The session was led by Sabrina Vorbau from the Insafe Coordination Team; Joachim Kind from Landeszentral für Medien und Kommunikation (LMK), and Niels Van Paemel from Child Focus. 

The panel was composed of multi-stakeholder representatives, namely David Miles, Safety Director at Facebook; Ricardo Resende Campos, Director of Legal Grounds for Privacy Design (LGPD); Jutta Croll, Project Manager on child protection and children's rights in the digital world at Stiftung Digitale Chancen; Anastasiya Dyakova, Adviser on children online safety of the Vice-Prime-Minister/Minister for Digital Transformation of Ukraine; and Magdalena Duszyńska, psychologist and trainer by profession  (Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Wrocław).

Niels Van Paemel set the scene by raising a question on whether the structuring characteristics of the media landscape have remained the same with the advent of social media, or whether the rules of the game have changed. In this context, exploring the power of social media allows to take a closer look at how individuals and groups use social media platforms in order to shape the public opinion of users.

The panel discussion, which was hosted by two Better Internet for Kids (BIK) Youth Ambassadors – Kathrin Morasch and João Pedro Martins – revolved around five subthemes.

Online versus offline activism

Social media is an amazing space to spread the word about societal issues, but how is the advent of online activism changing our behaviour offline? To what extent can we say that social media is supporting or hindering activism in the offline world?

For Magdalena Duszyńska, the bystander effect has both been reinforced and reduced by the advent of activism on social media. We see a lot of young people, nowadays, expressing their views about a societal issue on social media, but not taking similar action offline. This trend is driven by a need for approval, and by the fact that outrageous and violent topics generate the most engagement online.

However, as was demonstrated by the women’s strikes on the issue of abortion in Poland, social media has, in this case, served as a place to spread the word about demonstrations and strikes, therefore inciting offline activism.

Ricardo Resende Campos explained that the role of communications in our societies has tremendously changed in the past decades, because of the emergence of social media and its progressive replacement at the centre of our societies’ communications, in the place of traditional mass media. This is important because the media – the mass media yesterday, social media nowadays – shape our world views in fundamental ways. This raises numerous issues when one considers the problem of filter bubbles. Yet, online communications also have some limitations, which are especially evident when societal issues arise and the response from the bulk of the public opinion is expressed purely online.

A new imperative: navigating different persona on social media

As a recent trend among users consisting of showing the different ways in which they present themselves on different social media platforms indicates, we are nowadays curating and maintaining different online persona on social networks. As Anastasiya Dyakova remarked, the difference is also quite striking when we compare our offline and our online identities more broadly. This difference is in part driven – especially for children and young people – by the quest for likes on social media, and by the general sentiment of comparing oneself to another person’s highly curated and embellished online life.

As accurately mentioned by João Pedro Martins, this plurality of online persona even goes as far as having different accounts on the same social media platform for young people, because they are filtering what they share with the specific audience which they have on each account – this is best exemplified by the popularity of finsta accounts on Instagram. Magdalena Duszyńska affirmed that we have these different online persona because each social media platform fulfils a different need – on Tinder, it would be the need for love and closeness, while on Instagram, it is the need for acceptance that prevails and on Facebook, the need for affiliation.

David Miles reflected on how Facebook, when it first emerged, gained ground so quickly because of the sense of authenticity it harboured. For him, this multiplicity of online persona speaks to the fact that young people have been wanting, for several years now, to disaggregate their social media profiles, and curate them for different audiences.

Jutta Croll claimed that children and young people’s development tremendously benefits from having the capacity to play with different identities and personalities in an environment where they are free to experiment and try things out with little offline consequences in terms of safety; this is especially visible when we look at gender identities. Social media represents a great opportunity in that regard.

Social media and human connection: a hindering or facilitating effect?

Given the ongoing pandemic and the social distancing measures enforced around the world in the past year, we find ourselves in a situation where our social lives are lived more and more through digital technologies. How is this affecting us, and especially the youngest among us? For this discussion, speakers were shown a statement “social media is neither social, nor media”.

Jutta Croll argued that during the pandemic, we have witnessed first-hand how social media can be. We are not living in a time of social distancing, as we keep saying, but rather of physical distancing, and social media have enabled us to maintain our social contacts, a reality which is also valid for young people. Besides, social media is media – it is not replacing the “traditional” media, it is complementary to it and in some ways and for some people, more prominent.

For David Miles, our increased reliance on social media has fuelled interesting debates around the notion of screen time. Quoting the work of danah boyd in the US and of Sonia Livingstone in the UK, David called for a focus on the quality of what users are doing online, rather than on the quantity of time spent online. Besides, some academics are also seeing that screens have reversed some trends of decreasing literacy in adulthood. The connectedness which social media is allowing during the pandemic has been vital for young people’s mental health.

Regulating the use of social media by politicians

With the pandemic and the US election, the issue of the spread of disinformation and misinformation on social media has been more prominent in the public debate. Ricardo Campos argued that political and legal systems around the world are facing enormous challenges because of this transition from mass media to platform media, and that electoral legislations were not built with social media in mind, resulting in a huge gap on the topic.

David Miles mentioned that if the effect of social media platforms on democratic processes is mostly painted as detrimental, it is not all negative – ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook has helped 4.4 million people to register to vote. Facebook also labels advertising and holds users to account based on their community standards. Besides, elections usually surface a whole range of societal issues, and the groups that form around that, the conversations that happen online, particularly under the pandemic, are at the heart of the process of having free and fair elections.

Involving the youth in advisory and decision-making processes relating to internet and social media governance

For this part of the discussion, the speakers were shown a recommendation by the #Youth4DigitalSustainability group on internet for social cohesion – which our two BIK Youth Ambassadors were involved in. The quote read “youth accounts for one out of three active users of media content platforms. Such platforms need to assure youth representation in internal advisory bodies and self-regulation processes to improve on the decisions that affect this age group”. 

David Miles shared that, since 2019, in the framework of the Youth Pledge for a Better Internet, Facebook has been carrying out a line of work on age-appropriate design, in which they are co-designing a youth guide which was released at Safer Internet Forum (SIF) 2020. To get there, a range of workshops with young people around the world were carried out. The input collected fed into the youth guide. On that note, David Miles reaffirmed the importance of avoiding treating young people as just one demographic block in co-design processes. The involvement of young people in advisory bodies and self-regulation processes is a trend which is expected to develop in the near future – David Miles mentioned the example of Messenger Kids, which was developed using insights from pre-teens.

You can find further information on the Internet Governance Forum on the Better Internet for Kids (BIK) portal and on intgovforum.org.