Maybe Because 'Children' Aren't Who They Are Working For?

An internet safety campaign backed by US tech companies has been accused of censoring two teenagers they invited to speak out about the biggest issues facing children online.

Gosh, I wonder why? 

Childnet, a UK charity part-funded by companies including Snap, Roblox and Meta, edited out warnings from Lewis Swire and Saamya Ghai that social media addiction was an “imminent threat to our future” and obsessive scrolling was making people “sick”, according to a record of edits seen by the Guardian.

Did they not realise that he who pays the piper calls the tune then? 

Swire, then 17, from Edinburgh, and Ghai, then 14, from Buckinghamshire, had been asked to speak at an event to mark Safer Internet Day in 2024 in London in front of representatives from government, charities and tech companies.The tech-backed charity also edited out references to children feeling unable to stop using TikTok and Snap, social media exacerbating a “devastating epidemic” of isolation, and a passage questioning why people would want to spend years of their lives “scrolling TikTok and binge-watching Netflix”, the edits show.

Childnet denied making edits to keep tech funders happy and insisted it would not stop young people making their points.

Of course they did… 

“I was pretty surprised because at this stage I didn’t know there was a conflict of interest with where their funding was coming from,” said Swire, who was at the time a member of Childnet’s youth advisory board.

How do you get elected (if it was an elected role, of course) to a youth advisory board without having the slightest idea about how things work? 

Ghai, now 16, said: “It was quite shocking because the stuff that they deleted was bringing to light a lot of things that were happening in the industry. It felt hypocritical because they were asking us to speak up against this and then at the same time they watered down what we wanted to say so much.”

Well, one hopes you’ve learned a valuable lesson from this, at least… 

Will Gardner, the Childnet chief executive, denied making edits to keep tech funders happy. “If young people want to make a point we allow them to make a point but there are constraints – not due to who gives us money, there are constraints in the nature of the event that we’re running, and the time constraints,” he said. “We would certainly advise and edit around tone and language but we wouldn’t stop young people making a point.”

Tell me another one!