PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, influence operations, and online harms.
While my experience of parenting has been limited to trying to ‘school’ my younger siblings (classic older child behaviour), I have recently started thinking about how we should explain digital threats to children and the next generation – i.e., parenting in the digital age (if we were to put a name on it).
Taking my 16-year-old brother as an example (I still see him as a child), it seems like rather than my parents teaching him about the internet, he’s the one teaching them. Mainly how to use TikTok or react to a message but still the power dynamic is that my parents know almost nothing about the dangers of the internet and see my brother as an expert. Not to out my brother but he did use ChatGPT for his homework and was promptly schooled by his teacher on academic ethics and the dangers of AI – so clearly he’s not a pro. Most kids know about the dangers of the internet in at least a rudimentary manner, and when it comes to things like digital etiquette (not using GPT do your homework, for example) schools are (for the most part) keeping pace with the AI advancements. But, we cannot assume that children growing up with screens left, right, and centre know how these digital threats target and effect them nor that they (or their teachers) fully understand the power of AI - it's an unbelievably complex and ever changing topic, after all.
Last night I found myself in a rabbit hole of parental-led online child safety debates and two main talking points really stood out. Firstly, the concept of digital resilience and the question of ‘Can children develop digital resilience without first experiencing risky experiences online?’ and ‘Do risky online experiences always result in children becoming more digitally resilient afterwards?’.
This article suggests that for children to develop digital resilience, they must be allowed to engage with the digital world. This, of course, opens them up to several risks (cyberbullying, graphic content, etc.). The article compares it to learning to ride a bike, requiring a bit of assistance and support from the parent until the child can ride on their own. I’m hesitant to agree about simply approaching child safety online through the guise of exposure therapy - not to mention that, while there is a role parents must play in their child's safety online, the described theory doesn't explain the roles and responsibilities for platforms and lawmakers to ensure that certain material is not on the internet. But, I can't deny that in the real online world risk is something we can never fully mitigate against.
The second view mentioned the word ‘limits’ a lot – limits on how much screen time children should have or in the most extreme circumstances, views that the internet and all forms of technology should be entirely off-limits for kids. The argument for this is that reduced time = reduced exposure to inappropriate content and that it limits distractions and gives more time for things like schoolwork... Basically, some parents are concerned with not knowing what’s out there, and so are resorting to no technology as an easy way to avoid having hard conversations. But, kids aren't always under the watchful eye of their parents and eventually they become teenagers and teenagers love a bit of rebellion; at a certain point the child will get their hands on a device and will be going into the virtual world for the first time likely unsupervised and completely blind and naïve because they have been effectively sheltered from it their whole life and unfortunately that's a recipe for disaster.
The solution is somewhere in the middle – we need to protect children but the reality is they are already more exposed to the internet than we were growing up and like my brother, lots of kids have already dabbled in using new forms of technology. At the same time, we can’t just throw them into the deep end expecting resilience at the end of the tunnel. We need to have open discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of the internet and understand that so much of our lives is online, we can’t run away from it. Ultimately, we need to realise that it's not just children that need digital resilience, it's all of us. To teach the next generation, we need to prepare as well. You can't teach someone to ride a bike if you still have the training wheels on yourself.
More about Protection Group International's Digital Investigations
Our Digital Investigations Analysts combine modern exploitative technology with deep human analytical expertise that covers the social media platforms themselves and the behaviours and the intents of those who use them. Our experienced analyst team have a deep understanding of how various threat groups use social media and follow a three-pronged approach focused on content, behaviour and infrastructure to assess and substantiate threat landscapes.
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