Tech giants are ANTI-kids
On February the 2nd of this year Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, wrote a blistering critique of the world’s tech giants and their response to discussions in the USA about increasing protections for children. Copyright means I can’t share all that she wrote here, but among her points were these:
First, leaders from several major players didn’t even bother to show up to the US Senate hearings. They genuinely think they’re above the law. Apple, Google, and Microsoft execs all stayed away.
Second, those who did show spent their time justifying inadequate and downright harmful decisions, acting like they’re providing the world a service and doing us all a favour.
After surveying 27 of the biggest names in tech, the e-Safety Commissioner’s Office has found that, “many companies weren’t even using available tools and technologies to detect child sexual exploitation and abuse material, let alone detecting grooming or live streamed child abuse. What’s more, there were no real barriers to stop users creating new accounts and reoffending.”
Google was given a demand notice by the Office, with requirements to improve. They ignored it. X (formerly Twitter) was fined $610,500. They’ve ignored it and it’s now before the courts.
These companies are happy to roll out “improvements” and grab PR. But in all honesty, can we read this and truly believe that these platforms are safe for our kids?
These companies – and their leaders – do not care about you or your kids. They don’t care about bad actors, scammers, paedophiles, abusers, bullies, or anything that could impact their bottom line.
Let’s talk about the Senate hearing. Policy-wise, nothing will come of this. These are talk-fests where politicians can showboat, make accusations, and speak over the top of those who have been called to testify. Fist-banging tough-guy acts don’t move the needle.
In one grotesquely awkward moment, Senator Josh Hawley, demanded that Zuckerberg apologise to the parents in the audience at the hearings for the harm their families have experienced through his platform. And he did.
As I watched this “car-crash” tv moment, I found myself squirming at the appalling theatre of it all. But I couldn’t help but think that after that apology, a parent might have demanded that Zuckerberg turn around and ask the politicians who were berating him, “Why haven’t YOU done anything?” Because ultimately, the US government has more sway over what’s going on with our kids and the online world than any other body on the planet – and they’re doing nothing. They’re holding Senate hearings that go nowhere and extracting awkward fake apologies from tech execs who aren’t going to make anything happen until we get some real legislation that helps kids.
Zuckerberg and Sandberg and Musk and all of the other executives at these big tech companies are culpable. There’s no denying that. But the real culprits are the politicians who are failing to act. We’re dealing with it at an Australian level where we just pass the buck to the USA, and in the USA it’s an exercise in cynicism. It’s not just the platforms. It’s the politicians too – who are ironically trying to create a gotcha moment that will go viral on the very platform they’re trying to catch out with their “gotcha” moments.
But when X and Google plainly ignore our e-Safety Commissioners warnings and even fines, we are going nowhere fast. Until feckless politicians legislate, we’re not going to see change.
We could fix so many of these problems so easily. Claims of complexity are overblown. We have rules around when kids can drive, drink alcohol, finish school… the online world doesn’t have to be any different. But our politicians won’t age-gate tech at all – not even pornography (where the Federal Albanese government walked away from an e-Safety Commissioner recommendation for an age-gate trial last year).
The bottom line: there are no benefits to the world or to our children’s lives from social media at the young ages they’re given access.
And speaking of bottom-lines, in the past couple of weeks – right after the Senate hearings – Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp) announced their record earnings. This was their chance to wallpaper over the disaster of the previous days of ugly publicity. They announced what might be the best quarter of performance of any company in the modern business world.
Meta posted a 25% increase in quarterly revenue. A total of $40.11 billion dollars.
Just to be clear, that is $40 billion – with a ‘b’. In three months!
This is a company that has laid staff off (dropping from 88,000 staff to 66,000 – so about a quarter of the staff are gone). This led to a $200b gain in market capitalisation in one day!
But they won’t implement safety measures to stop our kids from seeing pro-anorexia content. They won’t implement basic procedures to block IP addresses from known scammers and paedophiles. They won’t remove explicit content that messes up our kids. And the list goes on.
The mendacity of this company is astonishing. They speak with such duplicity. They weaponise their armies of PR people and effectively scrub the negative realities of their product because at the end of the day, it’s all about the money. The politicians, the shareholders, the economy… they’ll let profitability rule over the wellbeing of our kids.
So what’s the upshot?
We have government legislation and organisations to protect our environment and our industrial relationships. But big tech are immune. They can’t be touched. Their balance sheets are bigger than that of several countries in the world, and governments won’t go near them.
Cigarettes require warnings. They highlight that smoking them can kill you. But there’s nothing like that for tech.
And that means that as parents we have to pick up the pieces and take individual responsibility since we have ineffective elected officials who care more about kow-towing to mendacious, duplicitous tech billionaires than helping our kids. Their focus is on prosperity over protection and ironically, society is the poorer for it.
What do we do?
- Be across your kids’ tech. Keep them off it as long as you can. But when you do give them the go-ahead, be aware of who they’re talking to and what they’re viewing.
- Be firm on screens never being allowed in bathrooms and bedrooms. It’s just not safe.
- Have regular and consistent conversations with your kids about the risks that come with their tech, and invite them to share what’s going on with their friends and tech. Be up front and describe “capping,” “sextortion,” and so on. Don’t water it down or they won’t understand the seriousness of it.
- Make sure they know they can come to you if anything happens that’s concerning.
- Use resources from the e-Safety Commissioner’s webpage Online safety | eSafety Commissioner and the ACCCE webpage ACCCE | Australian Centre To Counter Child Exploitation so you know what’s going on.
And finally, hope that tech executives grow a conscience or that politicians grow a spine and start doing something at a society-wide level for the wellbeing of our kids (but don’t hold your breath).
Want more?
The Happy Families Podcast
Episode #930 | Big Tech Doesn’t Care About Your Kids
Responses