Post by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

Over 1,200 BCS members responded to our survey asking for views on the challenges and priorities for government as it considers legislation around social media usage for young teenagers. The range of responses highlight the complexity of balancing protection, access, education and platform responsibility in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. The top recommendations our community put forward for policy makers to consider in this area are: ↳ Prioritising young people’s digital literacy education (for example, on disinformation) ↳ Addressing challenges with enforcement of content moderation ↳ Supporting parents to monitor and understand social media platforms ↳ Understanding challenges with effective age verification and ease of circumvention (VPNs are an obvious example) ↳ Creating effective routes to enforce penalties on social media platforms for non-compliance. Thanks to everyone in our community who contributed views, creating research that will inform the debate on how to best help children navigate the online world safely. For example, this report will support BCS’ response the national ‘Growing up in an Online World’ consultation, launched by Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Read the full findings: https://hubs.ly/Q04dHTK_0 #OnlineSafety #DigitalLiteracy #DigitalPolicy