PassW0rd – 13 October 2021 (Internnet Harms)

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Speaker C: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM. Your window on the world of technology and the impact it is having on your lives. In this programme, we look at internet harms, the issue now being discussed in the Houses of Parliament, to find out what they are, what their impact is, and what the regulators are considering doing to deal with them. The street thieves, muggers, conmen, pornographers, paedophiles, and burglars moved online a while ago. The newspaper stories of criminals taking advantage of a new high-tech world emerged at least 40 years ago in 1981. But what is exercising the peers and the MPs are not those things which they think are already covered by computer crime legislation. What Parliament is looking into is the impact of internet technology on children, and particularly on their mental health. It was something that Password looked into in September 2019, though now the process has accelerated. Partly due to COVID, but also because of the wholesale adoption of technology by children and the widespread use of social media by the population at large. A trend that has seen an explosion in online bullying, misogyny, hate speech, racism, blackmail, and exploitation by social media influencers. All developments that are beginning to take a terrible toll on the young. According to research, more and more people are showing symptoms of mental illness. There are even signs that young people’s brains are beginning to develop differently because of a lack of physical contact, and they are beginning to become very lonely. It’s an unconstrained trend that US big tech has largely washed its hands of, claiming that it is neither responsible for nor can it do anything about it because it says that it’s not responsible for online content. Andy, what are internet harms? They used to be crime, but— or computer crime, but they’re now much more than that, aren’t they?

Speaker D: It’s—

Speaker E: I think they’ve always been much more than that. We recognized and categorized computer crime because it was sort of new and something that we could put a label on. But in reality, along with most other crime. You know, internet crime is just, for the most part, a translation of crime that was going on anyway that’s moved on to the internet.

Speaker C: So it’s just people who are bad doing bad things online?

Speaker E: Yeah, I guess that’s a reasonable way of summarizing it. Yeah, the internet’s allowed them to do much more and have a much bigger reach than they had before. But in reality, yeah, it’s bad people doing bad things.

Speaker C: Because the internet has become so bound up into our lives, then we’re just used to doing those things that we would have done before on the high street if we were a criminal. We’re just doing them again.

Speaker E: In fairness, there’s some new crimes come in as well that weren’t available to the old-fashioned conventional criminal. It’s because we’ve allowed the technology to be so integrated into our lives that, uh, that’s possible.

Speaker C: And it’s becoming a little more than that too, isn’t it? Because one of the things that people don’t realize— and you could easily say this— is that they’re being very subtly influenced by companies or by individuals who are trying to exploit like them, and they don’t really know that.

Speaker E: Absolutely. And it’s not just companies and individuals. I mean, there’s reasonably good evidence it’s nation-states trying to influence perception as well. I hate to— a phrase that I love that has been around for a long time, you know, reality is irrelevant, it’s perception that matters. And now a lot more people can influence our perception, and some of them are very good at it. And also people believe what they see online no matter what the source. We used to rely on newspapers which, for good or for bad, had some sort of very editorial control and some sort of accountability, or, you know, the good old BBC. But now anybody with a keyboard can be an expert and can promote their thoughts.

Speaker C: So a lot of the internet companies, they’ve said, we’re not responsible for this, we’re just a conduit. And also, if we start to surveil this behavior, then people will start to say, oh, we don’t like them very much, they’re watching us all of the time. Is that a fair defense?

Speaker E: No, the reality is that they are watching us all the time and they’re making vast amounts of money from the information they gain from what we’re sending and what we’re watching and what we’re doing. So it’s fairly poor defense to say, you know, hey, we can’t do it because they already do for their own commercial purposes. And to say we’re just a conduit, well, if you open a store, you’re accountable for what happens in it. You’re responsible for making sure that people are safe, you’re responsible for also, you know, that your staff are secure, etc., etc. It really is a weak defense.

Speaker C: Do you think then this thorny issue of— there’s several thorny issues. There’s the issue of anonymity and there’s the issue of attribution. Let’s take anonymity first. Do you think that people who are on Facebook— I mean, it’s called Facebook— do you think that people should be anonymous in these social media spaces?

Speaker E: Anonymity is a myth in real terms. The people who are providing the services, they can’t tie an individual to a keyboard or device, but they can sure as heck get very close to it. They profile users, they look at patterns of usage, so they have a fair idea, not necessarily of the exact identity, but they know that activity belongs to this personality, shall we say, or this individual.

Speaker C: That was Professor Andrew Jones on the roots of cybercrime and its evolution and the responsibilities of the internet giants who, in fairness to them, are beginning to do something about the issue, but many would say it’s too little, too late, because online harms are beginning to be built into the tarmac of what was once called the information superhighway. That’s because of algorithms, lines of code that use artificial intelligence to profile you and try to understand you, which helps big tech make its vast revenues. Now, the AI bots and apps are coming in for a lot of scrutiny because one of their objectives is to not only target adverts at you but also to try and keep you on a particular platform like Google or Facebook. It’s a practice that is particularly dangerous for children, according to Jun Zhu, a Cambridge University researcher who has been investigating the issue.

Speaker A: I think this is something we have been debating extensively since the publication of the first version of online harm bill. Defining harm can be something quite tricky, but from my point of view, I think we’re really thinking about two types of harms. One is the more direct, more explicit harm when children are being exposed to inappropriate content, cyberbullying, etc., etc. Or some of the implicit harm which may have been less discussed both in the bill as well as many current regulations, which is about how the intrusion to children’s data privacy as a result of manipulation of their online experiences very much against their best interests. So that’s particularly the kind of harm In the latest evidence hearing in the Parliament, we heard so much more outcry for more attention on this kind of harm on children.

Speaker C: You’ve been researching this. What are the examples that you’ve seen of online harm?

Speaker A: There are many formats of the kind of negative impacts that could have on children based on the intrusion on their data privacy. For example, how children’s data may be collected without their explicit consent and then used to generate online promotions for them, which will encourage much more extensive screen time engagement, particularly by younger-aged children. So although there has been a lot of debates and discussions about screen time control, there’s less understanding about some of the underlying issues that lead to all this screen time addiction. So this is one of the prominent kind of negative experiences children are going through that we work a lot about. And then the other kind of potential negative impacts children could be experiencing is It’s, you know, a lot of grown-ups experience that as well during our time online, such as the filter bubbles. You know, we have heard a lot about the misinformation, you know, how what we do online, all these digital trails could be tracked and used by algorithms to deduce what we may be more interested to read about, to listen to, and therefore a lot of the users are less aware of we are actually living in a kind of filter bubbles by the algorithms. We may be less exposed to a more well-rounded of the information out there, which could lead to all these political biases we have heard a lot. And that’s the same thing that children could experience, and that’s even more detrimental when children are still at the at the stage of developing their perception about the world, developing their morality and the way of thinking about what they see, what they hear. So although it doesn’t seem to have direct harm on children, but it can have very dramatic and negative impacts on their development. But then the potential consequences are there. The lack of control and awareness about where our data is going, being collected and used for, one day it can influence the opportunities our children can have in terms of education, job applications, loan applications. And when that happens, that will be too late.

Speaker C: One of the things about this though is that what you’re talking about is very, very, very difficult to actually identify. And also it’s very difficult to prescribe against.

Speaker A: Yes or no. I think what is really encouraging to see, at least in UK, is the recent launch by the Information Commissioner’s Office of this Age Appropriate Code has laid out a really pioneering regulation landscape, particularly in terms of this kind of implicit data collection and the data manipulation behaviors., it will really make people start to think about things very differently. A lot of the technologies we’re experiencing and using today, they’re free, right? But there are no free bread in the world, as we all know. So if we’re using this kind of as a starting point to start thinking about what is the— what am I paying, right? We are paying with our data in order to enjoy a lot of this digital technologies for free, although it doesn’t seem to have any harm at the moment in front of us.

Speaker C: For internet harms to be properly addressed, Jun Zhao says the financial model of the internet must also change.

Speaker A: I would say there are two sides of this story. One is, what do we have in power to stop such platforms like Influence2 to bring this kind of influences to our children’s life. The recent UK ICO’s Children’s Code of Legislation has explicitly mentioned that any of these kind of online promotions must be aligned to children’s best interests, and they have been working closely with the consumer institutions in the UK who are much more experience they’re dealing with advertisements being presented to these children to define, you know, what is against the children’s best interests. So the legislations are moving towards in that way. And the second thing is I would really encourage families to talk more about this kind of experiences children may be exposed with when they’re going online on themselves. You know, the kind of potential influences they may be exposed to when children are playing with games, when children are being given some online promotions, when they should go to ask for approval or help, or they think something is not right and go to ask for their parents or guardians before they take any actions themselves. It’s part of the digital parenting. There are endless lessons we have to learn from this for parents and the children together.

Speaker C: Jun Zhu from Cambridge University talking about how children can be unwittingly duped and misled by internet algorithms. It’s an issue that Aza Raskin, the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, took further when I met up with him at the Copenhagen Pledge. A meeting of leading technology thinkers who signed up to only make tech for good in Denmark 2 years ago. Internet harms, according to Raskin, are not only down to internet criminals, but they are also increasingly being deliberately used by big tech to catch children early. Something that the parliamentary committee took evidence about on the 14th of October from Laura Edelson of New York University’s Facebook Ads Observatory, who was banned from studying Facebook ads by Facebook. And also from Guillaume Shaslow, a former Google engineer who worked on the company’s recommendations algorithm.

Speaker F: We’re supposed to not go after, like, kids younger than 13, but I was just reading about a set of games for children where when the in-app purchase dialog comes up and you click no, your avatar in the game starts to cry, which is very clear emotional manipulation. And that’s of course one example of, of many. If you can get children hooked, you’ll have them all the way. So YouTube for kids is a great example of a product where it used to be, you know, the Saturday morning breakfast cartoons. Like, there, there are rules and regulations about what kinds of ads and what kind of content can be shown. Those don’t exist for online content.

Speaker C: So what’s the impact of that on children?

Speaker F: When your world is smaller, right, if you think back to what it’s like to be in high school or middle school, your world is your social sphere. That’s it. And if I can get you instead of just trying to get your attention, if I can get you addicted to needing attention, that’s way more efficient. So one way of doing that is if I could undermine your sense of self-esteem, that would get you addicted to needing attention. How am I going to do that? Well, how about if I showed you proof every single day that your friends liked you more if you look different? Than you actually do, right? Because that’s Snapchat and Instagram. And in 2017, 55% of plastic surgeons in the US reported having seen patients that came in asking to look like their filters. So it’s like climbing down deep into the value system of our kids and changing what they want fundamentally. And then, you know, our brains are still developing. The marshmallow test is one of the most important predictors of how well you do later in life, is delayed gratification. And our technology is like letting that ability atrophy. It’s literally training us away from having delayed gratification because you just have whatever you want right now. And how that’s How that’s going to affect the generation, we don’t know yet, but there’s no control. This is a psychological experiment we’re running on the entire world.

Speaker C: I personally think that the ramifications of technology addiction, the ramifications of the way that people have been using technology, will be seen in about 5 years’ time, and then you’re going to start seen them go up on a curve because you’re going to see lots and lots of people with personality disorders. Is this something that you’re concerned about or?

Speaker F: Yeah, we saw 2013 to 2017, high depressive symptoms and suicide and suicidal thoughts in women went from sort of a constant around 17%, 19% and jumped to almost 30%. Right at the outset of when social media and our phones really, really took off. We’re going to see that, of course, increase. Loneliness in the U.S. is already like one of the top mental health issues. And there was a paper from Microsoft last year where their social chatbot has been given sort of what they call empathic abilities. So they’re optimizing for long-term use and whether the user feels like emotional satisfying. What does that mean? It’s already like, it works. Like you read the transcripts, they’re chilling because after a couple of weeks, like many of their users are turning to the chatbot as their primary source, the AI as their primary source of communication.

Speaker C: So we’re saying technology trying to come up with the solution for the problems it’s caused.

Speaker F: Well, and what I’m saying here is that loneliness is about to become one of our largest national security threats.

Speaker C: Asa Raskin highlighting 2 years ago the effect that companies like Instagram were having on the self-esteem of young people. It’s an issue that has now come to the fore with the revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, that the company had suppressed research which showed Facebook was aware of the damage its Instagram app was causing to teen mental health and well-being. One survey in the leaked research estimated that 30% of teenage girls felt Instagram made dissatisfaction with their body worse. According to Haugen, who is due to give evidence to the UK parliamentary committee on October 25th, what’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says as these young women began to consume this, this eating disorder content They get more and more depressed, and it actually makes them use the app more. And so they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more, she said. The Facebook research confirmed symptoms that Elinor Samuelsson had already discovered. Samuelsson works in schools in Sweden and presented her project at the Copenhagen Tech Festival, a conference that aims to put humans first in technology. She helps groups of teenagers talk openly about their online habits and worries such as bullying and self-harm.

Speaker G: In Sweden right now, we’re seeing that 80% of like children that call, uh, Bris, uh, like which is this like Swedish organization for ensuring children’s rights like in like like society. They’re 14-year-old girls. We’re seeing another group of people who are more prone to developing like mental disorders are people from lower socioeconomic classes, people who might have been migrating here, who come with post-traumatic stress disorder. And it’s like, so we have certain groups that we know, but we were right now, we’re a bit careful and not trying to segregate people based on that data, but rather just focusing on where everyone is right now and trying to, through like knowledge and exercises, bring them higher up on their journey.

Speaker C: You’re saying that soon you’ll be spending more on mental health than you will on physical health. Why is there this perception of increase? Why is there this idea that people are going to become more depressed within our society, more lonely?

Speaker G: In Sweden, I think it’s because we have rather high standards of living, and I think mental health is becoming less stigmatized. So even though we’re seeing increasing numbers of people seeking help, they’re also seeking help for things that are not as, like, severe because they’re asking for help sooner, which is a good thing. But I think now it’s just more for society to figure out how to deal with it.

Speaker C: Is it technologically related? Is there more loneliness because people are using more screens and they’re not going out and talking to people? You’ve said earlier that people weren’t taking as much physical exercise as they used to. Which is evidently something that’s to do with technology.

Speaker G: I don’t know if I dare to say that it’s so strongly correlated to like technology. I also think it might be when you’re a child, your, your mother asks you to go play soccer, so you do that. But then when you become like a teenager, you all of a sudden get to make your own choices and maybe you get different interests. And I think that could also be a reason why why people stop exercising. You’re seeing a lot of girls who stop exercising, which is also interesting, and we don’t fully know why, and I think that’s what we’re trying to figure out. What we are seeing is that we see the teenagers socializing with technology and with each other. If you look at the younger children right now, there are some scientists who are actually a bit worried about their your brain’s development because your brain develops with sense of touch and with being seen and held by your parents. And now there’s a bigger trend of giving the kids an iPad rather than hugging them when they’re crying. And so that, I think, we don’t know yet what the implications are going to be, but I do think we’re going to see differences in how we learn. A lot of technology today, especially if you look at the social networks where kids and also adults spend a lot of times, they’re specifically designed to trigger dopamine levels in your brains. They’re designed to keep you on the platform, like the infinite scroll is designed to keep you there. And we, with our primal brains. Like we, we haven’t dealt with this before. So I personally find it interesting to look into technology that has mental health or people’s wellbeing as a like ground design, like metric to be very interesting where you’re actually designing something to be good for the person, like using it.

Speaker C: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because you say, 50% of mental disorders start at the age of 14. That’s also the sort of time that people are beginning to get involved with social media now, isn’t it? That’s one of the points when you’re beginning to accelerate perhaps some of these stresses and some of these issues that people have where they think maybe they’re lonely or whatever. Is that something that you’re researching?

Speaker G: Yeah, and it’s funny you say it because, um, and I don’t remember the exact number, but they’ve seen that if you get a Facebook account before the age of 12 or 13, you’re much higher likely to develop like a mental health disorder than what you are if you wait until you’re maybe 15, 16, which is just like, like a few years. But I think it has something to do with you’re so like malleable at that age and your brain is actually changing changing from like a children’s brain to more of a teenager brain and what we consume and what we do, it definitely impacts us.

Speaker C: That’s the view from Sweden and Elena Samuelsson confided in me that she limits her own screen time and finds a sense of community through her Buddhist faith, Kakao ceremonies and yoga rather than in social networks. I’m Peter Warren with Password on Resonance FM. After this, you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. So what is the government thinking of doing about this? Lord Clement-Jones sits on the parliamentary committee that is currently hearing evidence on internet harms. They’ve heard from footballers, internet watch organisations, of which there are a considerable number, the parents of children who have committed suicide, and the people who know the ins and outs of the algorithms that are driving our desires to the places that the companies want us to go. For a program we recorded 2 years ago, Lord Clement-Jones laid out his thinking to us in an interview in April 2019 on what was needed.

Speaker D: I don’t think government are going to go all the way down the track where we say, look, you are publishers and anything that you put out, user-generated material, whatever it is, you are the publishers. That is too extreme because, quite frankly, expecting policing of every single scrap of material that appears on social media is obviously not— that wouldn’t be appropriate. But what is appropriate is to have a duty of care, a broad duty of care that actually tells the social media platforms these are the kinds of harms you should be trying to prevent. And you have a code, you expect them to police it themselves. And if they don’t police it, they get fined. So there is quite a degree of discretion for the social media platforms in terms of how they carry out their duties. They can construct some pretty sophisticated algorithms nowadays which can prevent that sort of harm being posted. So it’s not an impossible task, but obviously they’re going to be grey areas, and our regulators are very used to debating and discussing where grey areas occur and whether or not regulatory action should be taken. I mean, every single one of our regulators is used to that. The Information Commissioner’s Office, Ofcom, you name it, the Electoral Commission even. They’re not just simply going to lay down the law in grey areas. They’re going to actually debate whether or not something falls within a particular category. So our regulators are quite sophisticated.

Speaker C: So is this the shape of things to come then? This is this is going to be the new way of doing things, that businesses will have to start thinking about the impact that they have on the environment and on others.

Speaker D: And the fact is that you can’t carry— conduct business just in it. We’re not in cowboy territory on the internet or anywhere else. What we are doing is really treating online behaviour much more similarly to offline behaviour. You know, historically, people have been responsible for harm they cause offline physically. If you abuse people offline in the physical world, if you create harms in the physical world, you have historically been liable, whether for a criminal offense or a civil offense. And this is what is now beginning to happen. People are waking up to the fact that online harms are taking place, which should be prevented by the social media platforms. These very powerful social media platforms that have a semi-monopoly of advertising as well. So, you know, they are having a fantastic impact on society, and we’ve got to wake up to that.

Speaker C: Okay, so if you say code of conduct, I mean, a lot of people just say that’s entirely nebulous. How on earth is that going to work? You’ve got organizations like Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg suggested that he be regulated— or sorry, that Facebook be regulated. Only a few days ago. But then it was pointed out that he was saying that it should be regulated in a sort of Facebook-y way, was what one commentator said, which seems to suggest that it’s regulation in his interest. So if you give them a code of conduct, then it’ll be a code of conduct in their interest?

Speaker D: No, I don’t think so. I think it’ll be a code of conduct that’ll be in the interests of the British public. You know, I’m not saying it wider than that. I mean, I would love to have a situation where there was a sort of global code of conduct. I don’t think we’re going to get there, but I certainly think we should start in the UK and probably in the European Union with establishing some ground rules where harm shouldn’t be created, you know, beyond purely the criminal offenses which they’re liable for currently. This whole area is in need of an overhaul. What we’ve had up to date is a situation where where the social media companies have been able to plead that they are, quote, a mere conduit, i.e., all they do is transmit what is put on their platforms. They aren’t— they’re not responsible for any content at all. And that is, you know, I’m afraid, a completely false situation. And we can’t let that go on for much longer.

Speaker C: The government white paper did fall short of saying that there should be a breakup of these large technology companies. It did fall slightly short of saying that they were utter publishers?

Speaker D: Oh yes, and I think that will continue to be the case, and I don’t think I’m suggesting that they should be total publishers. They do not post all their own material, you know, the material that goes up on social media is third-party material, but they have a duty to prevent harms where it is apparent, and that’s what they, you know, need to be given a duty to do. I I don’t think, you know, in fact the government’s white paper has not yet come out. The green paper though was sort of indicating a general direction, but I think the thinking has changed and matured quite a lot over the last year, and I think we’re going to see some fairly firm proposals coming down the track, and I think there’s going to be quite a strong degree of all-party agreement on what we’re trying to do, basically.

Speaker C: There’s been a lot of argument for having a sort of supra body, some very, very large organization that will regulate this. You’re saying no, you want it to be very much like the system that broadcasters currently use, where they have a code of conduct, they work out what is right and wrong, and then they implement that.

Speaker D: Well, no, no, it goes further than that. What I think I’m suggesting is that what we do is we really give one of the regulators, Ofcom, say, the responsibility for the kind of regulation over the internet of social media that is appropriate, that they are responsible for drawing up a code of conduct which deals with some of these online harms. And I’d be perfectly relaxed, and I think actually it’s not a bad idea. Some people have put this forward, people like Dot Everyone and Five Rights have put forward the idea of a kind of advisory body that basically keeps an eye out for harms, builds evidence of harm, because I think it’s very important that there is evidence of harm displayed. You can’t just, you know, lay about you and say that that’s harmful behaviour. You’ve got to have evidence. And, you know, they advise government on whether or not regulation should be extended, whether codes should be changed. You know, they are basically a flexible body, but they’re not regulator. They’re more like an advisory body that assists the regulators and the government in coming to grips with, with these online harms.

Speaker C: Aren’t you going into some funny territory here? Because you’re asking people to define what harms are. You’re asking them, in a sense, to be philosophical. You’re asking them to come up with ethics. They’re going to have to sit there and think about what is right and wrong. And to be perfectly honest, everybody Every one of us has a lot of trouble with that question.

Speaker D: Well, yes, but then that’s what, that’s what parliamentarians do every day of the week. I mean, you know, we have to. We’ve got the Digital Economy Acts, we’ve got data protection duties, we’ve got consumer protection rights, all kinds of things. Every day of the week we have to draw lines between behavior that is, if you like, regulatable and behavior that isn’t, and behavior that’s criminal and behavior that isn’t. You know, all the time, this is what lawyers themselves advise on. You know, which side of the line do people fall on?

Speaker C: But that’s the job for you, and the companies will say, hang on, we’re not moralists, we’re not ethicists, we’re not philosophers.

Speaker D: Well, every company doing business has to make decisions about the ethical nature of what it does. You know, you can’t be like the bookmakers, for instance. They’ve just withdrawn their new product which allowed up to £500 stake. Things like that. The companies do have to make these kinds of decisions. And of course, as we move into new technology, artificial intelligence and so on and so forth, they will have to behave in an ethical fashion, make judgments accordingly.

Speaker C: So, no. So you’re saying that that’s the price of doing business in the new information age is you’ve actually got to get very moral about it.

Speaker D: Well, not— it’s not necessarily something that’s peculiar to the new information age. I do think the issues are heightened in this new information age, as you call it, but always businesses should have a duty, whether online or offline, to act in a moral way. You know, it isn’t just about kind of commerce bred in tooth and claw. We expect business to behave properly, and you know, whether it’s about pollution, the polluter pays. We’ve established principles, you know, over the years that mean that business has responsibilities.

Speaker C: Lord Clement-Jones on internet harms in 2019. So was he right then? And is he right now? Mark Deem, the head of the technology practice for the law firm Mishcon de Reya, thinks so. He says that Lord Clement-Jones’s ideas of codes of conduct and of companies changing their priorities from money to a duty of care are the only way to bring Big Tech around to the idea that they are dealing with people and not numbers.

Speaker H: I think the concern fundamentally is that there is the need to do something in this space. We have to address a very significant problem that we have at the moment, but it is very important that whatever we do, we get it right. Regulation is increasingly becoming important, but the enforcement of that regulation is going to be the absolute key. There is no point in having regulation unless it can be enforced properly and can achieve the desired outcomes. We have to be very careful that whatever we do when we regulate, we don’t end up having unintended consequences here, which could actually create a greater concern in the long run than the the immediate harms that we’re seeking to regulate, to prevent.

Speaker C: There’s a big debate going on at the moment about online harms. Why? Why has it taken so long to come to the fore? Because we’ve had the internet since 1996, and in fact we’ve had internet crime or technologically enabled crime since around 1981, ’83.

Speaker H: I think one of the big problems is the question of definition. And how is it that we can define what those harms are and how we’re going to seek to regulate them? Technology and the regulation of the digital space is necessarily very difficult. We have to really be focusing a lot more on principles-based regulation rather than rules-based regulation. And the reason for that is that once we go into the principle-based regulation aspect, we open up greater flexibility in the way that we can police matters.. It becomes more nimble. We can regulate through codes of practice and guidelines rather than purely against a specific example.

Speaker C: So in a sense, what you seem to be saying is you want to make people think about whether something is right or wrong, and then they will make the decision whether to go ahead or not.

Speaker A: Precisely.

Speaker H: And we want to avoid a situation where we end up in a game of a technological cat and mouse, where we see people just changing their behavior to try to get around the regulation that’s put in place. If it’s done on a principles basis, it should be harder for that to be achieved, rather than rules-based, which might, as I say, just create this world in which where the aggressors are just trying to deal with the new rules that are thrown and put in place to try to work a way around, a workaround if you like, so they can carry on their nefarious behaviours. To me, what we absolutely have to make sure that we understand in any system, any regulatory system, is that technology is neutral, if you like. You will hear a lot about tech neutrality here. What that’s really driving at is that if it is a crime in an analog setting, in the real world, if you like, in the offline world, it should by definition also be a crime just because it has been done in the digital space or in the online space. So if it’s going to be a crime in the playground, on the street, it should be a crime if it’s done online. So, if, for example, you have more than 50,000 followers, is it right that you should be able to quote somebody’s voice who would otherwise, in the offline world, not be heard at all? That is to say, should you enable somebody to be able to publish without some form of regulation that minority voice in a way that you wouldn’t be able to in the real world without there being some checks and balances put in place? And it may well be that that is the type of structure and infrastructure that we need to develop within the online world. The biggest problem here is the scale, it’s the speed with which technology enables voices to be amplified and repeated across jurisdictions at speed, at pace, and at scale.

Speaker C: So the harm is being done by people, they’re the one who are— they’re the people who are directing the harm, they’re the ones who are using the technology to do harm, It’s not the technology itself.

Speaker H: Exactly. What we’re seeing is the technology is being used as a way of facilitating behavior which needs to be addressed, possibly curbed in certain instances. Now, there is a big debate that’s going on about whether or not this means we should allow for greater transparency, which obviously has to be encouraged. And some people are calling for transparency to be achieved by people being able to monitor and look at the communications that are taking place. And we see with the online Harms Bill that’s being published this year, that the government is seeking to introduce a concept of a duty of care that is owed by the platform provider.

Speaker C: Now, in terms of this regulation, and I understand that you’ve said it should be done by codes of practice, should there be sanctions on the internet companies? Should there be some sort of penalties that they have imposed upon them to make them actually start to think more ethically?

Speaker H: Because most of these platforms are profit-making organizations, it tends to be the case that it is hitting those profits, hitting those companies where it hurts, that is probably going to drive changes of behavior. So I think that is probably the way that we’re going to have to go, seeking to penalize poor behavior, if you like, of those platforms through financial means.

Speaker F: Absolutely.

Speaker C: So it’s going— it should be a combination of sanctions on the platforms to make them think about what it is that they are doing and also driving an awareness among the population at large that in the same way as you are not allowed to expose yourself on the street to somebody, to do that online is also utterly inappropriate.

Speaker H: And providing a way that the online community can also call out bad behaviour, and for that bad behaviour then to be acted upon by whoever it may be, the platform provider or the regulatory or criminal authorities. What we often find in the offline environment is that it’s human beings themselves that often will act as a check upon the behaviours of other humans. Now, Bizarrely, that doesn’t necessarily translate into the online environment as well, and sometimes what you’ll see is that it’s actually humans that are helping to amplify the bad behaviour rather than in any way hold any checks and balances over that behaviour. That is what we really need to try to replicate in the online environment— sorry, it’s the offline behaviour that we need to replicate in the online space if we possibly can as well.

Speaker C: As Aza Raskin said at the beginning of this programme, companies must change from the greedy giants only concerned with their share prices to providing the services that matter to people. Otherwise, they will find that people will dislike and distrust them. Something that Password found out very personally in the last 3 weeks when the 11-year-old child of one of our producers took a debit card out of their mother’s handbag and used it to buy around £800 worth of goods from a website targeted at children called VAT19 while she was walking her dog. Part YouTube channel, part website, VAT19 is an influencer deliberately targeted at children by Jamie Salvatori, its founder, whose LinkedIn page states he is a social media expert. Yet it has no checks and balances to ensure that purchases are actually being made by an adult or to determine the age of a child buying goods on its site. When we emailed Jamie Salvatore and Vat19’s proud mother and CEO, Dr. Allison Salvatore, to ask for a comment, our emails went unanswered. That this is a very real problem can be gauged by Asa Raskin’s story of the game avatar that cries if you do not make a purchase and by the invention of Toca Boca by Born Geoffrey, an app designed to create children’s profiles.

Speaker I: If you go on an aeroplane, you turn on flight mode, and that has a long list of consequences where sort of cellular transmission and Wi-Fi turned off, this, that, and the other, because it’s the context that you’re in is I’m on an aeroplane, so therefore I want to be able to use some things but not necessarily all of them. This is the obvious solution for kids. I’m handing over this device to my kid. Kids mode therefore has these consequences. You cannot access my text messages, you cannot call someone inadvertently, you cannot make purchases that were not authorized. All of these things, that should be the default and the standard out of the box. And then we can go further from that point. But all of these things that create this perpetual fear of like, are they going to buy something now? Suddenly, am I going to get a bill for this? Are they going to send something to to my text message? Are they gonna accidentally tweet something to my company’s corporate Twitter account that I have pre-installed? All of these things that happen constantly. That should not be a concern for anyone. Like, we need to put all of that to rest. So a lot of this should be handled on a platform level and there should have been a kids mode and there has not been one and does not seem to be one on the horizon either, unfortunately.

Speaker C: Is what you are saying that there needs to be a platform form that is actually specifically built for the child.

Speaker I: I think it’s more the identity part of it. I think realistically, if it’s just— it’s about the device and sort of the what content’s being shown, what purchases can be made, how data is handled or not handled, you know, privacy by default, these sorts of things could all be, in my opinion, a flip of a switch. And then all the software that wants to be available when you the device is in kids mode, you need to comply with all of these things. You would have automatic self-compliance. We’ve already seen this a little bit when Apple launched the kids category on the App Store. They put harder and stricter rules in place. So if you want to be in this kids category that they’re merchandising and promoting, you need to adhere to a stricter standard for certain things than you would if you put your app in the general App Store. This is— and the vast majority did, you know, they were happy to do that. And that, you know, because it’s a good incentive. And I think this would be the similar thing. If you, you can hope that self-regulation among all of these things, not just in kids’ tech but in tech in general, is going to work. You know, it’s questionable whether that has taken us as far as it could have. I think that would have given parents a lot of comfort in feeling like, well, at least yeah, I’m not going to get a bill. At least this data is not going to be farmed out to some ad network somewhere if I’m doing it in this way. So that would be a start.

Speaker C: Do the parents need to be educated?

Speaker I: It’s a question of who would, who would take that on. I think the need is real, and that’s my, that’s been my perception that there’s actually a huge lack of information and credible information. Like, how should I relate to this? Even from, from very young kids. You know, when is it okay to introduce some form of screen-based entertainment for kids, all the way up through teens. There needs to be some sort of authority to look to. I think that’s the problem. There is no authority to go to, and it doesn’t need to be sort of an official government institution. It could be an Oprah, you know. Who’s the Oprah of children’s technology? Someone that you can go to and that out of all the of the things that are out there, points to something, says, this is great, this is fine, we’ve looked at it, we’ve assessed it, this is a lovely piece of technology, you should go this. This, however, is awful and you should not do that.

Speaker C: This issue cannot all be laid at the door of the companies caught up in the frenzied dreams of internet fortunes. As Jun Zhao and Mark Deane point out, parents too have obligations in this, though. They have to also be wary of their children’s personal space. Though simply leaving your child in their room on the internet and not knowing what they are doing and who they are meeting is not something that would have happened pre-internet. As Mary Rahman told us, you have to make the effort to find out what they are doing.

Speaker B: Nowadays, every single person that I come across, whether they are you know, from Bangladesh or from America. Everyone is super speedy now with technology. Everyone’s got a phone, they’ve got a WhatsApp, majority of relatives are on Facebook. The world has become really smaller. There’s great benefits to that, and there’s other ways that I just simply cannot keep up. So I’ll check posts, I love Twitter, but In a way, sometimes when I reprimand my children, I do sometimes think, oh gosh, well, you know, here I am using it. I just want everyone to use the technology valuably, have it for some entertainment, but also have that balance of using it for positive communication, like the learning, certain things, news articles or news headlines. I don’t need to put on my TV and look for channels 1 to 5 anymore. I am getting those feeds across Twitter. But it’s a constant balance, it’s a constant juggling act, and what I try to do, especially in the holidays, is take a day out where we leave, you know, they leave their technology at home and we go out and we go to museums, we go to parks, and we have a different type of learning where you’re sort of walking around a museum and learning about history so that they understand that they can use a different part of their their brain to learn and absorb information. Right, well, you mentioned news there, but of course there’s a lot of fake news and also a lot of hate speech, pornography, nasty violence, and so on. These are the things which the government is trying to draft a new law about, the Online Harms Bill. What do you think are potentially the worst harms that you can come across online in terms of your children? What I worry about with my children as they’re growing up, especially the eldest, is the online bullying, is that kind of the bullying that you can get as she gets older, as she has group emails with school. I just worry about what kids are saying to one another and also sort of being shamed for, I don’t know, you know, there’s body shaming out there, there’s lots of the way they attack online and I worry about that. I worry about a whole group of people seeing messages about a particular person. It’s another kind of online bullying form and I also worry about content, you know, she’s getting to an age where she’s asking questions about, well, we come from a Muslim background and she’s asking questions about what’s happening in the the news when she sees terrorist attacks. A lot of stuff is coming out now that I have to filter with her and speak to her about. Also, you know, as they get older and older, you know, I will worry about imagery, imagery of women, you know, pornography, which is huge on the internet. I will start to worry about those things and the influences that they can have on, on my children, especially when they start to get more curious and sort of find their own paths through the internet to look for material. That does worry me quite a bit. Well, of course, all parents of young children want to protect their children and to gradually expand their horizons, I suppose, as, as they get older and more mature and able to handle different content.

Speaker C: But do you think that this is something the government should get involved in?

Speaker B: I do think the government have some responsibility to help parents in terms of content. You know, there’s a lot of race crime out there, there’s a lot of genderphobia, there’s, you know, a lot of issues out there. There’s— you’ve seen in the news that some people through online bullying and revenge porn and so on and so forth have, you know, taken their lives and been quite suicidal. So I think as the internet and technology gets bigger, then the government has to take some sort of action because if criminal activity is taking place over the internet, then there needs to be some laws to protect children.

Speaker C: That was Mary Rahman. It’s not all doom and gloom though, as by and large the internet has done more good than harm, brought together more people, and in the main informed the world in a way that has revolutionised our lives. As Robert Steen pointed out in a previous episode of Password, without it, his chronically disabled son Mats would not have had the life he did, full of friends and lovers he would never have known without it.

Speaker J: At his funeral, it turned up a lot of people which I had no idea who was or where they came from, and then it proved that they came from all over Europe.. And they knew my son Mats without actually having met him physically. And this was kind of an eye-opener for me as for the kind of friendships, relationships, love relationships that can be built in the digital world. First and foremost, I met with a woman. Her name was Anne. She lives in Salisbury. At the time when I met her in my son’s funeral, she was she was a psychologist, she was an entrepreneur, and she worked as a headhunter in the European Union. She was a gamer and a close friend of my son, who at that time was age 25. And she said to me that if you are the kind of adult which I suspect that you are and which most people are, you might want to know a little bit more about the life that your son has been a part of. And then she sat down with me for some hours and took me through what they experienced in this gaming world, which is called World of Warcraft, together. And she said that most of the time we are in a kind of traditional social relationship. It is not about killing each other. It’s not so much about about the gaming or the competition as you might believe or think. It is mostly about social relationship. We meet, we talk, we eat turtle soup together, we run around lakes, we have competition, or we just tease each other. So very much the same thing as we experience in the physical world. And of course, this is very important for your son too, wasn’t it? Because he didn’t have that mobility in physical world to run around the lake. That is true, and I think that that was in a way a blessing in disguise because my son was born with a muscle disease which we discovered when he was 4. This muscle disease is pretty well described, so we knew more or less how his life was going to develop over the next 20 years, which is both kind of terrifying but also good as for putting the practical things in place so that he can live a good life based on his pre-assumptions. So I think we were kind of liberal when he decided to spend so much time in front of his computer in this gaming world. If he didn’t have this disease, we would probably have taken the traditional approach and taken his time away from the computer. We would have been worried about all this gaming, about all the time spent in front of the computer. We would have limited that. We would have given him an hour or two a day which he was allowed to play and so on and so forth, like most other parents and adults are doing. So as I said, kind of a blessing in disguise there. What we experienced is that he had something to spend his time on when he, the last 10 years of his life, was more or less bound to his apartment and couldn’t go out with the rest of us. And we thought that this was a good way of occupying his mind. It was kind of a leisure activity which he could do, but we didn’t see beyond that. We didn’t see the real kind of relationships and how he could also set his footprint in the world and actually mean things for others. From all of these stories which we learned after Mats had passed away, we learned that he didn’t only experience relationships, friendships, being in love, but also actually to be an important part in forming other people’s happiness and lives.

Speaker C: That’s all for this month from Password on Resonance FM, produced by Blue Buffery and written and presented by me, Peter Warren. Tune in next month for more on the impact of technology on society. Or to find out more, go to our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening and goodbye.

Speaker B: This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.