Better Internet for Kids

Safer Internet Day 2023 was one of the most important moments in February for Save the Children Romania and the internet safety programme team that is part of the Romanian Safer Internet Centre. We took this occasion to emphasise, once again, that even though the internet is an important tool for children nowadays, it can hide a series of important online risks – with cyberbullying being one of the most common, and with the greatest impact on children’s wellbeing in Romania.

Safer Internet Day is celebrated in more than 180 countries around the world, always on the second Tuesday of February. This year, the day fell on 7 February 2023 and was celebrated for the 20th time. The coordinator of this day in the Czech Republic is the Czech Safer Internet Centre, managed by the CZ.NIC association.

Today, another edition of the bi-annual Insafe Training meeting kicks off. The two-day event is an opportunity for the Insafe network of European Safer Internet Centres (SICs) to meet in person to facilitate the sharing of experience and good practices between network countries, to explore areas of common ground, and opportunities for closer working between awareness raising, helpline, and youth participation strands. The April 2023 Insafe Training meeting is held face-to-face in Vienna, Austria.

Children and young people are exposed to a wide range of content online that is inappropriate or harmful to them and that they do not understand. Among the most problematic content are violent, hateful and radical content spread by some influencers, as well as online pornography to which young people are exposed at a very early age. Therefore, the Slovenian awareness centre Safe.si decided to celebrate Safer Internet Day 2023 by encouraging schools and young people to talk and think about these issues. The chosen topic proved to be very interesting, and a record number of schools, pupils and students participated in the Safer Internet Day activities.

The ALL DIGITAL Weeks campaign is a significant awareness-raising initiative across Europe, focusing on digital skills to enhance inclusion, empowerment, and employment opportunities.This year, the campaign will run will run over 3 weeks from 17 April until 7 May 2023.

As part of the Better Internet for Kids (BIK) Quality Assurance Programme (QAP), the Insafe-INHOPE Coordination Teams are jointly conducting a set of fourteen country visits to national Safer Internet Centres (SICs) to better understand what is happening in the Member States: monitoring emerging issues and challenges, identifying good practices to be shared, and harvesting the results of the Better Internet for Kids (BIK) policy. On 17 October 2022, the Insafe-INHOPE Coordination Team visited the French Safer Internet Centre in Paris.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Safer Internet Day, Internet Sans Crainte - with the support of its partners - built an ambitious and global campaign whose engaging baseline was "20 years... and tomorrow?” to celebrate SID in France.

For Safer Internet Day (SID) 2023, young people were the focus of the SID event in Italy. The day was split up into several different sessions to target different kinds of audience. Read on to discover more about the celebrations during the day.

In Mexico, the Mexican Safer Internet Day Committee Fundación PAS, part of the SIC+ programme, was in charge of organising Safer Internet Day 2023. To celebrate the day, several events were organised in collaboration with stakeholders and influencers.

The practical workshops and school routes were attended by more than 4,050 classrooms in educational centres. Read on to find out more about Safer Internet Day (SID) celebrations in Spain.