How The UK Is Letting Silicon Valley Take Over | Beeban Kidron interview

**Ava** (0:00)
Am I tough enough?

**Beeban Kidron** (0:01)
Strong and stable leadership.

**Ava** (0:02)
Total ruba. Hell yes, I'm tough enough. Shut the fridge.

**Beeban Kidron** (0:05)
Not another one. It's the PoliticsJOE podcast.

**Ava** (0:11)
Let's go back first. Let's sort of go through the qualification. So you've been doing this for over a decade now, and it was because of a documentary that you had made back in 2012
Can you take me back to that moment? How did you go from, well, directing Bridget Jones to getting involved in online safety?

**Beeban Kidron** (0:28)
Okay, Beeban will do. No baroness. Yeah.
So, yeah, I was a movie director. I was working between LA and London, and I used to make documentaries on things that were of interest to me in between the movies. And in 2012, when a smartphone became the price point that an adult would give one to a kid, I walked into my kitchen and I found four 15-year-old girls silent on the sofa. And I thought, oh, that is weird. Yeah, girls aren't silent on the sofa together.
I wonder what it's like to grow up here, i.e. in my kitchen, and there. And then I thought, where's there? And three weeks later, I had picked up my camera and started making a film. I have just met Oli, who worked on the film. There you go.
I haven't seen him since. But we made a film and spent hundreds of hours in the bedrooms and lives of children and also followed the tech to America and all the way to Silicon Valley, where I was kicked off a lot of headquarters, because they care about their privacy quite a lot, though not ours. And somewhere in the middle of it, a guy called Nick Croponte, who was a very famous futurist in the area of tech, one of the early founders, he just said to me, look, you know, this is going to be democratic, this is no gatekeepers, and all users will be equal. And when he said all users will be equal, I had a sort of a mad moment where everything kind of that I'd seen in the bedrooms of children kind of went through my brain. And I realized that was a category error, because if you treat all users as equal, you're treating a kid as if they're an adult. And actually a child is a child until they reach maturity, not until the moment they pick up a smartphone. And I'd recently been put in the Lords. I had quite a good phone book from being a director. I tried to tell the tech companies, I tried to tell the children's charities. No one was interested. It was tech was the future. It was all new rock and roll.
And I thought this is a generational injustice.
And I've never made another film since. I became a campaigner for child rights online. So that's how I got here.

**Ava** (3:07)
It's interesting because what you're suggesting there is that these tech companies think that everyone is equal once they enter the marketplace of the internet. So by that supposition, it's a democratic place.
But that is not how you see it at all.

**Beeban Kidron** (3:20)
No, exactly. And democracy isn't treating absolutely everybody irrespective of their capacity, their condition equally. It's about having opportunity. It's about having the right conditions for human flourishing in each case. Yeah. And I think the thing that has happened over the period that I've been doing this, we've watched them go into market after market after market. And what they are is market controllers, yeah, rather than necessarily innovators. A lot of the time, they're not doing something new.
Uber doesn't get you from A to B in a different way from a black cab or an old cab used to.
It actually captures your data, takes a bit from the driver. You know, it's an exchange point rather than an innovation point. And what they were doing was just not recognizing children as anything but a market. And that I felt was an injustice because children are not just a market. And in fact, although I have always thought that children are just the clearest way of seeing a much bigger problem and also probably an issue over which you could get most agreement in terms of bipartisanship, actually, children also have enhanced set of rights and legal protections, right? So I thought if we can prove it here for the under 18s, then we can prove it for the rest of us. And I think what is really interesting is the level of pushback from the companies is really because one in three people online is under the age of 18