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| 14 | Tech can’t wait for regulation to protect children online | ----------- | |
| ComputerWeekly.com | 2026-04-08 04:20 | ????0? | |
| There is a familiar story that plays out every time another news report emerges of children being seriously harmed online. Parents are told to “take control”. Schools are asked to “do more”. Tech companies promise another round of tweaks. But this framing misses the real issue. The harm children experience on social media is not a failure of parenting or education. It is the outcome of commercial systems designed to maximise engagement at all costs.If the tech sector genuinely prioritised child safety, we would not be facing the scale of harm that now confronts children and young people. What is happening online is not accidental, or the result of a few bad actors. It is the consequence of algorithmic recommender systems deliberately engineered to keep users scrolling. Systems optimised for profit do not suddenly behave differently because the user is a child.This was laid bare by the findings of the Big Tech’s Little Victims Algorithm Experiment. The project, led by the National Education Union, created four fictional profiles of British 13-year-olds across TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and Instagram to see what content children are served when they sign up for the first time. The results were shocking, but sadly not surprising to teachers. Within minutes, children were shown harmful and inappropriate content, including guns, self-harm, sexualised material and misogynistic narratives.One visible example is the rise of online misogyny - girls being targeted or harassed, and female staff facing open hostility. What starts on a feed becomes offline behaviour and, once embedded, becomes far harder for schools to unpick. As Louis Theroux’s recent documentary The Manosphere has brought into sharp focus, the scaling of misogynistic content, for example, is not incidental - it is by design.First, we need honesty about the limits of half measures. The Government has launched a national consultation on children’s digital wellbeing. Ministers have also announced a six week pilot involving 300 teenagers, in which families will trial different forms of social media restriction at home – including disabling social media apps entirely, imposing one hour daily limits, or enforcing overnight curfews – with a control group continuing as normal, to assess the impact on children’s sleep, wellbeing and school life. -- ???????? | |||
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