer, private, and healthier online products and policies for young people. By curating and analysing the work being done by young people, educators, companies, governments, and civil society, you can have a better handle on the top questions of the moment when it comes to young people’s experiences online.

Some areas into which we will enquire, sharing the latest happenings and starting a conversation:

Age verification and assurance: Should we know how old people are online? Should it come at the expense of user privacy? Who should be responsible for age verification, and what should companies do once they have this information?

Age-appropriate design: A mouthful of a phrase that’s barely five years old yet has mushroomed into legislation across countries like the UK, Ireland, European Union, Australia, and US states like California. What do these guidelines mean in practice for companies?

Ranking and recommendations: We have nearly a decade of algorithmic ranking to examine, and mixed views on whether they impact the safety and wellbeing of youth. What are the range of approaches available to us when ranking or recommending content for young people, and what are the tradeoffs involved?

General artificial intelligence: With the rapid proliferation of tools built on GAI, what is the responsibility of the builders and disseminators of intelligent models to mitigate the risk of child endangerment, grooming, self-harm, or other types of abuse? What should data collection practices, mitigating bias in model design, and moderating interaction outputs look like when products are available to young people?

Youth privacy, agency, and autonomy: We have historically always sounded the alarm on the next threat to “the children”, and in some parts of the world been quick to discount the rights and agency of young people to build their own identities. How can we protect these rights and how do they play out across online platforms today?

The role of young people, parents, educators, companies, civil society, and governments: Our views on which of these stakeholders should be responsible for which part of the online experience is rapidly evolving. We’ve seen many tech companies launch parental controls over the last few years, even when we know parental controls are largely ineffective for increasing youth safety. We increasingly look to companies to moderate online experiences for young people, but are there tradeoffs to consider when private corporations make these decisions? 

A few things to note about this newsletter (and I might make this a standing glossary in the future):

I will write in British English, the form that I am most used to (and frankly prefer). This means “u”s where some weren’t expecting them and “s”es where they were expecting “z”s. If this is you and it starts to feel unbearably irritating, drop me a note and tell me how you feel.

“Youth” / “Young people” generally refers to anyone under the age of 18, and can be further disaggregated into “children” and “teens”. I will be specific wherever there is a difference in how we should address the two groups:

• Children: Youth under the age of 13

• Teens: Youth aged between 13 - 17

This is my starting point: I believe that thoughtful and data-driven design choices can lead to substantially better outcomes for young people’s experiences online. I have seen this firsthand through the policy and product decisions my teams and I directly informed at the companies where we worked. Where those choices are not possible because of other considerations, I believe we should have an informed conversation about those tradeoffs and try to find middle ground.

What I’m reading / asking about:

Last week was Safer Internet Day, and so many people had announcements to make. Many groups recapped ongoing efforts or talked about their programs and partnerships, so I am focusing on specific product and content updates:

• YouTube shared a report it backed from the World Health Organization (WHO) and British Medical Journal (BMJ), outlining principles for appropriate mental health content for teens.

• Discord will soon offer safety alerts in chat, detecting potentially unwanted messages and giving teens the option to block or report them, or talk to someone from Crisis Text Line. 

• Meta updated its Safer Internet Day blog from 2023 to say it was rolling out its Take It Down partnership with NCMEC to more languages.

• London School of Economics’ Sonia Livingstone & Didem Özkul flagged that when companies develop experiences in the “best interests of the child”, that should include all their interests, and span the full range of rights that young people have.

The week prior, the US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on online child exploitation with CEOs from Meta, X, TikTok, Snap, and Discord, which generated a lot of coverage and interesting analyses:

• I shared my thoughts in Tech Policy Press on the common red herrings to watch out for, and what questions we should be asking instead. We heard nearly all of these red herrings that day and my bingo cards came in handy.

• The Young People’s Alliance hosted a conversation with youth activists on their reactions to the hearings, their frustrations with regulation, and what they want to see happen next. (Video)

• Naomi Nix at the Washington Post wrote about the ineffectiveness of parental controls, despite companies regularly citing them as a way they keep young people safe online.

• There was extensive coverage of Meta’s call for Apple and Google to manage parental consent when early teens aged 13 - 15 download apps from their stores. 

• Nick Kristof at the New York Times wrote a compelling overview of how American institutions have failed children, from demanding accountability from tech platforms, to addressing hunger and poverty, to providing caregivers with the resources to take care of their families.

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