Can We Make the Internet Safe for Children? With Baroness Beeban Kidron

**Mia Sorrento** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm Senior Producer Mia Sorrento.
We are increasingly aware of the potential dangers smartphones and social media pose for young people. Social media bans for under-16s are being rolled out across the world. But can we actually make the internet safe for children? And if digital platforms are designed to capture our attention, who should be responsible for protecting young people from the harms they can create?
On today's episode, Baroness Beeban Kidron, filmmaker, campaigner and member of the House of Lords, joins Carl Miller, author and researcher at Demos, to discuss why making the digital world safer will require holding technology companies to greater democratic accountability. Let's join our host, Carl Miller, now with more.

**Carl Miller** (0:45)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, everyone. I'm Carl Miller and our guest today is Baroness Beeban Kidron. She's a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, founder of the Five Rights Foundation, a global authority on digital regulation, especially to enshrine children's rights in the digital world and the author of a new book, Users. Baroness Kidron, so lovely to have you on Intelligence Squared, very welcome to you.

**Beeban Kidron** (1:09)
Thank you very much. Great to be here.

**Carl Miller** (1:11)
All right. Well, let's start with the overall claim, I suppose, allegation that the book makes. A generation of children have been plonked onto digital platforms that didn't protect them, and that has, I think, displaced childhood is the phrase you use.

**Beeban Kidron** (1:29)
I think so. I mean, if you take the book as a whole, it sort of starts with that. It sort of says, not only has childhood been interneted, but actually every aspect of private and public life. And it looks at the claim of the tech sector to be exceptional. And it basically says, look, you know, if tech is exceptional, then they've actually got an out clause for all of life because they are everywhere. And it then goes from that analysis to saying, actually, there are some things we can do about it, and this is what they are. So I think that children give us the clearest vision of what's wrong with tech. You know, they have least electoral capital, least sort of experience in the world, least time without it, and they're very, very early and enthusiastic adopters. But what starts in childhood doesn't stay in childhood, and what starts online doesn't stay online. And that's what the book looks like, looks at.

**Carl Miller** (2:35)
And you also, Beeban, kind of take aim quite early in the book on something I've always found extremely curious, which was like a kind of generational indifference to the actual experience of the children online. I mean, I can't tell you the number of think-tout, the round tables I sat through, I'm sure you too, where due to the fact they were digital natives, it was kind of somehow assumed that they were going to be far more kind of apt kind of navigators in the digital world than their parents.

**Beeban Kidron** (3:02)
I know, it's such an extraordinary claim. And when people use that sort of digital natives, I always have this image in my head of a four-year-old, you know, with an HGV truck, you know, like this. And you go, okay, now drive on the open road, love. You know, it's just not like that. Life is not like that. Childhood is not like that. Children, you know, childhood is not like that.
And the idea that you kind of go, okay, guys, we know you can walk now, so off you go, out the house, you're four years old, the nursery's somewhere, we won't tell you where, we won't tell you how to cross the road, we won't tell you where it is, and we'll see you at three o'clock. You know, it's so preposterous. And I think two things, you know, obviously, in the beginning, I was sort of as bewildered as anyone. Now, having done my 10,000 hours on this subject, you know, I begin to understand it a little bit, a little bit better. And I think that two things that are worth sort of really sort of getting in mind, one is that children's experience is very different from adult experience. And I think that parents and teachers and so on have been very slow to wake up to the fact that the algorithm for a 13-year-old boy is different from an algorithm of a 14-year-old girl, which is different from the algorithm of some professional, you know, who's on Pinterest and getting, you know, and thinks it's, you know, all it is, is about wallpaper and soft furnishings. You know, that each of us are served what the tech bros think will make us stay most. And if you are a 13-year-old boy, unfortunately, that is likely to be porn. And if you are a 14-year-old girl, it will be something to do with your body, your pretty, your, you know, whatever it is, dieting and so on. And so I think that it was very difficult for parents to understand that the experience that their children were having was so astonishingly different. And when you get to the point now where you go, how many kids have seen beheadings online and it's somewhere around 50%, you go, hang on a minute. No one, no one should see a beheading online, let alone a kid. So I think that it was one of those, we've been boiled like a frog bit by bit by bit, and people didn't realize.