← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
World Children’s Day: digital futures for children – children’s rights under pressure in the digital environment
01:31:00
Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
- [00:14]
B
So welcome. Good evening to everyone here and those watching online. I'm Sonja Livingstone from the Department of Media and Communications here at LSE and I'm really delighted to welcome you to to this evening's hybrid event called Children's Rights under Pressure in the Digital Environment. So the International Child Rights Framework was brought into the digital age in 2021, very recently when the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted its landmark General Comet 25. Keep that phrase in mind, you're going to hear it a lot. General comment 25 sets out how children's rights relate to the digital environment. Since its adoption, the General Comment has provided vital guidance to governments, civil society and industry around the world on how to uphold the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the Digital Environment, if you like. It's 10,000 words long. It tries to answer the pressing questions what does good look like? What's going wrong? What's needed? Who should take which actions? Today is World Children's day and it's 36 years since the UN General assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. And we're going to ask the so what question? Why does this general comment matter? Who's taking notice of it? Are things changing, improving for children as a result? As you can see, the event is hosted by the Digital Futures for Children Centre, which with the Five Rights foundation, was established a couple of years ago to research the opportunities for and barriers to a rights respecting digital world. We support an evidence base for advocacy, facilitate dialogue between academics and policymakers, and we amplify trust, children's voices. All our work is framed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and general comment 25. And I should say we're not just observers in this process. So before setting up the dfc, some of us formed the Drafting Group for the Committee on the Rights of the Child to produce the General Comment. And for that we consulted children, governments and other key actors. We grappled with the nature of Children's Convention rights, asking what does education, safety, inclusion, play, privacy, participation? What do they look like in a digital world? How do they apply in the digital environment? Can this be achieved? We also grappled with what we even mean by the digital environment. Yes, it includes the technologies children use in their home, school and elsewhere. But it also includes the technologies and the companies behind those technologies, the technologies designed to attract them, to track them, to sort and commodify them, whether or not children are the intended users, whether or not the tech companies even know that they are there. So as digital technologies are ever more taken for granted in our everyday lives, in our work, in our relationships, in health, public spaces, we're asserting that a child rights framework is vital to centre children, which is defined as everyone up to 18 to hear their views, articulate their needs, inspire and legitimate the actions that respect and protect their rights. Which often means in practice trying to put children before profit, trying to think about the business model of the disposition digital world. And today, as we signal in our title, children's rights are under pressure in human rights law. The UN Human Rights and Business principles asserts that states have the obligation to ensure that businesses act responsibly in relation to children's rights. But children's lives, actually all our lives, are increasingly underpinned by commercial infrastructures owned and developed by major corporates whose power exceeds that of many governments, many countries and corporates who do not have children's needs and rights in mind. And the pressures are multiplying. In addition to the challenge of big tech's power, wielded through innovation, through monopoly, through lobbying and litigation, child rights advocates are just dealing with a host of problems. These include the loss in the authority and legitimacy of the United nations as geopolitical tensions rise, drastic cuts to the budgets of UN organizations and many child welfare and rights organisations around the world, discursive and normative challenges to human rights, loss of trust in organizations in including in the state, the weaponization of information and knowledge and within the family, rising calls for parents rights over children's rights. And that's to say nothing of the widespread dismay that many are feeling as generative artificial intelligence once again shows the ethical vacuum at the heart of business innovation. I don't think we're going to cover or resolve all of this tonight, but we do want to try to map some recent developments and future prospects for children's rights in a digital world. So I'm going to introduce our speakers and the event. We're first going to hear from Dr. Kim Sylvander who's going to present the results of our new research report. This examines the recognition, uptake and implementation implementation of General Comment 25among UN treaty monitoring bodies, national policies, regional frameworks and civil society advocacy. Our goal at the GFC has been to reveal the progress being made, identify the obstacles and unfold a theory of change to realize children's rights in this fast changing digital environment. So so Kim Sarander is a postdoctoral researcher at the Digital Futures for Children Centre and her research is focused on children, youth and media, specifically online hate, racism, sexuality and technology facilitated child sexual abuse and exploitation. She's worked for the UN in civil society and academia. She served as a government appointed expert in inquiries on sexual exploitation and the effects of digital media on children in Sweden and at the dfc. She's also led a second project today with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights which is a global consultation with children on the general comment. So Kim is going to speak for up to half an hour and then we have two respondents who will each speak for five to ten minutes. So on. Jerison Lansdowne, in the far seat is an international consultant and advocate on children's rights. She's worked with the Committee on the Rights of the Child on several general comments on the rights of children to be heard to play during adolescence and in the digital environment and she was involved in drafting the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She's an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Canada and and at University College Cork and has honorary doctorates from the Open University, Carlton University and the University of East London. Our second respondent is Gaston Wright, an expert in digital rights and public policy and director of Civic Compass, a think tank that studies how data protection, content moderation and online safety shape the civic space. Previously he launched Change.org in the South Cone. He worked for a while as Public Policy manager for Meta in Latin America and spent 12 years at Ashoka where he led the global expansion of changemaker.com he studied at the University of Toronto and teaches Internet Regulation at Docotoro Tella University and the University of Buenos Aires. So then we're going to have time for Q and A and discussion and Q and A and so please be ready with questions when the time comes. And if you're watching online, please be ready to use the Q and A function on your screen. We will wrap up at 8 o' clock and for those here in person there will be a reception just out of these doors and to the left, so please put your phones on silent. This evening is being recorded and will be available as a podcast later. And I would now like to warmly welcome Kim to come and tell us how the general comment has done.
- [09:38]
A
Thank you. It's lovely to be here tonight and see you all. Thank you for coming in this very cold weather we are having today. Really appreciate you coming out. Yes, so today it's World's Children, World Children's day. And firstly, I'd like to thank Sonia for setting out the history and adoption of general Comment number 25 and our work with this project. I'd also like to thank Jerison and Gaston for joining us today. So I want to pick up today from where Sonia left off, what happens now from February 2021 to today, and ask a very simple question. What difference has the general Comment actually made? Not in theory, not in aspiration, but in real systems that shape children's lives? Because we find ourselves in a global moment, as Sonia has already talked about, where children's rights are under threat not only through new digital risks, but through something deeper laws being weakened, protections being rolled back, and powerful corporate and political actors influencing decisions far more than children themselves. These speak to a wider pattern. Children's rights are increasingly contested, increasingly politicized, and in many places increasingly fragile. And yet at the same time, the General Comment has become an important and widely cited child rights instrument. As I will show you in this presentation, it's shaping the Committee on the Rights of the Child's concluding observations and recommendations to states. It's influencing national laws, regional regulation and the work of UN agencies. And the vocabulary of digital governance is being reshaped as well. Well, it has given states, regulators, civil society and advocates a shared language and a shared benchmark for what it means to realize children's rights in the digital environment. So today I want to talk you through what the evidence shows about the impact that the General Comment has had, where it has shifted norms, where it has reshaped governance, and where it is struggling. I'll draw from two major studies that we've undertaken at the DFC. Firstly, our analysis of 79 state party reviews in the monitoring system of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and then our global mapping of legal, institutional and advocacy uptake from the UN to regional bodies and national systems. Together, these findings tell a story that is both encouraging and sobering. General Comment number 25 has catalyzed real change, but what changes has occurred is uneven, vulnerable, and often resisted. And understanding this tension between progress and pushback is crucial if we want to understand how the general comment can fulfill its transformative potential. So before returning to the findings, it helps to recall what the Committee and its general comments do. The Committee on the Rights of the Child monitors how States implement the Convention. States report periodically, and the Committee reviews their progress, taking evidence from civil society, national human rights institutes, UN bodies, and children themselves, and issues concluding observations with recommendations to States on what they must do to better implement the Convention on the Rights of the Child. General Comments are its authoritative interpretations of the Convention's provisions. They don't change the treaty necessarily, but they clarify what rights require in new contexts. So, for instance, for the general comment number 25, which explains how children's rights apply in the digital environment and now shapes law, policy, regulation and professional practice across multiple Systems. So since 2021, we've seen a remarkable shift in the practice of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Committee has gone from mentioning digital issues occasionally to including them in every single concluding observation. And this isn't just a vocabulary change. The general Comment number 25 has genuinely reshaped how the Committee interprets the Convention. As mentioned, this is based on our Systematic review of 79 state party examinations since the adoption of the general comment 25 in 2021. And we've looked at how digital issues are raised in the Committee's list of issues in State Party reports, alternative reports, and the Committee's final recommendations. Across these reviews, a clear pattern emerges. The Committee now places strong emphasis on on violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, and it sets much clearer expectations around privacy and data protection than it did before. And it increasingly pushes states on digital literacy, access to information, and harmful content. We also see the beginnings of a more ambitious and broadened agenda on corporate accountability and the governance of AI profiling and automated decision making. But there's a gap. Participation rights remain underdeveloped. Children's freedom of expression, their rights to associate online, and, crucially, their involvement in shaping digital policy are still rarely addressed. So while children's rights in the digital environment are now firmly on the Committee's agenda, implementation is still dominated by a protection lens often interpreted through privacy, information access and the obligation states hold under the Optional Protocol on the Site, sale of children, and sexual exploitation. But if we zoom out and look at the State Party reports, one thing becomes clear. Children are growing up in profoundly different digital worlds, depending on where they live. We have countries like Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK where the digital environment is beginning to reflect a child rights framework, even though this might not yet be reflected in children's lived realities. These states have strong data protection laws, independent regulators, universal broadband, digital literacy in schools, and clear duties placed on companies. Enforcement should be said, is imperfect, but children grow up in systems that at least attempt to protect and empower them. Most children, however, live outside of these contexts. A much larger group of countries such as Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, and Turkey are moving in the right direction, but progress remains uneven. They have policies, helplines cybercrime units and literacy programs, and their approaches are still dominated by protection and law enforcement logics. Privacy may be partial, participation may be an afterthought, and company accountability is often missing. And then there are states with only the beginnings of a framework, a national strategy here, a cybercrime law there, but weak enforcement, limited coordination and minimal child rights integration. Many rely heavily on donors or UN agencies activities and in conflict affected or low resource settings such as the Gambia, Eritrea, South Sudan or Congo. Connectivity is low, institutions are fragile, and governance often means generic cybercrime provisions rather than any rights based systems. The result is a deeply unequal landscape, and even though state party reports don't reflect the complete reality of the digital governance systems that they have in place, they still give us a snapshot of how these countries prioritize rights in their settings. Some children benefit from emerging protections, many encounter unregulated, inaccessible or commercially driven digital worlds. And this is precisely why the General Comment matters. Without a shared child rights framework, these inequalities will deepen and children's experiences will continue to diverge. It's important when we look at the monitoring system of the Convention to also consider the alternative reports, because civil society and other organizations play an important role in informing the Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress that countries have made. So civil society groups, not national human rights institutes and international organizations routinely use the General Comment to push states much further than they go in their own reports. So for example, in Norway, ECPAT International's contribution to the Review of Norway and the National Human Rights institution used General Comment 25 to challenge a proposed minimum age for social media and highlight gaps in privacy and remedy. In Brazil, the Alana Institute invoked the General Comment to call for a stronger data protection and to stop children's data from being trained by AI. Recommendations to the Committee later reflected these reports by these alternative reports, which is a very important indication that alternative reports need to be considered as important in the advocacy of the General Comment because they do push the Committee to then adopt recommendations that are very specific. And so we will see in later years that they will be able to follow up and make further recommendations on how states should implement general Comment themes, for example, much closer. But what's striking is that very few children's reports mentioned the General Comment et al. When we do look at Children's own submissions and they're very powerful, of course they show that digital life is central to learning, friendship and participation. But access remains deeply unequal and children, for example in the Philippines, describe unreliable connectivity. Romanian children highlight online risks and low digital literacy, and in Honduras, children simply ask for Internet in their schools. They also speak about harassment, discrimination and the pressure created by algorithmically amplified content, yet say they have almost no voice in shaping the policies or platforms that govern their lives. Finally, a brief look at what's emerging The Committee on the Rights of the Child is now treating AI as a standard area of concern, recommending safeguards, calling out profiling, and pushing states to regulate automated decision making systems in education, welfare and policing. Corporate accountability is another growing theme, drawing on both the General Comment and general Comment number 16 on business and children's rights, but is still in early stages. We also see a tension between protection rights and civil and cultural rights, for example to expression. For instance, in some countries, digital governance frameworks are being used to justify state censorship or surveillance, such as Russia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam. These emerging issues tell us that the General Comment is beginning to shape the digital future of children's rights, also within the Committee on the Rights of the Child. But they also remind us that rights in the digital environment are contested, fragile and unevenly realized. So I want to begin this second half by briefly touching on the theory of change, because it gives us the clearest lens for understanding what happens after a general comment is adopted. General Comment number 5 doesn't create change on its own. It works when four things come together legal uptake, institutional uptake, advocacy uptake, and normative uptake. So the question for this part of the talk is where is general Comment number 25 traveling through these pathways and where is it getting stuck? And that brings us to how the general comment actually moves. It has no enforcement mechanism. Instead, it spreads through norm diffusion, influencing how institutions think, how they interpret the convention, and what they expect states and companies to do. It becomes the reference point for issues the Convention never explicitly named Data Governance, Profiling, EdTech Platform Accountability, Children's agency in digital spaces. So rather than asking is the general comment binding? The real question becomes who is picking it up, who is resisting it? And where is it starting to reshape law and practice? That's the journey I want to map in this section, and at the end we'll return to the theory of change and the indicators we need to measure whether those pathways are actually producing meaningful change for children. So to understand the General Commons impact, we used a mixed method multi level approach. We analyzed documents across UN systems, regional bodies and national laws, and we complemented this with expert interviews, regional consultations, a global call for evidence, and a narrative literature review. This allowed us to trace not only where the General Comment is formally referenced, but how different actors interpret, use, or contest it in practice. So if you want to know whether a human rights norm has landed, you don't look at the press release, you look at where diplomats start fighting over the wording. And that is exactly what we see with the general Comment number 25 across the UN system in the first years of 2021, the General assembly spoke frequently about children and the digital environment. Yet almost as if the General Comment didn't exist, resolutions on disinformation, sexual exploitation, cyberbullying and virtual learning all invoked digital childhood, but none cited the General Comment. The concerns were clear, but the assembly had not yet accepted the General Comment as a reference point. The turning point came with resolution 78187 on the rights of the child in December of 2023. For the first time, the General assembly explicitly instructed States to implement the Convention in relation to the Digital Environment and incorporated Core General comma 25 themes. Privacy is foundational to children's dignity, dignity and agency business responsibilities for safety by design, the need for child rights impact assessments and the obligation to address digital divides, particularly for girls and rural and low income children. Advocacy groups described it as a political endorsement of general comment 25. Yet the debate also revealed open resistance, with Iran, Nigeria and others insisting that the General Comments are non binding, that they promote controversial agendas, and that they overemphasize children's privacy rights. In one resolution, General Comment 25 became both mainstreamed and contested. The Human Rights Council followed a similar trajectory. Early resolutions avoided the General Comment entirely, but by 2022 a resolution on cyberbullying took note of the General Comment and urged companies to adopt safety, privacy and security by design. In 2023, the council's annual day on the Rights of the Child focused entirely on children's rights in the digital environment, using the General Comment as the foundation for assessing state progress across the wider UN system. General comment 25 is increasingly treated as a working tool, so Special Rapporteurs, for example on the sale and exploitation of children, advise Montenegro to base new legislation on the General Comment. The Special Representative on Violence Against Children anchored her flagship policy paper, A Safer Digital Environment for Children, in the General Comment and used it in advocacy around the global Digital Compact. Specialized agencies also rely on it, so unicef, for example, draws on the General Comment in its work on data governance, AI and platform accountability, treating it as the child rights counterpart to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and and Human Rights, UNESCO's guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms explicitly reference General Comment 25 and incorporate indicators assessing whether national system meets its standards. So these are big changes which exemplify how the General Comment has started to become standardized when talking about children in the digital environment in the UN system. So taken together, these developments show no single moment of adoption but something more telling General 25 being woven into resolutions, guidance, expert reports and global standards sometimes cited, sometimes resisted, sometimes quietly absorbed. Exactly what we expect from a normative instrument whose influence spreads through interpretation, negotiation and gradual uptake rather than through enforcement. So if the UN is where the General Comment builds legitimacy, regional systems are where it gains traction. In Europe, for example, the General Comment has been explicitly woven into several key instruments. The most clear is the EU Artificial Intelligence act in 2024, where the General Comment is cited in the explanatory recitals. The act treats impacts on children's rights as a trigger for high risk classification. Under the Digital Services act, platforms accessible to minors must ensure privacy and safety provider by design, disable profiling based advertising and mitigate systemic risks to children's rights, concrete duties that echo the general common 25 almost line by line. The Better Internet for Kids strategy cites the General Common to reaffirm that children's rights apply online and offline. While the European Parliament's 2024 resolution on virtual worlds opens with the General Comment in the African Union in 2023, the AU put children's digital rights at the center of its political agenda by selecting the rights of the child in the digital environment as the theme for the Day of the African Child and naming General Common 25 outright as part of Africa's normative foundation. Just a year later, the AU went further and adopted the Child Online Single Safety and Empowerment Policy, the world's first continental framework dedicated to children's rights in the digital spaces. It weaves the General Comment throughout best interest participation, non discrimination, safety by design, child rights impact assessments, and even continent wide plan to train ICT regulators directly on the General Comment. This is not in the least due to the efforts of Five Rights foundation who I know are in the room. Perhaps the boldest development is the draft African Model Law on Children's Rights in the Digital Environment, which hasn't yet been adopted but which lifts the general Common 25's principles almost verbatim to offer 55 states a harmonized template covering everything from privacy by design and independent oversight to remedies and accountability. Africa shows what it looks like when the General Comment is taken seriously, when it becomes legislation, policy incapacity, deep building all at once but how this will be, how this will look in practice is yet to be seen. But it also exposes this hard truth. Political ambition doesn't guarantee implementation. The region still faces vast digital divides, resource constraints and limited enforcement capacity. The architecture is being put in place, but the real test will be whether these frameworks translate into actual protections for the millions of African Americans children who are online today. We also have ASEAN. ASEAN's uptake looks quite different. The region has acted quickly on online sexual exploitation and abuse. We know in the Asian context that these are also looking at State Party reports and reports by the Committee on the Rights of the Child. These are central concerns in many Asian countries. Yet the region has acted quickly on these issues. Yet its wider digital agenda is still far narrower than what the General comment envisions. The 2023 legislative guidelines mark real progress. They explicitly cite the General Comment alongside the Convention on the Rights of the Child. But flagship frameworks like the ASEAN Digital Master Plan 2025 still cast children mainly as recipients of access, not as rights holders with agency and and enforceable protections. Still, ASEAN's Large Scale Child consultations and its growing rights architecture show clear entry points for the General Commons broader vision, especially as the region navigates AI ed tech and data governance. The foundations are there, the challenges now shifting from harm prevention to a truly holistic rights based digital ecosystem. We also looked at countries and here of course we are unable to cover all the countries in the entire world. But we wanted to see where can we actually see evidence of impact when we look at legislation, legislative processes and here, experts in our global consultations were key to identifying which countries we should look at. So if the general comment 25 was adopted in Geneva, its real test is in capitals and regulators offices around the world. What happens when it hits the ground? The picture that emerges is one of creative uptake, local translation and uneven but undeniable movement. So let me offer a few snapshots. In Ireland we have one of the clearest examples of the General Comment reshaping a regulatory culture. Even before its formal adoption, the Ombudsman for Children's Office was already using the draft text to influence the national currency curriculum framework and parliamentary debates on the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act. Once the General Comment was adopted, it quickly became a cornerstone of the Ombudsman's advice to the new media regulator. During the developments of Ireland's first binding online safety code for video sharing platforms, the Ombudsman and civil society repeatedly invoked the General Comment to demand child rights impact assessments, safety by design, duties Privacy by default, meaningful age assurance and accessible redress. These interventions directly shape the final code, which now embeds many of these principles. Ireland shows that the General Comment in action not as an abstract UN document, but as a real practical tool wielded by regulators, lawmakers and advocates to secure clearer duties for industry and stronger protections for children. So in Brazil, we saw law go from soft guidance to hard law. Brazil offers one of the strongest examples of the General Comment being transformed into binding rules. In 2024, the National Child Rights Council adopted Resolution 245, explicitly naming the General Comment as a standard for rights in the digital environment. It mandated privacy by default, restricted data collection, banning profiling and targeted advertising to children, and framed pervasive commercial surveillance as incompatible with children's rights. In 2025, Brazil went further with a digital statue of the child and as adolescent, embedding the general common principles into law. Safety by design, obligations for all services likely to be accessed by children, reliable age assurance and a ban on loot boxes, which I know many other countries are looking to at the moment moment as well. They also included the rapid removal of harmful content and reinforced powers for the Data Protection Authority. Implementation remains a challenge, especially for smaller companies and overstretched regulators. But Brazil demonstrates the General Commons potential to migrate from soft guidance into enforceable commitments with the right translation and interpretation, with the help by civil society society organizations. One of the most recent examples we have as well is Indonesia's 2025 regulation on child protection in electronic systems, which doesn't cite the General Comment. But its influence is unmistakable, especially when we look what went into leading up to the adoption of this regulation. The process included inter ministerial workshops and a dedicated children's consultation, treating their participation as integral to design. The regulation requires data protection, impact assessments, high privacy defaults, limits on profiling and persuasive design, and a clear complaint mechanism. Officials drew on international models like the UK Age Appropriate Design Code and Irish guidance, both shaped by the General Comment as well or informing each other. Indonesia shows that the General Comment traffic travels indirectly through toolkits, norms and models adopted to local realities and supported by international advocacy. So to really come down to the advocacy issue, advocacy is the engine that keeps the General Comment moving from paper into practice. Take five rights foundation that we work closely with since 2012. It has worked deliberately to turn children's rights in the digital environment into concrete design duties for governments and companies. It helped shape the text of the general comment 25 as we've heard from Sonia, then stayed in the room drafting language for UN resolutions, feeding into the Global Digital Compact, advising on EU files like the DSA and AI act, and co creating the African Union's Child Online Safety and Empowerment Policy. This is proof of how much one organization with the rights skills and knowledge can do the same. Playbook repeats nationally, from the UK's Age Appropriate Design Code and Ireland's Data Protection Guidance to Indonesia's draft Child Online Protection Law, where five rights toolkits and arguments are clearly visible in the final provisions. But across our consultations, advocates describe the General Comment as their anchor. Often they do not lead with rights language in the room, and especially in today's environment where child rights are being rolled back. But they rely on the General Comment to justify tougher standards, child rights impact assessments and safety by design. At the same time, they're pushing against real headwinds, low awareness among lawmakers, a drift toward narrow protectionist fixes, and the structural power of large tech companies. Their message is consistent. Without binding duties, coordinated regulation, legislators enforcement, and meaningful child participation, children's rights in the digital environment will remain aspirational. With them, the General Comment can set the direction of travel, and advocacy can keep pulling policy and practice along the route. So what enables progress? When we've looked across these various sources, we see that important enablers include strong human rights institutions, institutions, effective regulators, civil society mobilization, regional legal frameworks, existing data protection laws, and structured processes for children's participation. But what holds progress back? And here, of course, the rollback of children's rights is an important factor. But with that weak institutional capacity, fragmented governance, over reliance on law enforcement approaches, resource constraints, digital inequality, powerful technology sector lobbying, and crucially, very limited involvement from children in shaping policy. These barriers mean that even where the General Comment is referenced, it does not always translate into meaningful practice. Rights related to participation, access and agency remain especially fragile.
- [37:02]
C
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSEIQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSEIQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [37:30]
A
So where does this leave us? After analyzing 79 state party reviews, regional and global governance systems, national laws, and the practices of civil society and regulators around the world, a clear picture emerges. The General Comment has shifted the global understanding of children's rights in the digital age, but its impact is uneven, contested, and still unfolding. Our theory of change reminds us that the General Comments does not work through enforcement. It works through something more subtle but ultimately more powerful normative authority, institutional uptake and multi state stakeholder mobilization. Across the world we see the general common traveling through four interconnected pathways, legal and regulatory, which shape privacy laws, online safety codes, AI regulation and platform accountability. Institutional aligning UN agencies, treaty bodies, regional organizations and national regulators around shared standards Advocacy, which equips civil society researchers and national human rights rights institutes with a rights based framework for litigation, campaigning and public debate and normative and cultural pathways embedding the vocabulary of children's rights in digital governance itself. So taken together, these pathways demonstrate that the General Comment is not just a document, it's a mechanism of diffusion shaping how digital environments are governed, interpreted and contested. And yet the same evidence also shows shows how fragile this progress is. Children's rights are under threat in many places. Protections are being weakened. Regulation is shaped more by industry lobbying than children's voices. Political polarization and shrinking civic space makes rights based governance harder, not easier. That is why measurement becomes crucial. Because if we want the General Comment to deliver not just recognition but transformation, we need a way to assess whether these pathways of change are actually working. That's where indicators come in and we can now start to measure whether a state has child specific digital laws and policies, whether enforcement bodies exist and how the resources and have the resources to act whether companies are bound to duties of care, whether children participate meaningfully in policy or product design, whether remedies exist when rights are violated, and whether digital inclusion is improving in practice, not just in strategy and documents. These indicators would allow us to distinguish symbolic adoption from real progress and to track whether the General Comment and children's rights in the digital environment more broadly is moving through the four pathways of our theory of change. If the general Commons first phase was gaining recognition, then the next phase must be about deepening implementation, strengthening these pathways and ensuring that the digital environments children inhabit every day are shaped with their rights at the center. And that is the challenge for us all. The General Comment has given us clarity, coherence and a shared vocabulary. Its long term impact now depends on sustained political will, effective institutions and genuine participation, especially of children themselves. So the next chapter of the General Comment perhaps begins with one question. Not whether we have the framework, but whether we have the commitment to make it real. Thank you.
- [40:47]
B
Wonderful Kim, thank you very much. Hope I can feel some commitment in the room to make this real. But I want to draw now on our two respondents to hear their thoughts, reactions. I'm going to turn, I think first to Jerison and then to Gaston. And then we will be coming to you all for questions here and online. I think you can.
- [41:21]
D
So what I'm going. I mean that was a really fascinating overview of where we've come over the last 40 cents, nearly five years. And what I want to do will sound rather random in the face of what you've just said, but what I want to do is to reflect on if we're going to work towards strengthening children's rights in the context of the digital environment. I think a starting point is perhaps to take us back a bit to think about how does the Convention on the Rights of the Child actually deal with childhood status? And we're talking about children and what do we actually mean when we're talking about children? And in the context of human rights law, every other human rights treaty rests on a presumption of autonomy. It rests on a presumption that individuals have self determining rights to make their own decisions in relation to marriage, in relation to work, in relation, relation to access to information, religion, whatever. But children from birth cannot be presumed to have autonomous decision making capacity. They have all the rights in the Convention, but they don't have the capacity from day one to exercise those rights on their own behalf. So the Convention on the Rights of the child in Article 5 introduces this concept of, of the evolving capacities of children. In other words, what it does, it recognizes there is a journey from day one birth of the child up until their 18th birthday. And children are going through a transition in the process of that journey. And that has a huge number of implications. And the CRC is very clear about what those implications are. First of all, all the rights, as I say, do apply to children from birth. But because children don't have capacity, parents are vested with the rights and responsibilities to provide direction and guidance to children. But there are very clear parameters on how that must be done. And when we say parents, we mean anybody who has responsibilities for the care of children. It could be teachers, could be in certain contexts, medical clinicians and so on. It could be children in institutions and so on. So anyone who has care of children. So what is required is that that direction, guidance must be directed towards the realization of children's rights and it must be consistent with children's evolving capacities. So here is the complex question. As children advance 5 years old, 7 years old, 10 years old, as they transition through, how do those rights transfer to them to exercise on their own behalf? And in the context of the digital environment, this is hugely complex. And states have a clear role to intervene where parents are failing to comply either with respect for the evolving capacities or the realisation of children's rights. So that's the kind of framework and how we understand the status of childhood in the context of the human rights field. I just wanted to pick up on two key issues really which I think are relevant to that. First is this creates an inherent, if you like, tension between parental rights and children's rights. And we are living in a world of increasing authoritarianism where many more states are now saying we. We are privileging parents rights over children's rights, having gone through a period when there was huge enthusiasm, almost universal ratification and so on. So for example, the committee recently criticized Russia because it has introduced a family code which explicitly says we prioritize parental rights over children's rights. Now that has a lot of implications I think that we need to be alert to in relation to the digital environment. Because if we are saying that states have an absolutely critical role to take responsibility for the. For introducing the regulatory framework that creates a positive environment for children's digital experience and states are saying well, it's parents responsibility, states will be. We have to be guarded against states moving back and leaving that to par parents and saying this is the responsibility of parents and parents then being in a kind of controlling role without any protection from the state with regard to children's rights in that digital environment, either in relation to protecting them from the worst excesses of the way that the digital companies are functioning or in relation to controlling parents and the denial of access to opportunities within the digital. So I think that's one thing that we. I mean you've touched on it, but I think is really important. The second point I think is that in the context of the digital environment I think it's. And you touched on the fact of the over focus on protection as being the predominant theme which emerges in the discourse. And I think it's important to understand the concept of affairs capacities of the child as they journey through childhood through a triangular conceptual framework and all of three dimensions which we need to think of. When we think about what kind of environments are we creating for children in the online environment, how are they engaging with it? What is the impact on that world on children's lives? So first of all we need to think about how do we promote. What is the. What is the mechanism through which we think about promoting children's optimum capacities? So children have rights to education, they have rights to play, they have rights to information. How are we ensuring that in the Digital environment, we are creating meaningful opportunities for children to develop and promote and thrive through to adulthood, during the course of their childhood. So, for example, in education, are we through edtech? The digital world, which is increasingly predominating in the educational field, is the kind of environment built on a real understanding of how children learn, that children learn most effectively through discovery and exploration and questioning and research. Are the digital tools which are being developed consistent with promoting their rights to optimum dependent development and to learn in the most effective way? We know that play, for example, is hugely important to children's development and their evolving capacities through childhood. Physical capacities, cognitive capacities, social, emotional and ethical capacities all develop through play. And are we creating a world where children's opportunities for play, many of which can exist in digital bound, are being denied because of the addictive model which children are being drawn into. So they're losing access to the natural world, the physical world, the outside world, because of the kind of worlds that we're creating. So we need to think about how do we promote children's capacities in the context of digital? And then we need to think about how far are we respecting those capacities that children have. Are we recognizing what children can do, what children can bring to the table, their right to have their own views, their own freedom of expression, freedom of association, and how is the digital environment impacting on that? And how are we presuming incapacity? I mean, you touched right through that on the failure consistently to listen to children. But are we recognizing that children bring to the table skills and knowledge and expertise and perspectives and experience without which we can't create an environment which is consistent with the realization of their rights? We need to obviously recognise children not as passive recipients of these services and environments, but active contributors and shapers within it. And then finally we need to look at how do we protect children in light of their still evolving capacities that children themselves actively acknowledge that they do want protection from cyberbullying, from exploitation, from invasions of their privacy, from harmful websites, from harmful pornography and so on. And adults do have clear responsibilities to support the creation of online environments where children can engage in a safe and positive and healthy way. So we need. So what I'm trying to say really is we need to think about all those three dimensions when we're thinking about what it is that children, what kind of world children are living in in the digital age, how are we promoting their capacities, how are we respecting their capacities? And how are we protecting those capacities? And to need to look at those. So when governments are investing in legislation in policy implementation, in allocation of resources. We need to think about all those three dimensions and adopt holistic approaches that promote and protect and respect children's rights and their capacities in this environment. And focusing on one or just focusing on children's agency is not sufficient. It's not sufficient to focus on children's protection. We need to look at all three. So that would be my reflection as a sort of conceptual framing to keep in mind as we engage in this debate.
- [50:50]
B
Fantastic. Thank you very much. Jerison, wonderful. Thank you. And Gaston.
- [50:59]
E
Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Kim and Sonia, there are different ways in which we can respond to your presentation and I will. While you were making the presentation, I asked myself how we can put the general comment into practice, how we can use that framework in a way that will give us the right tools to make this sort of discussion around legislation more tangible. And I think that there are like for me three critical stakeholders that I think you have mentioned during your presentation. But going into, I mean, talking about three things, as Gerson talked for me, one is the general public. I mean the broad spectrum of society, including children. Then another key stakeholder is the decision makers, sort of the regulatory side or front front of the discussion and then the elephant in the room, which is how we deal with big tech. These for me are the three critical stakeholders that we need to discuss when, if we want to assess the general comment B service it's effectiveness in terms of regulation or legislation. Talking a little bit about the general public. I think that if we look into the general comment as a framework, one of the things that I think that we need as a way of engaging with the general public is to make the general comment more, more localized and looking into. I'm from Argentina, so I have been following the Brazil experiment and I think that what Brazil did extremely well, apart from having a coalition of civil society, the judiciary and the executive aligned towards a regulation, what they have been doing really, really well is to turn the prescriptions of the general comment into very concrete communication, sort of bullet points for the general public, which I think became a conversation in society, major newspapers, talking about children's online safety. You don't get to see see that very often. Okay. So I think that the question about what is the actual narrative that you will use to explain the general public these complex issues of children, digital rights. It's something that I think we need to pay more attention. So that would be the localization piece, piece on how the general public could absorb a new narrative then on the sort of decision Makers front. One of the things that I have experienced myself working in tech regulation is that sometimes we assume that the conversation we're having with a regulator is a conversation where the two of us will have the same information, that there is no asymmetry of information, that the regulator or the decision maker is an expert. And I'm going to be sitting with that person for an hour and I'm going to have an expert conversation where the conversation will flow. And that's not the case. The case usually is that you are in front of a politician, you are in front of somebody that is presumably interested in the matter. They might have advisors, but at the end of the day, the ultimate decision maker is the legislator or the regulation regulator. So one of the things that I reckon we should be doing to turn the general comment 25 into something more concrete is to make sure that we, whenever we have the chance to talk to legislators or regulators, we go with the mindset of trying to increase the technical literacy of the counterpart. And I think that that takes a very different approach to the way we usually go when we talk to decision makers. And in our case we experimented a little bit with this. Working with five rights. We decided that we wanted to to have a bill of law in Argentina back in 2023 that resemble age appropriate design code. And the approach that we took is we're going to pick a legislator that has been working in the field of children's rights for many years without any expertise on tech. Okay, she's not even part of the Tech and Information Commission, even though these type of projects will go straight to that commission. And the approach we took was sort of a more technical literacy approach where we use some of our budget to bring an expert from to Argentina. Engaged not only with the legislator team for a week, but also organized meetings with the rest of her political party. Then we organized an event where the bill of law was introduced in public and that generated sort of an interest in the rest of the house to then sign the project and turn the project into not a bill of law because it hasn't been voted yet, but it is a bill of law that it's been discussed at the commission. And the approach was more how we engage at the educational level with the legislator with rather than going and asking a legislator, you should do this because this is good for children. Which was a more sort of a practical approach that we took. And then finally, in regards to big tech, and I'm saying this because I have a background, I worked for Meta for a couple of years And I know how these companies operate on, on this front. I think that we need to rethink the strategy that we have with the platforms. My take is that we have been having conversations with the platforms way focused on probably the more hardcore prescriptions of the general comment 25 which is the values around children's human rights and how they relate to the digital sphere. But I think that the conversation with the big tech or the type of strategies that we need to use when engaging with big tech should be that plus a conversation about the business models, their business models and how their business models models are funneled by engagement.
- [59:41]
F
How.
- [59:41]
E
Their business models are based on also tracking the performance of certain ads on children. And I think that we haven't been good at looking into or some organizations have been good in looking into sort of the more economic side of the discussion. But I think if we want to have a relationship with the big tech where they take us very seriously, we need to increase their reputational cost. And by increasing the reputational cost, I think that we need to look more into the models of the DMA rather than the model of the dsa. The DSI is an interesting model, but if I have to give someone a prescription of how to turn the conversation around when it's blocked with a tech company, I think conversation around the dma, you know, it's, it would be more strategic. So that's pretty much it.
- [60:56]
B
Thank you very much. Thank you. I think I am given the time going to come to the audience if that's okay and see I can see some hands going up. I will come online soon but I will stop start with a very prompt hand in the front. I'm going to ask you all please to keep your questions short and questions and do say who you are to start.
- [61:24]
A
Right. Hello, good evening. My name is Divyani and my question is, you know, I was seeing in the map that in, in South Asia I think the. Some work needs to be done by, by the convention and I was wondering because South Asia has a lot of street children and there, there is no sort of way to talk about parental rights or parental regulations. So I was wondering how would the convention approach that because the numbers are huge.
- [61:52]
B
Okay. Should we take a few? I think and then that one is.
- [61:57]
E
For you for sure.
- [61:58]
B
Well, maybe Jerison also. And I'm just thinking how specific that also relates to the digital, which is interesting because they may have access to, to technology, those kids. Are there other questions here at this point or. Yeah. Okay, thank you. This is more for and to say who you are of Saheeda. I just want to ask. You talked about parental responsibilities and I just wondered how you balance overprotectiveness and under protectiveness. Because I work in the safeguarding field. Okay, good questions. One more just to round off three or should we come? Okay. Yes, thank you.
- [62:49]
A
One at the back.
- [62:51]
D
Hi, I am from Colombia. So we are not included in the report. But I would like to know everyone.
- [62:57]
B
Looked at that map very carefully.
- [62:59]
A
Yes.
- [63:01]
D
But I would like to know how the risk that children face in digital environments and the relationship in countries that face conflict are treated in the committee and has been developed in the United nations and your opinions about it.
- [63:23]
B
Thank you. So you don't have to answer all the questions. Pick whichever you'd like. Kim, do you want to go first?
- [63:34]
G
Yes.
- [63:34]
A
So I can maybe start with your question just because it's fresh in mind. So when it comes to, and I think I mentioned it briefly when looking kind of at the state party reports, but I looked closer at how the committee was treating or how they were approaching digital issues in post conflict or conflict affected countries and very low income countries with kind of very low regulatory infrastructure, but also where the digital infrastructure was low. And one thing needs to be said before which to contextualize the committee's concluding observations and the recommendations they make in every single state party they have to consider. Okay, what's most important here? Where can we get through? Where kind of what areas of children's rights do we think are most effectively addressed in this concluding observation that we can then follow up on? And one thing that should be said is often these countries have quite poor track records in terms of actually completing their own State Party reports and usually very limited information comes from them. They tend to also be kind of linked to having fewer civil society organizations and UN bodies being active in those spaces. And usually when they do, they'll talk about specific issues like for example, children's rights and conflict and so on, which I think is very important. But what I see is that digital issues are almost completely non existent in those cases, unless it is in regard to the Optional protocol on the sale of children, which is brought up kind of routinely in concluding observations. So in a way, children in these environments, even though we know that that connectivity is increasing and they are going online, we know very little about their lives. So states are those states of course know very little about, you know, how many children are online, what they're using, how they're accessing it and so on. And we don't know the relationship between really a lot about the relationship between guardians or adults who take care of children and those children and how devices and for example, connectivity looks in those relationships. So it's a very incomplete picture, I would say, but I would say in terms of looking at how the committee handles them, digital issues have been set aside for what they consider to be more pressing issues, which my fear is then that we have, even in those states we have issues like for example, child sexual abuse material which is AI produced. We have these emerging issues, they're occurring there as well. We just don't know anything about them. So my concern is that we're not, or the committee is not asking the questions about these issues now to then be able to hold states to account in the next five year review. So then that delays kind of maybe the pressure that the committee could have put on these countries in terms of these issues.
- [66:56]
B
Thank you. Jerison, do you want to say something about.
- [67:02]
D
Yeah, so a couple of things. So on street children, the committee have done, they have produced a general comment on children who are living or working on the streets. And certainly in there they do raise, they raise awareness of the importance of the digital environment and children having digital access and not being marginalized as a consequence of being denied that access. So it's something the committee have alerted to States that this is an important issue that they need to think about and so on. But there's also huge issues of potential for risk and exploitation for children in that situation because there is no, there's no sort of safeguarding, there's no protective sort of arm of parents or guardians or whatever very often for those children. So they're very vulnerable in relation to, over and under protection, there lies a question. I mean, one of the challenges, we talk all the time about protection, but the fact is, and protection rights in the Convention are, you know, are extensive. But the problem is that what we understand by protection is incredibly specifically culturally determined. And the degree to which children are at risk in any situation isn't a matter of sort of objective reality, but also a fact of, you know, the internal resilience of the child, a degree of support they have, the cultural acceptance of those particular behaviors and so on, so forth. So what we understand by protection and under protection, overprotection varies again extraordinarily widely in different contexts. And parents in relation to the digital environment will take. There is no one way of saying that this particular activity or this particular exposure or this particular website is harmful to children because there are so many contextual factors. So I don't and there are no. And so there are very few guidelines on that really. But I think that the challenge is to engage with the people who are caring for children, to engage with children themselves about how they perceive and understand risk. Because there is a big difference between risk and harm and children. You know, many children will explore and take risks in the online as well, in other environments. And that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to experience harm. So the challenge is finding that there's no easy answers to that at all.
- [69:31]
E
I just want to pick up on parental control. I think it's a huge issue, parental control, but it's at the very core of the way that the big tech have constructed a narrative around protecting children. So their entire function, functionality is based on communicating decision makers that their platforms provide parents with the right tools to control their children's online. And I think that we need, as advocates of a different model, I think that we need a very different narrative to explain why we care about the privacy of the children. For me, it's a real challenge when I talk to legislators, legislators are wired with the idea that parental control is the way to go. And that serves very well the purpose of the big tech in terms of pushing for an agenda that left aside privacy issues and, and the best interest of the child, but it's also fed in.
- [70:47]
D
That's exactly that. But it's not just it feeds the big tech agenda, but it feeds the state's agenda, which is wanting to push much more strongly on parental rights and parental controls and not on children's rights and children's agency. So I think it's a cop out. It's a cop out in which children lose. Lose any recognition of their rights and their opportunities to influence the way in which those decisions are made. It subsumes children as recipients of those mechanisms.
- [71:22]
B
Thank you. I think we have one question online, three questions online. Okay. All right, Marisa, do you want to give us the three? And then we'll take another round of answers. Thank you.
- [71:34]
C
Fantastic. So we have a question here from Florence Stevens which says how should states and relevant organisations integrate rights education into digital literacy initiatives so that children are not only protected online, but also equipped to understand and assert their rights?
- [71:55]
B
Fantastic.
- [71:56]
C
We have a question here from Lucy from Future Views Today, who thanks us for tonight and asks the question, how can we transition from reactive to proactive safeguarding, embedding safety and child perspectives into AI by design rather than after harm has occurred? And then the final question from Peter Jozazi from digital child rights Foundation. And Peter Alex asks, how do we keep the general comment 25 Alive Together so that children's digital rights or rights in a digital environment are better protected? Thank you.
- [72:37]
A
Lovely.
- [72:37]
B
Okay, big questions.
- [72:39]
E
Yeah.
- [72:41]
B
Who would like to. So digital literacy education, AI safety by design, and I think where next.
- [72:51]
D
Would.
- [72:51]
E
Like to go with the AI?
- [72:54]
B
Okay, go for it.
- [72:55]
E
Well, I think the discussion on AI and children's digital rights, it's completely decoupled. So it seems to me that at least from where I'm coming from in Latin America, the, the regulators or the legislators trying to come up with new regulation are trying to do everything at the same time. So the narrative or the discussion we have globally around these issues is also confusing the legislators because we're talking about AI, we're about talking, talking about age appropriate design code, we're talking about data protection laws. It's really, really difficult for a legislator to grasp all that discussion. So I think that one way to answer that question is I think that in the countries where we still not have a good, good data protection law, we need to start with a good data protection law, updated to the digital world and then move on into different legislations. If not, we are going to ended up with countries having a copy paste approach of the AI act in Europe and not having a data protection law. So my response to that question would be it depends on where are you rolling out the regulation. I think that entering to a discussion of AI without having the basics of digital protections, it's overkill.
- [74:58]
B
Though I think it's fair to say we don't have safety by design design for AI anywhere in the world at the moment. But. Okay, maybe some countries are a little better positioned. Who wants to pick up the other questions? Kim is looking like she might. Yes.
- [75:17]
A
Yeah, I was gonna answer the same question, but I think it'll kind of go into the other ones as well. And I think so when it comes to the, this transition into proactive rather than reactive, I think like you said, I think legislators are trying to survive in the sense that they're trying to do what they can at the moment, or at least I hope they are. In many countries they are. But innovation is so fast. Right. And that's why we need things like regulation that requires safety by design, by default. Child rights impact assessments are super, super important because even if the innovation moves fast, if they're required to do child rights impact assessments in a way that actually is enforceful, then hopefully we can integrate that into the design process. So that's what we talk a lot about the design process, designing with children in mind, and having that kind of mindset from the beginning, which of course is, I think, for many, probably a radical idea, because what's happening at the moment is still the Zuckerbergian move fast and break things kind of attitude, which then is really speaking to our agenda, which is of course by design. But I think those are the pressures we need to put. Those are the regulations we need to set. And as you say, I think when it comes to the question of how do we keep the general comment alive, I think that speaks to that issue, which is also about how do we make it local and how do we make it understandable. And I think really this kind of rethink that you are proposing is actually brilliant because then we can provide kind of the know how that is so sorely lacking. And when there is no how, then there can be a moment of contestation from the policymaker to say to the big tech companies, but wait a minute, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? And so providing that basis, I think is very important and is part of kind of keeping the general comment alive. And in a way, it's not important that the general comment as it is, stays alive. It's what it's promoting and what framework it's promoting. And so in a sense, it's just like with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. If all children had rights, we wouldn't need the convention, but we need the convention because all children don't have rights. So, yes, I think this, this idea of localizing. At the same time, there is something to be said that the Internet is international and crosses national borders, so there needs to be that also international coordination, of course.
- [78:03]
B
Jerison, do you want to say something about human rights education and maybe general comment education? But I mean, there is a movement, isn't there, for human rights education in schools?
- [78:12]
D
But I suppose mixed. Yeah, mixed, I'd say. I mean, I think the important thing is that we don't think about human rights education as being the Article one of the convention says da da. Article two says da da da. But we think about how do schools become living, breathing human rights institutions where children experience the values of the convention and they practice the values of the convention and they inform the way in which equity is presumed, respect for each other is response. And there are some interesting examples of schools which are doing this. So in terms of, you know, digital literacy or teaching human rights, they are embedded across the curriculum. I mean, I did, I visited a school that was in Part of the unicefs in UK rights respecting schools.
- [79:10]
E
Work.
- [79:11]
D
And I went to the school on spec. They didn't know I was coming and I just dropped into a couple of classes and they were just bringing, they were bringing rights into maths and they were bringing rights into history. Just, you know, there was in fact there was a class on technology and they were bringing in rights in terms of access to information and who has access to information and what constitutes, you know, and so on. So it's about, so it's about not it being like Thursday at 2 o' clock for half an hour, it's about how do we learn about rights and you know, in the on and the offline world, how do we learn about how those, what those rights mean across the curriculum. And I think that's. And that you are respect, your rights are respected in school and you respect the rights of others in schools. And that seems to me the way forward and the most effective way that this should be pursued. And what's more, when that does happen, there has been independent evaluation bar of those schools which shows that children learn more effectively, the teachers have more job satisfaction, the conflict between children and teachers reduces, the levels of bullying go down. So you do get really, really positive outcomes. So there's a very good argument for it pragmatically, apart from principle.
- [80:29]
A
Can I speak to the digital literacy as well? Because I think one thing that we become acutely aware of, I mean, I'm sure many of you do work with children as well, and our colleague Sandra at the back there, we work with ed tech and we're out in schools in the UK and talking to kids all the time. And what's very obvious is that, for example, if you look at the general comment, it touches on things like privacy and like data protection concepts that many children have only met because they had to press yes or no on a cookies thing and they just hate the cookies thing. So they just say yes to everything. They don't know what that means, they don't know where the data goes. With that being said, adults usually don't either. So it is also about. Digital literacy is also about educating the educator, I think is one key aspect, but also making children aware of things that could possibly influence or impact their rights and not taking things for granted. So I think, for example, the cookies example is a very clear thing where adults, but also children from a very young age just know that it's there and it's just a nuisance in their everyday lives, but they don't understand the actual impact it can have on their private information on who might be able to find out things about them on then what information is sold to them and how that impacts their everyday lives. And I think that awareness raising is part of the human, human rights digital literacy education to be able to even ask those questions. And I know Biban Kidron, who has worked on the General comment and with 5 rights usually talks about this. We need to be able to really deliberate with children. They need to know about it. We need to also talk about. Oh, these are actually issues that are affecting you. Otherwise it's difficult to have. Have the conversation because otherwise without awareness, you cannot become aware of the possible impact. I think.
- [82:28]
B
Thank you. We are near the end of our time, I think Jonathan, you went. Okay, I see an enthusiastic hand at the back and. Oh, okay.
- [82:38]
A
Do we have here. All right.
- [82:42]
B
We're going to be very brief, one second sentence each because everyone needs to do the next thing. But yes, please break short.
- [82:51]
A
Yeah. A member of public. So my question is basically repeating Jerryson's question about age. So children's under age 5, they should be in environment, physical activity, sensorial and everything. And how should parents treat them like and is the children rights different based on the ages of different children?
- [83:16]
B
Thank you. Okay, brief question here. Yes, thank you.
- [83:20]
F
Yes, thank you. My name is Dimas. I work with international coalition of Jurists, the Kenyan section in the global south especially people experience the Internet through social media. So the way, for example other people would experience the Internet through education, through search engines and so on in other places big tech have come together with social, I mean with the government to make for example Facebook free and so that the only access that person has to the Internet is Facebook. And so does the general comment address this in terms of accountability? Because that's all they do.
- [84:08]
B
Thank you. And there was one there and then I'm going to call it a halt. Sorry, because we have.
- [84:15]
D
Good evening.
- [84:16]
G
My name is Alessandra, I'm a student here, executive master in diplomacy. And mine is more a political question. I ran for the European election and my own campaign last year. I lost but was all about how to regulate social media for kids under the age of 16. And I think this is the biggest crisis of our age. But my question is it seems to me, and I came 20 minutes later apologize that there is like a sort.
- [84:42]
E
Of.
- [84:44]
G
When you talk about governments and this pushback from the children right perspective to the parents responsibility is because there is a sort of scare towards what are the new big technocrats we talk nowadays. And the big tech that are really the powers nowadays. And what is the cost that governments and societies nowadays are prepared to pay for the advancement of technology and a world that is not as regulated as it should be?
- [85:20]
B
And who will calculate that cost?
- [85:21]
A
Even.
- [85:24]
B
Very brief, Anybody?
- [85:26]
D
I pick up on the first question about age limits. I mean, the first thing to say, I think it's important to say that age is not a proxy for capacity, that children's capacities vary enormously according to so many different factors. But there are certain areas where we do have to have fixed age limits despite that. So, for example, the age of marriage, age of social consent, age of criminal responsibility. But in the digital environment, obviously you have. There's a lot of discussion now about age barriers in relation to access to social media and so on and so forth. But the questions to ask in determining. I think there's a set of questions you need to ask in determining what those age limits should be. And it's what. What do we know from the neuroscience and child development? What do we know about the potential risks of under and over protecting children? What is the balance between the state and the parent in determining what those age barriers should be? And what do children themselves say about this? So I think that in all of those scenarios, those are the kind of questions that we need to bring to bear before making any sort of judgments about age limitations in relation to under fives, over fives, whatever. It's complex.
- [86:40]
A
It certainly is.
- [86:42]
E
I can pick up on the gentleman's question. You're absolutely right. This is a big issue in the developing world. I think that what we need is to go back to the basics of the discussions in the 2000s of net neutrality, because zero rating approaches, which is the one that you just explained, created a massive monopoly. These are agreements between the big platforms and the telecom companies. So we need to go back to the basics. We need to allow different apps, different Internet providers to have zero rating as well, same as the big text in mobile phones. And I think that that will create some sort of label in the play field.
- [87:40]
B
Kim, you have a last word? If you'd like.
- [87:45]
A
To answer as a final answer. Well, I will answer what I think maybe is what you're speaking to, and apologies if I misunderstood your question, but on this issue of what will kind of the cost be of not regulating and I think this is the big question. No. And that we don't know, but we had a very lively discussion here before this event where we discussed this issue and whether or not we could economically actually look at what do the harms that the digital environment cause children, what does it cost society further forward? And those that, for example, experience extreme forms of harm like sexual exploitation and abuse online and what that could mean later in their lives. And of course the online world, it doesn't create, I wouldn't say it creates necessarily new problems. I think, for example, gender based violence has always existed, but it takes new forms and it can be exacerbated through the digital environment. And those costs are very real. And I think that there is an issue that regulators are kind of backing away from looking at that or thinking about that. And also that there's an issue when we talk about children's rights versus kind of it ending at a certain age. At 18, people are still the same people, but they kind of move on into adulthood even though maybe and as Jerison was saying, their developmental levels are very different, they're ready for different things, their resilience levels are different. So I think it's a very complex issue and unfortunately the research is very complex as well. So it doesn't always support a one solution or, you know, one solution for everyone, which for frustratingly might not really answer your question. But those are things that, yes, I think about.
- [89:40]
B
I mean this is the London School of Economics and I feel like we should be getting better at doing some of these calculations. And I would like to add that in addition to calculating the harms, we should also be calculating the missed opportunities of children not flourishing online and in a digital world and growing up as we would all like them to. So there are multiple kinds of costs that perhaps we can think about as we take forward our work. On the general comment, I would like to thank you all for questions that I know were in your heads. I'm sorry to those that we didn't come to, but we can continue an informal discussion outside if you kind of follow round, round, round to the left as you leave this room. Have a glass of wine or juice or something. Let me now very warmly thank our speaker and respondents.
- [90:40]
A
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.ukevents to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.