Children and Young People: Digital Technology

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, the topic of this debate is often understood in ways suggesting that what is at issue is either a generic problem with the use of online technologies or a more specific problem arising from the use of social media. I declare an interest as someone who does not use social media, but whose life is greatly dependent on digital technologies. We are mistaken if we focus excessively on social media.

The generic problems for children and young people are said to include too much screen time, loss of sleep, educational damage, less social life and less exercise—I agree. The specific problems of social media use by children and young people, but not them only, are said to include a lurid list that runs across the risks of cyberbullying, a loss of privacy, exposure to porn and extremist propaganda and lots more. I agree entirely that each of these can damage young people; for that matter, they can damage older people as well. But the tech companies may, even if pretty belatedly, conclude that failure to curb these harms is damaging their reputations and commercial interests, so they will do more to prevent these harms. How successful they will be remains to be seen. So far, moves to take down harmful material have not been wholly successful.

However, these may not be the most damaging harms done by digital technologies and, more specifically, not the harms which most damage young people. The harms I have mentioned are all private harms in the economist’s sense of the term: they are harms suffered by individuals who are bullied or whose privacy is invaded, or whose education is damaged. There is a second range of less immediately visible harms that arise from digital media. These are public harms that damage public goods, notably cultures and democracy.

There is a large and growing body of knowledge about ways in which digital technologies are used to subvert democratic processes, including elections and referenda. It has happened in many jurisdictions. Such use of technology is cheap and its influence can be purchased and peddled by those who are not citizens, including corporations and states, among them hostile states and their intelligence services. Moreover, it can be done anonymously. Our electoral law, which regulates party-political expenditure during campaigns, is pathetically inadequate for dealing with hidden digital persuasion.

Equally, there is now substantial evidence of the use of digital technologies to undermine the reliability of news and information. This has often been hailed as a point of pride. When Mr Mark Zuckerberg first propounded his now infamous slogan “Move fast and break things”, one may assume that he took it that everything that would be broken would be something unjust and exclusionary that obstructed the dissemination of knowledge and information to the public. In the event, the digital revolution has swept away not only the wicked intermediaries, the censors, but essential intermediaries without whom we would have no serious journalism, no editorial judgment nor reliable ways of telling whether we were encountering fake news or the real thing. The wholesale destruction of intermediaries is a form of cultural vandalism, damaging to all but the perpetrators and the hidden persuaders, and in particular to young people.

I am all for pursuing the agenda of protecting young people from the private harms inflicted by uses of digital or of other technologies, but I think that we short-change the next generation if we do not protect them also from the public harms that such technologies enable. Protection from them will be far more difficult, I suspect, because it will not be in the commercial interest of the big tech companies that organise the data obtained from many sources—not, by the way, always social media—and package it for sale to those who pay to target specific groups for political and commercial purposes cheaply and, once again, anonymously.

In September 2018, Sir Tim Berners-Lee expressed his disappointment about what has happened to the web in these words:

“I’ve always believed the web is for everyone. That’s why I and others fight fiercely to protect it. The changes we’ve managed to bring have created a better and more connected world. But for all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas”.


We have been warned.