Cristina Costa has published an excellent article on the Digital Literacies Network website: Misplaced accountability: Why should young people be made to pay for the problems Big Tech create? With the growing spread of proposed measures to ban young people under the age of 16 from social media, she asks what underpins these recomendations that claim to safeguard young people's well being. And do the bans really guarantee digital welfare? A recent Guardian newspaper follow up on earlier interviews with young people in Australia, which was the first country to introduce such a ban and draws doubt to its effectiveness and impact. The ban was seen by some of the young people they talked to as an imperfect inconvenience while others had taken pre-emptive steps to ensure they were never flagged. Some had changed platforms and re-emerging on these platforms as “adults” were shocked with the content they were greeted with.

Cristina Costa questions the real impact of platform bans. "Young people are presumed incapable of navigating the digital world responsibly while parent are positioned as the primary custodians of digital safety. This creates a circular blame loop in which adolescent are punished for an apparent lack of maturity and parents for an assumed lack of vigilance all the while technology companies remain largely unaccountable.

She goes on to say that

such measures result in institutionalised imfantisation, elevating parental control as the solution, even when many parents lack the necessary digital literacies required to make informed decisions. And of course such a move is in contradiction to policies to promote and support media and digital literacy. Instead of bans Cristina says young people require transformative learning opportunities, pedagogies that cultivate critical reasoning, resistance to harmful practices and the ability to reshape digital practices. Such approaches demand trust in young people. as active agents, not passive recipients of protection.

About the Image

The image shows the paradox of AI-driven work and spatial disconnection in contemporary employment. Even workers who perform their tasks in physical proximity are entirely isolated from each other; their work relationships are mediated by intangible algorithms and physical technology like laptops/mobile phones. It also highlights the emotional and social isolation that can accompany digitalised labour. The image was created using Procreate.