Shortly after Safer Internet Day 2022, Twitter held an EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) Safer Internet Day Summit on 10 February with a strong focus on online safety. The event was open not only to organisations representing youth and young people themselves, but also to organisations representing underrepresented or historically marginalised groups.

The aim of the Summit was to empower all participants to speak their minds about online issues that matter most to them, and to be included in the public conversation about how to improve everyone’s digital experience.

The event included a session on online safety, where new tools and policies recently implemented by Twitter were illustrated, and then the participants were split into smaller breakout sessions, where they could discuss more freely about online safety issues and concerns they were experiencing on the platform so that Twitter could listen, learn and improve their experiences.

In total, 24 BIK Youth Ambassadors from various European countries participated in the Summit. During the breakout sessions, they had the chance to share their views on what safety tools they find have been working well for them on Twitter (e.g. the mute and report tool, conversation controls, and more), and to discuss what opportunities for policy growth they see and what mechanisms should be prioritised to be implemented. Among the most reported opportunities for further development was the strengthening misinformation and hate speech detection, especially when occurring through coded language or by using regional dialects currently not covered by the platform. Other suggestions were including a network of trusted fact-checkers to better verify the context of any reported content, and to better educate users of the reporting options available to them when using the social network.

Find more information about the 19th edition of Safer Internet Day. Alternatively, visit the BIK Youth website to learn how youth is getting involved in the Better Internet for Kids agenda, in Europe and beyond.