A co-regulatory approach to stay safe online: reporting inappropriate content with the MediaKids mobile app

Abstract

The convergence of mobile technologies, media, and the Internet is transforming the way that digital content is produced, distributed, and consumed, especially among children and young adults. In Europe as in many other areas, minors are exposed to an ever-growing amount of digital content on mobile phones, tablets, or computer screens. Increasing exposure at an early age brings both new opportunities and risks. This paper reviews the current discussion about strategies that deal with inappropriate, harmful, and illegal content online and proposes a particular co-regulatory, technology-driven approach based on the active involvement of children, their families, and the educational system. The MediaKids project aims to test this coregulatory approach by developing a mobile application-the MediaKids app-within the broader context of an educational programme to raise awareness about online safety. The project seeks to involve children and young adults in defining the notion of "harmful content" and, ultimately, in the elaboration of the policies for the emergent digital public space.

Collective caring: creating safety through interactions between young activist groups and young adults in Sweden

“…Such interactions allowed the young activist groups to gain crucial insights into how young adults understood and experienced unsafety, and to be empowered to use these insights as a basis for re-defining unsafety on their behalf. Their shared definitions not only critiqued narrow approaches to unsafety focused on imminent danger, but also offered a broader approach to unsafety encompassing diverse social spaces, similar to that found in previous research on young adults' safety (Cockburn 2008;Fetner et al 2012;Moore 2017;Poblet et al 2017;Syrjäläinen et al 2015). Yet, whereas previous research focused on individual perceptions of unsafety in relation to normative social categories, the young activist groups in our study developed a shared critique of such normative categories, as a member of the Youth Sobriety Association in City B conveyed:…”

“…Fileborn 2016;Parkes 2007). Instead, this joint action likened the safety strategies found by Cockburn (2008) and Poblet et al (2017) in which young adults drew upon social ties, fostered quality relationships and tied into a sense of belongingin their neighborhood and digital spaces respectively. Our findings went beyond these existing studies by capturing how young activist groups developed a coordinated response that was both immediate and enduring.…”

“…Digital platforms are social spaces where young adults appear to have greater autonomy in handling unsafety, as evidenced by the peer-centered approaches found in a study among high-school students in Catalonia. Students perceived unsafety as the protection of privacy and intimacy online whereas adults were concerned with young adults' exposure to harmful and illegal content (Poblet et al 2017). Their respective strategies for safety diverged as well: while adults wanted young adults to report and denounce harmful content to authorities, young adults fostered a self-reflexive relationship within the digital ecosystem by maintaining their connection to others and preserving their personal autonomy (Poblet et al 2017).…”

Collaborative filtering content for parental control in mobile application chatting

“…Four highlighted features in controling communication are: education material provided, blacklisted URLs/content filtering, parent involvement and monitoring social network acitivities. [14] FamiLync [13] Social Network Monitoring Application [12] SafeChat [22] Lock n' Lol [23] We-Choose [2] MediaKids [24] WhatsApp [25] Collaborative Filtering Content…”

Semantic Web for the Legal Domain: The next step

“…Customary international private law cannot be easily modelled without taking all stakeholders into account. The general balance between privacy, data protection, and security [58] seems to broaden the legal normative scope for regulating, among other elements, linked data markets [116], co-regulatory instruments [98], self-regulated collective awareness and informed consent [88], the behaviour of LEAs behaviour (law enforcement agents) 71 [25], and the use of multi-lingual and multi-jurisdictional term banks [105]. Distributed geospatial data, textual data, and controlled vocabularies can be combined to create interactive tools to enhance the rule of law and the specific legal information that citizens would need to perform legal acts [62].…”