• The session began with a participant poll on the question: What do you hope to get out of this session? The results: 
  
  • 27% were keen to inform themselves about the topic
  • 23% were keen to see the prevention prioritised as a way to protect children online
  • 22% were keen to find common ground and a roadmap for the future on this topic
  • 18% were looking for a clear answer to the question in the session title
  • 10% were keen to see regulation prioritised as a way to protect children online. 

• From this starting point, the session speakers presented the following challenges and arguments:
  
  • (London School of Economics – Prof. Sonia Livingstone) The debate between digital child rights advocates and advocates of democracy and free expression has become problematic. This is in part because discussions around illegal and harmful content have been unhelpfully confused and may also be because child rights advocates have not sufficiently prepared for the debates around technologies such as encryption. This makes the safety/privacy-by-design movement an important one, because it offers solutions that are not dependent on heavy-handed content-based regulation, but on the regulation of processes and outcomes, combined with standards, training and remedy.
  • (Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention- Patrick Burton) Regulation and safety-by-design are important elements of (online) violence prevention, but they are too often overemphasized as solutions and in this sense can be seen as politically expedient, despite good intentions in many cases. Sustainable violence prevention requires behavioral change, which requires an understanding of the way children engage with tech and are supported to live online. Furthermore, because there is an intersection between online and offline violence, we need to learn from other sectors about the role of tech and industry in supporting interventions that regulate them, and we need to learn from public health messaging and other approaches to social problems.
  • (jugendschutz.net - Andreas Hautz) Prevention through education and regulation go hand in hand because you cannot effectively keep children safe online without a combination of detection and removal of illegal content, proactive reporting by online service providers, active creation of safe digital environments, including in relation to safety by design and safe settings, and strong reporting mechanisms for when harm does occur. This combination lies behind a new law in Germany this year. In brief, regulation is needed to get engagement from online service providers, but analysis of the problems is essential, and regulation is only fully effective when it leads to prevention. At the same time, you cannot regulate everything, which makes media literacy a crucial element.
  • (Safernet Brazil- Thiago Tavares) Latin America is a dangerous place for children due to high levels of poverty, social inequality, violence and insufficient public policy and education, but also for society due to state surveillance and other government control tactics. These underlying social factors pre-dated the internet and are sometimes missed in proposals for regulation of the internet. Different societies propose different approaches based on their values, priorities, and political interests, which has been seen starkly in Brazil where the Federal Government has proposed regulation to prohibit content moderation in relation to harmful behavior such as hate speech, cyber bullying, neo-Nazism, and misinformation. This has put civil society organizations advocating for digital safety in direct danger. It also highlights the importance of rejecting regulation that fails to respect the due process of law or the rights to free speech, data protection and privacy.
  • (Internet Watch Foundation – Michael Tunks) The UK draft online safety bill places a duty of care, as a well-established regulatory approach, on online platforms with user-to-user services and search providers to ensure the safety of its users. However, regulating is complex and takes time as has been seen in countries/regions such as the UK, EU, and Australia. Furthermore, regulation must complement not duplicate mechanisms that exist and work, it should be based on principles and be flexible enough to adapt to inevitable changes in technology, and it should respect the rights of children to privacy and a childhood free of abuse and exploitation. Having clear standards about what is and is not illegal is very helpful for multinational solutions. However, that does not mean companies should not go further and do more to keep children safe.
• To the question of whether we have an option to overemphasize either prevention or regulation, participants responded:
  
  • The UN General Comment #25 offers clear procedures for achieving a balance, but a careful process is needed to decide how any decision might affect any or all of children’s rights. This is hard since children are individuals. This leads to an argument for regulation for ‘hygiene factors’ that governments and businesses must adhere to ensure children’s privacy, security and equity, combined with intermediators such as auditors, funders, trade associations and ethics organizations that can help ensure children rights more broadly.
  • Useful regulation would be regulation that lays out the responsibility of online platforms to have strong reporting, referral and victim support processes, and to focus not only on technology to detect the outcomes of violence such as child sexual abuse material, but also all the things before that go unreported.
  • Indeed, governments have so far failed to provide companies with a good regulatory framework that governs their proactive work in this area. We need better rules that guide companies and enable to them to take responsibility. 
  • Some regulation is needed, such as to require the use of automated tools to detect CSAM, but solutions should be implemented in a way that does not affect other human rights.
  • Regulation may be politically expedient, but it is also about what is possible at a given moment in time. And as much as we talk about global standards, the internet is not a global system that must be run in a global way. This Idea of global standards and systems has been an obstacle to action. The crucial question is how come up with a framework that recognizes the responsibility of internet companies to prioritize safety – so regulation is essential, but if we leave the decision to online platforms, they will not prioritize safety.
• A participant from the Technical University of Munich asked what should be done to protect child influencers. Participants responded that there is no easy answer, but that there is a distinction between types of influencers. For example, there is clearly a role for regulation regarding the use of children to market certain products that can be harmful for children, and this also requires attention to child labor laws.
• Dotkids.com asked about the value of creating child friendly domains/spaces. Participants responded that safe spaces are important, but that diversity is also important, for example in relation to language provision for access to information and safety measures (such as language recognition to ensure safety). Furthermore, at minimum regulation should not reduce spaces for children, which is what happened in relation to the ePrivacy Directive in the EU.

Conclusions

• We need regulation and prevention – there is no dichotomy between the two.
• Regulation must be seen in context not in the abstract
• We have to do the best we can for the children in our own countries/jurisdictions, rather than pursue goals of ‘global’ harmonization
• Waiting for harmonization even on definitions will just lead to inaction, so we must focus on other areas and for local and contextual adaptation.