Is it possible to create digital media experiences that will help children—and adults— thrive? And what are the tools and resources that can help make these experiences a reality?

In the past few years, we’ve heard warning bells about the potential harms and risks that children might encounter online. But there’s also a growing movement that acknowledges that while we work to minimize the dangers of the very real safety and data privacy issues that must be addressed, we should also be creating digital tools that help users feel better and to connect with one another in meaningful ways.

At the ASU+GSV conference in April, Michael Preston sat down with Bruce Homer, a research psychologist at CUNY, Elizabeth Milovidov, digital safety expert at the LEGO Group, and Natasha Miller, a senior research scientist at Blizzard Entertainment and Fair Play Alliance executive steering group member, to discuss some new initiatives that aim to help designers create positive play experiences.

Michael started off by setting the scene: “A lot of what you hear in the media are focused on harms and risks [for children online]. These are really important topics. However, we’re talking today about something a little different, which is what good looks like and what we hope for in digital space for kids.”

Learning from children

Bruce shared why it is so important to include children’s perspectives when defining what good looks like in the digital world. “The joy and beauty of working with children is that even if you’ve been working with them for a long time, which I have—they still surprise you,” he said. “So you need to involve the kids in all parts of it; get their voices involved into what is well-being; what is play, what is fun … that’s the only way it’s going to be meaningful and useful”.

He described what they have learned so far from children in research conducted as part of the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children Initiative (RITEC) initiative:

• Social connection is key for kids. In the study, children were all asked to play the games on their own devices, but they quickly organized themselves into groups to make the play a collective experience.
  
• Parents are interested in playing games with their kids and intergenerational play is very valuable. This, Bruce said, offers opportunities for intergenerational collaboration to create positive digital play.  “We’re getting to the stage now where the teachers that I work with in schools and the parents that I have coming into my lab are gamers themselves. There’s been a whole shift. When I first started doing research in schools the teachers would be like ‘oh games are evil’ and now the teachers are like, ‘oh awesome, what games do you got’”.
• Kids talk about games as a place where they felt they can really gain competence. They see online games as allowing them to practice something and get really good at it. Kids both challenged and helped each other achieve this mastery. 

Translating learnings to create positive digital design

The goal, then, is to translate research findings like these into digital design that supports children’s (and adults’) well-being.

Natasha explained that online games are an ideal place to do this work. In addition to the fact that billions of people play online games, “we own every aspect of that environment and so we can really start to test some of these theories and principles that are coming out, and if we put them into place, it can really make a difference in players’ lives”.

Elizabeth described how at the LEGO Group she holds workshops with designers across the company to discuss how they can incorporate the eight RITEC well-being outcomes into their work. In one example, a designer working on digital building instructions was able to link children’s use of the app to the “RITEC 8”.  “She was able to track out how every time the building instructions it helps prove competency it helps with connectivity it helps with self-empowerment and it helps with self-actualization.”

Natasha highlighted that the Digital Thriving initiative is working to empower designers to incorporate well-being elements into their work. They are in the process of creating a playbook that will walk game designers through all the steps needed to design digital experiences that encourage positive interactions – everything from how to incorporate experiences that inspire empathy in games to how to make new players feel welcome.

Stay tuned for more tools, resources, and case studies on how to incorporate well-being into digital design by following the RITEC and Digital Thriving initiatives.

 

Dubit CEO Matthew Warneford estimates that within a decade, a million people will make their living from the metaverse. Another 100 million will build in immersive spaces for their own fulfillment.

Can building in virtual worlds help make a better real world?

The iCan Generation

A full-fledged metaverse is a long way off, but Generation Z and the first wave of Gen Alpha are deeply engaged in using its emerging individual elements for play, work, learning, socializing and communicating. They’re native players and builders on social gaming platforms like Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite. They’re power users of YouTube and TikTok, not just viewing but creating videos of their own.

Gens Z and Alpha demand authenticity from the brands and content that seek to engage with them. They are equipped with a strong sense of justice, responsibility, and urgency. David Hogg, the 23-year-old Parkland High School shooting survivor and gun violence activist says, “I’m not powered by hope. I’m powered by the fact I have no other choice.”

Today, the youth who are driving movements like March for Our Lives, Fridays for Future, the Iranian women’s rights movement, and others, are using the digital platforms that have been integral to their lives in order to further the causes they believe in.

Further, when young people aren’t able to find the types of games or experiences they and their friends want, they create them. One might call this intrinsically-motivated mastery “the learnification of gaming,” and it yields skills that are proving valuable in the current-day workforce.

All this is why Dubit refers to the 8-to-young-adult cohort as the “iCan Generation.”

Quality = Relevance

When Dubit asked teens to define “quality” in media, they spoke of personal relevance over production value. Young people demand authenticity. A million-dollar series won’t engage an audience if the topic isn’t of immediate interest or importance, but a TikTok or YouTube shot on a smartphone can get millions of views and shares from those who find it authentic and germane.

The second key to quality was alignment with the platform: anyone making TikTok, YouTube, or even UGC social game content must understand the space’s unique purpose, genres and visual vocabulary.

Both of these factors point to the power to influence held by those born into the iCan Generation.

The Builder Economy

At Dubit, we predict that these young people will develop a “builder economy.” Young creators are already making games, experiences, and videos on their own, and they are entering a workforce changed forever by the pandemic’s abrupt shift to remote teams. Going forward, they’ll be less likely to work within a single company. Instead, studios will coalesce specialist teams for specific projects, that disband when finished. Developers, designers, artists, musicians, educators, researchers, and others may be part of multiple, recombinant “Oceans 11” teams assembled for particular skills.

This will provide builders with the flexibility to balance their work across income-generating projects and passion projects. As the distributed and user-run platforms of Web3 emerge, young people will create communities around shared concerns or passions. They’ll be able to build shared strategy and take action via decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Teams will be symbiotic, not top-down.

An additional benefit to these virtual and decentralized communities is that they can – and must – engage diverse global cultures as creators, not just consumers. Whether the cause is climate activism, education equity, economic inequality, or anti-racism, lived experience will be critical to authenticity and effectiveness. Virtual communities can be safe places, even when one’s real-life community isn’t.

Increasingly, the tools for creating games, experiences, world-building, and work spaces are open-source or freely available worldwide, removing one economic barrier to equity of opportunity. Generative AI has the potential to simplify the literacies needed to bring ideas to life.

Tools for Change: Web2 to Metaverse to Web3

Today’s youth are already experts in navigating the digital platforms that suit their goals.

Generations Z and Alpha migrate almost seamlessly between their real and online worlds. A study by Roblox and Parsons School of Design revealed that young people value virtual goods almost equally with physical goods: they use virtual clothing and other items for self-expression and connection. Diverse representation and authenticity are of paramount importance.

TikTok, for example, offers immediacy and impact in a “snackable” format; its users have developed a variety of visual and aural vocabularies that signal authenticity. Dutch producer Jan-Willem Bult teaches young people worldwide to report news and emphasizes TikTok because it’s so personal and direct: “reporters now can get as close to a user as their friends do.”

Social games like Roblox or Minecraft offer immersive spaces for hands-on exploration or creation around critical world issues. UNICEF, the United Nations Climate Change commission and NGOs like the Playing for the Planet Alliance all have organized game jams or competitions around environmental issues. GenZ female creators who started building in Roblox as pre-teen girls are not only making the experiences they care about (including around empowerment, mental health and conservation); they’re working from within to make the gaming industry more equitable.

The record-setting adoption of generative AI platforms for art, writing and coding is quickly making it possible for anyone to be not just an “influencer” but a builder. As blogging sites powered a 1-dimensional User Generated Content (print) revolution; and as smartphone cameras, consumer-friendly editing software, and democratic content platforms like YouTube and Vimeo sparked a 2-dimensional UGC (video) torrent; AI and the social gaming platforms are the foundation of the current rise of 3-dimensional UGC (immersive experiences).

And soon, the coming metaverse and Web3 will accelerate this movement and amplify emerging voices.

Virtual reality is sometimes referred to as “the empathy machine” for its ability to fully immerse a person in another world, whether that of a refugee or as a piece of a dying coral reef. VR production and high-quality goggles are still too expensive for mass global adoption, but we can look not far down the road for young people using social VR to invite peers to stand beside them in experiencing their lives, rather than looking through a distancing flat screen.

Augmented reality – a tool we all carry in our “pocket PC” smartphones – can enable young people to “tag” their world with stories, information, or advocacy. These may be site-specific, such as informing passers-by of an item of history or nature; or they may be projected anywhere, like the Kinfolk app that offsets the underrepresentation of people of color in public statues.

From Virtual to the Real World

At the same time, we need to be careful not to conflate facility with media tools with the critical thinking needed to use them wisely. It’s long past time to make media literacy – how to access, analyze, evaluate and create with any tool, current or yet-to-emerge – a central part of school curriculum, across subject areas.

We also must be careful not to treat virtual spaces as a utopian escape from real-world problems or dystopia. The metaverse itself can’t solve global challenges, but it can spark awareness, enhance knowledge, level up engagement and caring, and build structures for taking action. It can connect people and ideas on a scale and degree of diversity never before possible.

Real-world change is hard work, requiring every tool at our disposal to make progress. If it takes a village, why not employ the largest “village” ever created – the internet and emerging metaverse.

 

David Kleeman is Senior Vice President of Global Trends for Dubit, a metaverse studio and consultancy. He is a 35-year children’s media veteran – a strategist, analyst, author and speaker, connecting ideas and people in media, education, research and child development.

Years ago, when I was a lowly graduate research intern crunching data in Sesame Workshop’s content research department, I saw firsthand the great care with which the organization created high-quality educational media for kids.

My journey into education research started just as the internet arrived in NYC public schools, which kicked off an exciting movement that was mobilized by all kinds of new activity to make it possible to connect every school to each other and to the world beyond. To me, the biggest risk was that we’d fail to do something truly transformative for learners, most likely by falling back on familiar patterns – e.g., simply digitizing existing practices or treating “computer time” as an activity distinct from regular instruction, an add-on when the more serious work was complete. There was also an equally likely risk of inequitable distribution, which we combat to this day.

So naturally I was drawn to the Cooney Center, having spent the better part of two decades working to improve kids’ educational experience, typically by using technology as a lever to effect institutional changes such as bridging formal and informal learning, prototyping new assessment methods, introducing project-based learning, and expanding access to computing education in K-12 schools equitably and sustainably. For me, the most important innovation has always been the opportunity to center kids, which is exactly what the Cooney Center is about.

Today, our work builds upon the Cooney Center’s history of field-building research, focusing our efforts on engaging kids directly in shaping our digital world. I’m inspired daily by our opportunity to translate Joan’s original question – “can television teach kids?” – into a broader challenge: how might we leverage today’s constantly emerging media to advance kids’ learning, development, and well-being?

There is increasing public pressure for digital media producers to “do better” for kids. Our recent market analysis reveals many digital media companies are caught between capitalizing on a business model and maximizing the benefit to children. Developers say they are interested in designing for kids’ benefit, but often don’t know the answers to:

• What does “good” look like?
• How might our potential product shape kids’ learning and well-being?
• How do we ensure our product will serve a diverse range of kids?
• How do we understand kids’ needs and preferences across developmental stages and media platforms—including many that aren’t designed for kids’ use?

To incorporate new development techniques, innovators have told us they want easy access to consistent, reliable, research-based perspectives and the ability to pressure-test emerging concepts and products with diverse groups of kids. Innovators also want to know they are on the right track for promoting kids’ digital well-being and seek to explore friction in human experience earlier in the process than they currently are able to.

Kids should be part of designing their own digital futures

Our new priorities and initiatives draw from this initial inspiration:

1. Enable innovators to design with and for kids. We are leveraging child-centered design practices to help industry partners build better digital media products. The Cooney Center Sandbox bridges the divide among what kids want and need in digital products, what innovators seek to develop, and what researchers know is beneficial. We engage diverse groups of young people as design partners to shape the products made for them.
2. Promote children’s well-being in digital spaces. The Cooney Center is engaging partners globally in the adoption of digital well-being policies and practices by collaborating on the development of research-based definitions and indicators, practical resources, and accessible tools. Our work includes a global initiative with UNICEF and The LEGO Group to activate industry partners and policy makers, and a partnership with the Fair Play Alliance that focuses on building healthy interactions and resilient communities in online game spaces.
3. Support youth voice and participation through public media innovation. Working with young people from diverse backgrounds, the Cooney Center is uncovering valuable insights on their digital media use and translating findings to engage tween and teen audiences. Our partnership with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting supports innovation, shared learning, and collaboration across the 330 public TV and radio stations. Looking ahead, we seek to deepen the system’s capacity to platform youth voice and facilitate youth civic learning experiences.

Our work to center kids in product design is not only the appropriate orientation for industry, but it’s also critical that kids are directly involved in shaping their own digital futures – an adaptation of “nothing about us without us.” Kids offer unique insights about what they want and need that only they can provide. We hope to see the widespread adoption of child-centered design methods to support a continuum “from safe to thriving,” from ensuring safety, security, and privacy, to inclusive design so all can use, to well-being as a goal state – an intentional outcome of well-design digital experience, inclusive of physical and mental health, at the level of individuals, groups, and communities.

We must also assume that technology will continue to evolve rapidly, so our methods need to be durable and adaptable to new conditions. We’re already in the midst of another big shift in the way we interact with technologies. Since the early days of the internet, we have moved from (1) simply getting content online for mass consumption, to (2) participatory media, enabling everyone to be a producer, broadcaster, and commentator, to (3) AI-driven tools, enabling more and more creative tasks to be executed entirely by machines, from works of art to academic papers. We must define appropriate and necessary roles for humans and develop new models for collaboration with computers, and kids again need to be at the forefront.

More specifically, and more Sesame-oriented: what do kids need most today, and how do we leverage today’s emerging media for their benefit? How do we build from what we know in today’s new digital spaces? This will all be a real test for the field, and we have to do it together.

In my 12 years at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center—from 2008 to 2020—I developed the research chops and professional network required to do what I do now as a program director at the National Science Foundation. But what I’m most grateful to the Cooney Center for, and what I believe made me who I am today, are the people I worked with on the fourth floor of 1900 Broadway. These people were family to me. They’re still family to me.

In the summer of 2008, I was living in California when I accepted the position of Cooney Center Fellow. My soon-to-be boss Dixie Ching took it upon herself to find me an apartment in New York and hoofed it up to Manhattan Valley to check out an (illegal) sublet. Hardly anyone owned smartphones back then, so Dixie used a FlipCam (remember those?) to film a narrated walk-through of the Columbus Ave studio I would eventually lease. This act of kinship set the precedent for countless others I would experience throughout my time at the JGCC.

 

Founding Executive Director Michael Levine is largely to blame for setting the familial tone of the Center. He did, after all, talk me into naming my first Cooney Center report Families Matter (2011), a play on the 1990s sitcom that grated on my nerves. Michael also regularly reminded staff that real family comes first whenever our own parents, siblings, partners, or children needed attending to.

Beyond Michael, Lili Toutounas, and Catherine Jhee—the core FTE team for most of my time at the Center—our family was ever-evolving, given the steady stream of fellows, interns, contractors, research scientists, managers, and associates who cycled through for stints of one, two, or three years a time. This was by design. It kept the Center in touch with the latest trends in research and digital media. And it meant I had the pleasure of working with dozens of the most clever, enthusiastic, and mission-oriented young individuals^[1] passing through the JGCC on their ways toward even greater things.

To be part of the Cooney Center family, you had to have a sense of humor. Goofiness must have been some unconscious criterion in our hiring decisions because gather a group of us in any conference room (but usually Grover, Zoe, or Elmo) and we spent half the time joking around. To be part of the family, you also had to be obsessed with food and like to complain about the weather. Or maybe it was just me complaining about the weather and Lili and Catherine humoring me.

We reveled in the city we lived and worked in, doing museum field trips and NYC Fashion Week and croissant taste-offs outside of office hours. We celebrated birthdays and baby showers and farewells at nearby restaurants^[2] followed by too-sweet cupcakes from Magnolia or too-big cookies from Levain that we complained about but ate anyway. We visited the set—taking family portraits in Oscar’s alleyway—and teared up on cue during Sesame’s quarterly all-staff meetings, sitting in the creaky seats at the back of the Society for Ethical Culture’s auditorium. We survived an earthquake together. We traveled together to LA! San Francisco! Corona, Queens! We sailed the mighty Hudson and Acela-ed to DC, fighting motion sickness in tandem.

Of course, we didn’t just play. We worked long hours to make happen what no other organization was doing at the time, motivated by a shared vision of more equitable learning and life outcomes for young children and their families. This vision led to our creating the Families and Media Project in 2012, expanding the JGCC family to include partners in California, Washington, Arizona, New Jersey, and Illinois, which we affectionately referred to as the FAM Fam.^[3]

I left the JGCC in 2020 in the capable hands of Michael Preston, who’s keeping the Center as playful, fresh, and prolific as it’s ever been as it passes through its adolescent years. I wish Michael and the rest of the current crew there best wishes for the Center’s continued success. Feliz Quinceañera, Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and many happy returns.

 

 

 

 

 

Lori Takeuchi spent 12 years at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, where she led its research program and held positions including acting executive director and deputy director. Lori began her career in the children’s media industry at Thirteen/WNET and then spent over a decade designing K12 geoscience software. Lori is currently a program director at the National Science Foundation in its Division of Research on Learning (EDU/DRL), where she manages its STEM media portfolio. She holds board positions at the Oakland YMCA and the FrameWorks Institute and is Noggin’s Scholar-in-Residence.  

 

 

^[1] Aaron Morris, Alan Nong, Alexia Raynal, Allison Mishkin, Amber Levinson, Anna Ly, AnneMarie McClain, Armanda Lewis, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Briana Ellerbe, Caitlin Gonser, Carly Shuler, Carmen Gonzalez, Christina Hinton, Connie Sun, Cynthia Chiong, David Lowenstein, Elisabeth McClure, Gabrielle Santa-Donato, Gabrielle Cayton-Hodges, Glenda Revelle, Ingrid Erickson, Jason Yip, Jenny Ng, Jessica Millstone, Jinny Ree, Kiley Sobel, Kristen Kohm, Laurie Rabin, Marj Kleinman, Meagan Henry, Meryl Alper, Rocio Almanza-Guillen, Sarah Vaala, Tamara Spiewak Toub, Vikki Katz, and Zach Levine

^[2] E.g., Atlantic Grill, Bar Boulud, Boulud Sud, Épicerie Boulud, Shun Lee West, and Indie Cafe

^[3] Alexis Lauricella, Brigid Barron, Carmen Gonzalez, Elisabeth Gee, Ellen Wartella, Katie Headrick Taylor, Reed Stevens, Sinem Siyahhan, Vicky Rideout, and Vikki Katz

The following article was originally published on Net Family News and appears here with permission.

Even though the United States is the only country on the planet that hasn’t ratified the nearly 34-year-old UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, US-based companies that serve kids and teens around the world no longer have any excuse not to uphold their rights.

From the Digital Futures Commission

Why is that the case? Not “only” because young people’s lives are now “digital by default,” as psychology professor Sonia Livingstone wrote, or because one in every three of the world’s internet users are under 18 or because the Convention has been updated to define their rights in digital contexts – but also because they now have guidance from the UK-based Digital Futures Commission on how to bake in children’s rights. This is a game-changer.

The rights-by-design principles

The authors have defined the 11 principles of children’s rights-by-design and matched each with tools for baking them into products and services. Their guide is focused on designers, developers, managers, UX researchers, and others in the UK, but it provides needed definitions and resources for practitioners and policymakers everywhere.

“Digital technologies are part of the infrastructure of children’s daily lives – they are no longer optional for children but indeed crucial to their development and prospects,” write the guide’s authors, Drs. Livingstone and Kruakae Pothong. The problem is, digital spaces are “proprietary, and business models are based on wide and deep data collection to monetize [children’s] attention and identities,” they continue, and, what’s more, children’s own experiences and views have been largely absent from mix, even as their attention and data are commoditized.

You’ll see from the principles chart that designing for their rights is not only about child online safety. Safety-by-design is essential but addresses only young people’s protection rights. The other two categories complete the Convention’s perfectly balanced framework for youth well-being in all the overlapping aspects of their lives – physical, social-emotional, psychological, cognitive, and digital – a balance needed because of all the overlap. The authors modeled the participation rights part by consulting with 143 children aged 7-14 in workshops across the UK last summer. Their aim was to be sure the participants understood their rights and got a chance to reflect on them out loud, where digital products are concerned – so that the researchers could capture the “design features and functionalities that children expect to see” in their apps, services, and devices.

Operationalizing children’s best interests

Knowing that policy and lawmaking need precise wording and definition, one question I had was about Principle No. 2: the term “best interests of the child,” which appears in Articles 3, 9, 18, 20, and 21 in the Convention. I wondered how companies might operationalize what the authors themselves acknowledged has caused some confusion – “how to embed abstract human rights in concrete development processes and … manage competing priorities [in the face of] commercial drivers.”

In researching that question, I found US as well as European and international sources. Definitions from sources serving US legal and social services professionals make it clear that consulting with children is essential. “The best interests of the child means that any situation should be looked at from the child’s own perspective, seeking to take the child’s views into consideration, and with the objective of ensuring that his/her rights are respected” was the first part of a definition at LawInsider.com. FindLaw.com calls the principle a standard that involves factors such as the wishes, happiness, security, mental health, and emotional development of the child – factors courts need to take into consideration when making decisions on child welfare. That is the focus, too, of a resource for courts and child welfare workers at ChildWelfare.gov from the US Department of Health and Human Services, offering “guiding principles,” “factors” and “other considerations.”

The very first sentence of Principle No. 2’s definition is from the UNCRC itself: “Designing for children’s best interests means giving at least equal consideration to children’s wellbeing, growth, development and agency as to businesses’ interests.” That’s an excellent baseline. Well into the CRC’s second decade, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees found that “limited guidance [was] available on how to operationalize the best interests principle,” so it created guidelines here. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors the Convention’s implementation around the world, writes that the best-interests principle is closely linked to others in the Convention, such as children’s rights of non-discrimination and life, survival and development and the right to be heard.

What is not particularly helpful to the industry, so far, is that the principle, the Committee writes, “is complex and its content must be determined on a case-by-case basis,” so “the concept … is flexible and adaptable” because it’s “through the interpretation and implementation of article 3, paragraph 1, in line with the other provisions of the Convention, that the legislator, judge, administrative, social or educational authority will be able to clarify the concept and make concrete use thereof.”

Unavoidable and urgent

What is not in question, though – for Internet companies as well as all parties in both private and public sectors – is that we won’t get there without honoring children and teens’ right to be heard.

People will say that all this will take time, but it’s urgent as laws are being passed. The tools are here and the pressure is on for the industry to work together with youth to uphold “nothing about us without us” for young people. I hope US lawmakers at state and federal levels will work with youth rather than tokenize young people they hand-pick and – just as important – work  with industry, not in an adversarial relationship with it, in developing legislation that is actually in the best interests of youth based on youth’s input.

Related links

• The “three P’s”: It was in 2014 that I first learned about the three categories of children’s rights in the Convention – rights of participation, provision, and protection – and realized this was the ideal framework for their digital rights as well (here is that blog post about a paper by Profs. Sonia Livingstone and Brian O’Neill). Then in 2017, Livingstone and Prof. Amanda Third in Sydney, co-authored and ‘edited a special issue of New Media & Society on “Children and Young People’s Rights in the Digital Age,” further strengthening the framework by arguing for conscious upholding of children’s rights in balance, writing for example that “over and again, efforts to protect them unthinkingly curtail their participation rights in ways that they themselves are unable to contest.”
• So we’re seeing progress in prioritizing positive, remedial, and restorative approaches to youth wellbeing over punitive or purely legalistic approach. Just a few examples (see also “the ‘three P’s’” above) are the safety-by-design tools for start-ups and established Internet companies which Australia’s eSafety Commissioner’s Office launched in 2018, to General Comment 25, the 2021 digital-age update to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to children’s rights-by-design….
• For internet industry people, this is the best: a super professionals-friendly version of “Child Rights by Design,” while the full report from the Digital Futures Commission can be found here: “Child Rights by Design: Guidance for Innovators of Digital Products and Services Used by Children“
• “Children could not be clearer that they long for a child rights-respecting digital world,” write the researchers who conducted the workshops for consulted with children 7-14 on how to design for their rights. They “expect the digital world to put their best interests at least on par with business interests.”
• All the links to the work of the Digital Futures Commission are here, from the “Playful by Design” report to a blueprint for ed tech’s handling of children’s data to a paper on the minefield of standards and regulations industry faces and how it’s doing
• Children’s own views on well-being: Global study
• About youth rights’ digital upgrade in 2021

 

A writer and youth rights advocate, Anne Collier is executive director of the nonprofit Net Safety Collaborative and a longstanding adviser to global social media platforms. She has been writing about youth and digital media in sites, journals and books since 1999, when she created NetFamilyNews.org.