Safer Internet Day was created to highlight the dangers of the online world and inform users, developers, and organisations on how they can stay safe online, and to foster a safe environment for those most vulnerable. 

DIGIT discussed some of the main themes of Safer Internet Day as well as some of the work CyberSafe Scotland is doing to protect children online in Scotland with Annabel Turner, CEO and founder of CyberSafe Scotland. 

This year’s theme revolved around managing change online, but what does this look like in practice?

The online world continues to rapidly transform, and regulations are barely keeping pace as AI emerges. Further, social media and video games continually target a younger audience, often without proper safeguards to protect the children they provide a service to. 

Just last week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg apoligised to parents in a Senate hearing in the United States for the harm his social media platforms – Facebook and Instagram – has caused to children. 

Advances in technology have also caused the rampant proliferation of online child sexual abuse material to be distributed and carried out. Adults are more able than ever to abuse children across online platforms, and access abusive material. 

CyberSafe Scotland, founded by Annabel Turner, works with children across local council areas of Aberdeen to help children who have experienced online harm and abuse. 

She works closely with children to build trust and provide a safe space for them to share their negative online experiences, providing vital testimony to what the online world is actually like for children. 

Turner says that most adults cannot even fathom the scale of the issue – “children are experiencing a higher level of online harm than most adults realise,” she explained to DIGIT. 

She also shared that many children spend about two-thirds of their day in digital spaces, but these can be vastly different from the spaces adults see. 

Algorithms provide an often completely different experience for adults and children on the same social media sites, meaning that many adults will never see the same content that is shown to children. Further, online games and apps designed for children are completely outside the realm of the average adult experience, leaving children isolated and vulnerable. 

Many advocates discuss the need to listen to children in calls to protect them, but many are left unable to voice their concerns in an effective manner – they lack the safe space to share their negative online experiences, or the vocabulary and knowledge to advocate for their needs. 

CyberSafe Scotland attempts, and often succeeds, in giving this space to children, and Turner has kindly shared some of the top changes children would like to see from adults and businesses this Safer Internet Day. 

1. Get Involved – Your Children Will Thank You 

“Children want more adults involved in their digital lives,” Turner said, “That’s something that might surprise people, I think.” 

Indeed, Turner admits that this change is often antithetical to what people expect of children in online spaces, who we imagine would bemoan child safety locks and having their parents check their social media. 

“But children really recognise the fact that currently, they don’t have enough support in their digital space, they often feel very alone in it,” Turner explained. 

And Truner is urging adults to start these conversations, as children are typically scared that sharing negative or confusing online experiences will simply result in their devices being taken away, or their access being restricted. 

“So a really important thing for parents and adults involved in children’s digital lives. is that this has to be not one big conversation, but many, many smaller conversations,” Turner said. “Normalise support and protection in the digital space.”

She uses the Convention of the Rights of Children as a guiding principle in this – Turner spent years as a lawyer investigating some of the most heinous crimes against children, and her experience has guided her work at CyberSafe. 

The Convention comes into effect on 12 July, and makes children rights holders – “they have to claim their right, and they need to be able to speak about the things that are happening to them,” Turner explained. 

But equally, adults are classified as duty bearers for the children of Scotland. 

“And as duty bearers, we are under an obligation to consider what’s happening to them and the digital spaces that they’re in,” she said. 

Adults are therefore tasked with creating a safe environment for their children to discuss their digital lives, while ensuring that they are educated and involved in those digital spaces. 

This need not be necessarily invasive, but an exercise in staying informed, educated, and emphatically attuned to the experience of young people online. 

2. Stranger Danger Still Applies Digitally 

While children may want their caregivers to be more involved in their digital lives, they want less interaction with people – especially adults – they do not know. 

This is where privacy settings, and the businesses creating platforms, need to listen to the concerns of children. 

Teaching children to protect their own privacy only goes so far, Turner says, if platforms are already designed to share more data between users. 

Applications can have automatic settings that connect devices that are in geographic proximity, or recommend users to connect based on a mutual friend, putting children’s accounts in the view of adults they may not know. 

While Meta and other social media platforms have begun to introduce ways to safeguard children’s accounts online, these changes have come years after the introduction of the Information Commissioner’s Office’s Children’s Code, which came into effect in 2018. 

Further, children may be exposed to adult contact in online games and chatrooms, or may be exposed to material that they are not developmentally prepared to deal with. 

Recommended reading

• ICO Launches New Code to Protect Children’s Online Privacy
• Harrowing Report Highlights Scale of AI-generated Child Sexual Abuse
• Ofcom: Tech Firms Must Clamp Down on Illegal Online Content

All of this points to the quagmire of the social media and internet experiences children experience as these platforms become more and more integral to modern life. 

Increasingly restricting the ability of strangers to contact children online, changing the algorithms of recommended contact to young social media users, and preventing the data of children to be tracked and shared in the same way as adults, are all vital changes children are advocating for with the help of CyberSafe. 

3. Safety By Design

Safety by design is an issue CyberSafe Scotland continues to champion – devices and platforms need to be designed with the safety of children not just in mind, but as a top priority. 

Children working with CyberSafe Scotland, which is working with 5000 families across Abderdeen, are joining this advocacy. 

Many of the issues children discuss facing come down to safety by design. 

“They want products to be designed more safely for them, that is really key,” Turner says. 

And key to this is listening to children – but this listening needs to go a step further. 

CyberSafe fosters a close relationship of mutual trust and respect with the children they work with and advocate for. 

Turner wants to celebrate, and honour, the children who have shared their negative online experiences, bravely disclosing uncomfortable, even abusive situations they have encountered in digital spaces. 

Only by actively creating space for children to speak openly about their experiences, providing education on digital safety, can children access their own voice to then share with companies. 

“You can’t just go in and ask children what changes they want to see online,” Turner said. “You have to build that trust.” 

Implementation: Game Changers

CyberSafe Scotland has provided children with the ability and opportunity to share their voice and advocate for online changes, but how do these changes get implemented? 

The issues are two-fold: some changes require a cultural change about isolation in digital spaces, while others revolve around the online spaces themselves. 

For adults wanting to learn more about bridging the gap between themselves and children to foster a welcoming environment for children to share their online experiences, CyberSafe Scotland is partnering with ScotlandIS for a coffee morning on Safer Internet Day. 

CyberSafe Scotland will provide resources and discuss tangible actions parents, teachers, and caregivers can take to create a safer digital environment in their home, while offering advice on how to proactively engage with children about online experiences. 

The organisation also provides advice continually on their website to parents, teachers, and carers to get more involved in online safety. 

For companies looking to adopt safety by design principles and listen to the voice of children when implementing or designing new platforms and technologies, CyberSafe Scotland has launched a programme called GameChangers. 

CyberSafe will provide guiding principles companies can adopt to ensure their products and platforms are safe by design, and take action around the changes children are advocating for in online spaces. 

“I want Scotland to feel excited about its potential to be leaders in the online child protection space, and that this product project is a project that can be used as a base for that,” Turner said. 

Turner continually turns her attention to the children whose voice, honesty, and bravery are enabling change to occur: “It’s their courage that has created this potential in Scotland. We feel a huge responsibility not to try and unite the tech companies in Scotland to try and use that these children have told us for the better.

“We all need to honour that we need their support to make sure that the the voices of those children are are considered and taken seriously and used to create positive change.” 

For Turner, Safer Internet Day is about allyship to those most vulnerable in online spaces. It’s not just about raising awareness, but taking action based on this awareness.