Will Anstee, CEO of the Online Safety Agency, returns to the Managing Marketing podcast to continue the discussion on the issues and opportunities of delivering the benefits and minimising the harm of social media for children and teens.
Last time, we discussed the issues facing children and teens using social media and the role parents and families can play. This time, our attention turns to the role that the tech platforms themselves could and do play and the importance of government legislation to protect the public, particularly children.
We also discuss the role that advertisers and their agencies play. After all, children and teens represent a significant marketplace in pester power alone. But when advertisers spend their advertising dollars supporting particular social media platforms, communications channels, and games, they also have a responsibility to do so in a positive way for their customers and society generally.
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Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management consultancy. And welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you are enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.
Now, last time we discussed the issues facing children and teens using social media and the role parents and families can play. This time, our attention turns to the roles that the tech platforms themselves could and do play, and the importance for government to provide legislation to protect the public and particularly children.
But we also discuss the role that advertisers and their agencies play. After all, children and teens represent a significant marketplace in pace to power alone. But in supporting particular social media platforms, communication channels, and games with their advertising media dollars, they also have a responsibility to do so in a positive way for their customers and society generally.
To continue the discussion on this issue and the opportunities to deliver the benefits and minimize the harm of social media to children and teens, please welcome back to the Managing Marketing Podcast, CEO of the Online Safety Agency, Will Anstee. Welcome back Will.
Will:
Thanks, Darren. Great to be here.
Darren:
Look, Will, it was a terrific conversation last time, particularly focusing on what are the issues and the role families and parents play, in many ways helping children navigate this. I was really inspired by the conversation around trying to ban these things is a bit fraught with danger because there’s always ways around it.
And the very positive role that parents and families and even, the community complain, helping children learn to navigate and use these environments which have many positive things to bring in a much safer and positive way. So, thank you for that.
But we got to the point of talking about the bans, or the call for bans and the legislation that’s being discussed. I wouldn’t mind talking about that in a bit more detail because some parents particularly are very pro, yes, please ban this because we need guidelines, and we need ways of dealing with this.
Whereas there’s a large group also that are out there saying that by banning it, we’re actually doing a disservice to the next generation. Where do you sit on this?
Will:
Yeah, look, it’s super interesting and it’s very complicated. And I think the role that I’d like to have today for you and your audience is to really talk about sensibilities.
Because if you start to look at what’s being set there, a lot of it’s being politicized, which is then making more difficult. You’ve got parents saying, we want the ban without any understanding of actually how it’s implemented or can it be implemented.
So, let me sort of go back just one step in terms of what really we’re up against when it comes to banning social media.
So, in Congress, in the U.S. Congress in 1996 they created a legislation which was called Section 230. And Section 230 was basically the Communications Decency Act that offers social media companies’ immunity from liability for user generated content.
Now, what that means is that no social media company can be held accountable for what’s on their platform. There can be no litigation. They’re basically clean as a whistle.
So, as a result of that, you think about the way that these platforms work. So, there’s the Metas, the Snaps, the ByteDances, you name it, we all know who they are. Basically, they give access to their platforms for free, on the provider, they start trading the data.
So, when we start looking at the, I guess, trading of data, what does that also mean? So, when it comes to what the government in Australia are looking at, but also understand it’s being led by the states. So, this ban is being led by Peter Malinauskas, who’s the premier of South Australia.
And the ban is actually to say that there’ll be a ban of social media under the age of 14, so that’s 13 and below, with parental consent for 14 and 15-year olds.
Now when you start looking at that and then sort of how it starts to have impact, and then you look at what it means to the big, I guess, social media platforms, they make all their money from, I guess, the trading of data.
There was a stat used in our last podcast, Darren, that basically was Meta have publicly acknowledged that an individual child under the age of 13 is worth $270 in their lifetime. Now, by rights that shouldn’t even be legal, but yet they’re prepared to say it.
If you also then go out to talk to kids, and as we spoke last time, I mean, we speak to thousands and thousands of kids every month, and if you ask them in terms of who’s on social media, what age do they start on social media, it’s generally from sort of 10 to 11 years of age.
Now, social media as defined is more like the Messenger apps, like the Snaps, like the Telegrams, like the WhatsApps. And then obviously some of the platforms like TikTok et cetera, they’re sort of even debate whether YouTube is social because a lot of the schools are using it to educate.
So, there could be some exemptions, but it’ll be interesting to see how they start to define that. But long story short the ban when you have global, well, American big global companies saying that they can’t be touched, it almost becomes an impossibility.
So, what we are seeing in our communities is that mental health, there’s more depression, there’s more self-harm, there’s more suicide. There was a book written by a guy called Jonathan Haidt, I’m not sure whether you’ve heard of this, called The Anxious Generation.
And The Anxious Generation has sort of really taken its own — I guess it’s got its own entity now. That’s what’s sort of behind a lot of this direction behind the government pushing for the ban.
But when you start thinking about a ban for social, first of all is that kids say that social media is their lifeline. They talk about it as being their culture. It’s their connection to friends. It’s actually what sort of gets them up in the morning and keeps them connected.
To take that away is going to become very, very challenging. And you think about parents saying they want the ban because it puts the onus on the government, there’s still going to be massive unhappiness in households from this happening. So, it’s almost a little bit of I guess a fake expectation of that this is going to be a good thing.
Now, when you look at some minority groups, and that could be the neurodiverse, it could be the LGBTQ+ segments. They use social to connect with like-minded individuals. So, that is an important utility for them to have.
So, if you start to think about banning, first of all, what are you really banning? I mean, are you really making the impact on mental health that the government says based on the book of The Anxious Generation? Or are you simply cutting off kids from their lifeline?
And I think there has to be something sensible there. When we also know too, that the government can’t go to the social media companies and say, “Tell us what data do you collect on our kids? And we want it published. Tell us how your algorithms work and why do the kids get the same content over and over again.”
Here we are having these platforms that are meant to broaden our experience of what social is, and yet what they do is narrow us down through the algorithm.
So, it’d be really, really beneficial and much faster for the government to try and enforce that. But because of this Section 230, it basically is impossible. And so, the government now have to take this other path, and that’s where you start talking about challenges.
Darren:
Now, here’s the thing, and this comes up not just in relation to children and teens, but to social media generally. Section 230 protects them from many of the things that are traditional publishers who have to take responsibility for what’s published in their online environments.
A traditional publisher can be sued for defamation if they publish something, even a comment from a reader that’s defamatory, the publisher. Whereas social media companies are exempt because of Section 230.
I mean, earlier this year, there was a challenge to that and there’s now a precedent that they can be held responsible where they knowingly allow it to happen. But it’d be very easy to claim that you’re not.
The fact that this is all U.S. based, and while for tax purposes, many of them are based in Ireland. The truth is these companies are U.S. companies. There’s very little Australian governments can do when the legislation is enshrined in the United States of America.
Will:
That’s right. And that’s where, I think as a country we have to be a little bit more pragmatic because coming out and saying, we’re going to issue a ban, first of all, it doesn’t really solve the problem. It’s very hard, cumbersome, clunky, how do we even age verify?
We don’t have really the right sources or technology to do facial recognition that isn’t collecting data. So, that becomes another problem.
We already know now that the age verification doesn’t work from the 13. So, you’ve got all these sort of challenges. And the fact is, we are so small. I think, Australia with their GDP is smaller than the state of California, so no one’s going to listen to us. It’s almost like we’re just like one of the kids in the corner that shouts, the naughty kid.
And that the Americans that are saying, “Look, shut up.” But what the government thinks is that if they can rally enough. So, South Australia then connects with Chris Minns for New South Wales, and they believe they can then get further support from the EU, from Canada, a number of other Western countries. They think they may have the chance.
But I think that’s also a long, long time coming. So, again, we’ve got all this noise in the system right now. I was at the social media summit in the last short while, and you’ve got a lot of anger in the system, whether it be from minority communities, but even what they’re saying is, if you take away our social media for our kids, they have three hours free that they need to fill.
Now, does the government say I will take on that responsibility as well? Or does the onus go back to the parents? Now, every parent, and again, if they’re working two shifts, three shifts, they’re working hard to keep food on the table. They’re not going to be around to say what’s three hours going to do to fill their day.
So, the government is saying, in their best of wisdom, we are going to put money back into the infrastructure around playgrounds, basketball courts, et cetera. That in itself will take years.
So, we’ve got sort of this perfect storm that is, that’s brewing. We know that there is a massive challenge for our kids when it comes to mental health. And as I said last time we spoke, its incidence of mental health is higher than hay fever, which I still think is absolutely ridiculous.
But the fact is, even when you look at the Medicare system, there’s only a certain amount of mental health hours that you can get-
Darren:
Each year.
Will:
For each year for anybody. So, again, what the call out is, is that can there be limitless support for mental health? And it’s becoming such a problem for this generation that I think we have to consider that, but we also have to consider what happens in that place.
We know that when South Australia banned the phones in the schools, you had a lot of kids at first literally not knowing what to do on the playground, but within a short time they adjusted. Everyone adjusts in time.
And I think it is creating for a much more harmonious and a more positive playground experience when kids are talking to each other rather than sitting by themselves with their headphones in listening to something else or playing a game. So-
Darren:
Sorry, Will, but it’s interesting though that the social media platforms, Meta have responded to the threat of a ban by coming out and announcing that they have a child friendly version of Instagram, for instance, where the algorithm will be “dumbed down” so that it’ll be less targeted and less of a bubble. But I’m not sure that that’s actually the solution either, is it?
Will:
Well, what kid wants a dumbed down version? I’ve seen for YouTube kids and from my previous life running TotallyAwesome to the kids media company. We know that nobody wants to watch YouTube Kids, they want to watch YouTube. So, who wants to then have Instagram for kids?
So, again, it’s lovely packaging that actually doesn’t actually land in reality. And that’s what we’re always up against. So, that’s why we’ve got to sort of step back and say, look, forget all the noise. We do know that government has a certain responsibility to play for all of us. And it is about protecting us from harmful content. And you think about what happens online from pornography to graphic violence-
Darren:
Gambling.
Will:
Terrible stuff, gambling. Their role is to protect us or our kids of situations that put them in harm’s way. So, you think about some of the TikTok challenges and there have been some kids that have died as a result of delivering the challenge.
And then the third piece for governments is basically protect our kids from contact with dangerous strangers. So, think of when you and I were kids, there was the stranger danger platform, or there was even the Neighborhood Watch Program that we all had in our neighborhoods.
So, I think, communities start to regulate anyway, and I think the government does have a role to sort of start to enforce those things. But when you take on social media and when you take on I guess a juggernaut that has really no interest in changing the way their business model operates because It goes back to their shareholder value. It is incredibly difficult to make anything happen in that space.
Now, banning is one option. In fact, one of … and again, I can’t stand these sort of discussions, but one of the conversations was, let’s have more exemptions. So, if you are from more minority groups, let’s actually make you exempt.
But there was another person who spoke the other day, which I thought was quite fascinating, that said, “Let’s not use the word ban. Let’s use the word systematic usage reputation.” And someone on the panel said, “Oh, yeah, I can see that as a headline in the press.”
So, look, I mean, there’s so many mad conversations happening right now that I don’t think really helps any of us. But the fact is there is a need. And therefore it goes back to, in my humblest opinions of how do we educate, self-educate. Now-
Darren:
Is it — sorry, Will.
Will:
I’ll let you go on because I would just keep talking. So, yeah, you tell me what you’d like.
Darren:
But Will, what is the responsibility for social media? Because you said, as businesses, they’re there to deliver shareholder value, so they will optimize the algorithm, they’ll optimize the data collection to maximize profits.
But the executive chairman of News Corporation in Australia, Michael Miller, I think it was at a senate committee meeting, said that social media companies should have a social license to do the right thing in the same way that media companies are perceived to have a social license to be able to report on news media was about the news media bargaining code, right?
Will:
Yeah.
Darren:
Should there be, and could government, for instance, put in place guidelines of what it takes to have that social license to operate?
Will:
Well, look, again, I don’t want to sound like it’s a really hopeless situation, but what the government did to look at its abilities to really influence this decision, they employed Robert French, who was the previous Chief Justice of the High Court. For those who don’t know that.
What he did, he then went through a systematic approach of looking at what we’re up against. And that means what precedent had been set historically. When it comes to personal identification, what are the options available comes to I guess the res responsible age restriction technologies, facial recognition, even can we tell kids online by the use of their grammar in their emails?
And that’s another way. But the fact is the big tech really have no interest or cannot be made to do anything unless maybe their own shareholders start to say, “Well, we are not going to invest in you.”
So, I think it all comes back to all of us. But the thing that I think is really interesting is that where Robert French got to was that basically issue the social media giants with what he calls a duty of care as opposed to a prohibition.
Because as a duty of care, that goes back to all corporations at their fundamental heart have a role to play in I guess the healthy society that we all live up and we all want our kids to grow. So, that’s the path they’ve gone down as a duty of care.
But the other point too that I think’s important for all of us to think about is that there’s that old expression that perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good. And I think that if we’re all trying to get to perfection, we’ll never get there.
But how do we get good? And I think there’s something sensible about that too. And with News Corp, again, that’s sort of got in this bandwagon of 36 months platform. And again, I like the intention and in fact, I’m working with them and partnering with them to really sort of take this to market in interesting ways.
But the 36 month platform is all about, here we are saying that I guess mobile phone usage, the ban on possible, do we extend another 36 months until kids are more 15, 16 years of age and do we make sure that kids only have flip phones or dumb phones, whatever we want to call them, as opposed to the smartphone.
And there’s something in that too because we don’t want to take away a communication device that parents want to know where their kids are, you picked up from sport or whatever else.
But again, just the concept of implementing that, it’s just fraught with danger and fraught with complications that I think make it almost impossible. So, the social media companies, can we force them? No. Can we issue a duty of care? Maybe.
And I think all of us then have to say, are we prepared to invest in you if you continue to do this? But that’s the business model. And do they change it.
Darren:
Well, and then we talk about advertisers, because in many ways, these social media companies are businesses. Most of them rely heavily on advertising as their revenue. The shareholders’ profits or dividends come from having a successful business model that advertisers are basically funding.
And so, there has to be some responsibility for advertisers as well and their agencies in the way they’re using these because your point, and I included in my introduction is that 10 to 18-year-olds or even younger, 2 to 18-year-olds have an important part in the advertising process, because even if they don’t have disposable income, they certainly significantly influence expenditure in households, don’t they?
Will:
They certainly do. When you look at this audience, they’re a fascinating group. I mean, there’s sort of specific data points about them and the fact they don’t consume media like the previous generations or the previous millennials, generation Xs, et cetera.
We also know that the way the media industry is still buying it. And a lot of the cases is using sort of the old ways of sort of buying a demographic of 18 to 39 or 18 to 50. So, what happens then, the mean of any media schedule is always going to miss them.
And plus, the fact is they don’t consume media the same way. So, you should never be including them anyway. Contextual tends to be sort of the key way into this audience. They even respect that.
The research I’ve seen is that if you start serving appropriate ads that actually have a utility for them in whatever environment, then they’re actually going to actually appreciate it. But on the other hand, if you serve an ad that has nothing to do with where they are. So, say for instance, they’re looking at fashion and they get served an ad for the defense force, it pisses them off.
Darren:
They’re more savvy, aren’t they?
Will:
They’re so much more savvy.
Darren:
They’re more media literate.
Will:
And they don’t have time for the rubbish that I think we put up with. So, if you start to think about what happens then in that media space, you’ve got clients that are saying, “I want to be on Instagram,” and yet they don’t change their ad to be relevant for Instagram at the audience, at the right point in time, they’re simply using an old asset that they think works because they’ve done some sort of testing, again, out of a particular environment.
And every environment is particularly unique and different in terms of the purpose it serves for this audience. So, you’ve got to get savvy. And I don’t think brands are savvy enough. Again, they get too hamstrung unfortunately, by budget constraints, which of course is one of the issues.
The media companies are being told a lot is what to do. And they do it. I think it’s easier often to sometimes flow with the water as opposed to go against it all the time. And what you do see out there is first of all, media that is actually in the wrong place, that doesn’t make sense.
And you see creative that is completely inappropriate. And I want to say, not in terms inappropriate in a offensive way, but just the fact it doesn’t make sense.
Darren:
No, age appropriate or context appropriate.
Will:
It’s more context appropriate. It has inappropriate values in context. So, therefore, what’s its value? And so, the media agencies are then measuring cost per click, cost per acquisition, or that even, it’s more cost per click, I’d say, or impressions.
And that’s even a wrong measurement. So, we’ve got these wrong measurements, and then we’ve got these people that are simply trying to pedal old business models or old ways of doing things that are no longer relevant to this particular audience.
They’re seen as being too niche. A lot of the big FMCGs go out there and they’ll say, “Look, we don’t want to target anyone under 18 because it’s getting too dangerous.” Now, the fact is, the reason why they say that is because they’re not really confident how to do it. And then you look at all the fines that are coming through against a lot of the media companies. It’s again, fraught with danger.
So, the whole media brand relationship, media agency brand relationship, I don’t think is actually in a healthy position. I mean, you know better from your place in life, station in life. But we are not evolving and we’re not being smart and we’re trying to talk to these people in the same way. This generation, the way we talk to every other generation, and it just doesn’t work.
And we know how valuable they are as you know; I even saw the other day a stat that said of prestige BMWs, 30% of a household’s decision to buy an X Series 1, 3, whatever is based on the teen in the house.
Darren:
Right. Yeah. And look, that’s the influence that they have. The interesting part for me is that we’ve seen examples particularly with the X, formerly Twitter platform, where a group of marketers got together under the WFA and set up a group GARM, ban advertising or band expenditure with X and X, then taking legal action against them.
GARM was closed down. I read that Unilever, which was one of the companies behind that has recently been dropped from the X lawsuit because they’re back advertising again on X.
It shows you, first of all, the power that these platforms have and their willingness in some cases that when push comes to shove, they’ll push very hard against advertisers. But also, that collecting and acting as a cohort, as a cartel is actually also dangerous.
I think advertisers have the right to decide where they want to invest their media money, and their agencies are big influences in that.
Will:
There’s also the rebates.
Darren:
Yeah. Also, the rebates. But that advertisers do need to make these decisions about supporting platforms that are particularly not reflective of the values and the behaviors that they hold as part of their value.
Will:
Look, absolutely, and I’ve been bang on about this for a long time, but it doesn’t actually go very far. Because if you look at the way the media agencies make their money, they have to deal with the bigger publishers. If you are a niche publisher, you don’t ever get above the precipice.
You’re not worth enough money to a media agency to worth their while to talk to you. It doesn’t matter how clever your product is or how safe it is, they’ve got to go with the big guys.
So, you think about all the pressure on the media agencies, they’ve had their fees cut, they’ve had to lose staff. So now you’ve got people in there that are more junior that have to do sort of the job of two people. They don’t have the time to start to look for the niche, the smart, the clever.
They just want to make sure they keep their jobs. So, it’s easier to put Meta on a schedule than it is to put on a niche operator, and they’re never going to lose their job over that. Whereas they could potentially lose their job over going down niche.
The fact is it’s not delivering enough money for the media agency in terms of the way that revenue, well, rebate system works. Yeah. So, the system isn’t geared for innovation and the system isn’t geared, ironically for safety.
So, when you do start thinking about what does change, I mean, things that change is when there starts to be big sort of litigation coming through. And we saw not long ago the a number of the American sort of magazines, newspapers go in the bandwagon. Economist was one of them. But there were a number of others.
And the journalists started looking at roadblocks and looking at what the issues were there. Now there were a number of, again, these articles come out and they get a bit damaging. And they’re not particularly quite correct, but again, they’re trying to peddle a story that makes it more sensational.
But I had in my wisdom, called one of my clients to say, “Look you’re a big investor in Roblox. Rather than you simply cut your spend on Roblox as a result of these sort of articles, why don’t we get in place a number of policies that show that we’re on the front foot and that we’re actually progressive and that we’ve got this stuff, and that no one should be questioning our brand’s integrity.”
And their view was, “Look, thank you Will, that’s a nice idea, but let’s get back to you if we want to take this any further.” So, there’s this apathy in the system, whether it be from marketers, and they really don’t know how their media works. The media agencies, they’ve got their own agenda. And I’ve got to say no one’s any of the wiser. So, yeah.
Darren:
Because there’s two sides to this coin, isn’t there? There’s those advertisers who have children, for instance, as their target audience. And that could be anything from games and toys, Lego and the like. Through to the advertisers who specifically because of their category have to avoid advertising to children.
And that’s the difficulty, isn’t it? That these environments that they’re choosing, while they all say they’re specifically targeted, we’ve seen examples recently that the data that these social media platforms and tech platforms have is largely worthless because in many cases it’s rubbish.
There was a example of one person accessed their Google profile data and they could have been a hundred different people based on the data that was held on them. So, it makes it very difficult.
I can understand from a marketer’s perspective, it could be just in the two hard baskets. And when you’ve got an agency that you’re paying potentially millions of dollars to, to invest hundreds of millions of dollars on your behalf, you’ll take their word for it, they’re doing everything they can.
Will:
Keep it safe. Yeah. I mean, keep it safe in the fact that I know that if you are an alcohol company, you’ll probably actually set your age parameters as over 25. Because you’re so worried about going under 18.
But if you think about the audience of who’s really drinking your booze, whether it be the seltzers or the beers or whatever else, it’s going to be kids at uni basically. But yet you don’t talk to them. So, here we are, we can vote at the age of 14, but yet we can’t actually get served an ad until we’re 25.
Darren:
Isn’t it 18?
Will:
You’re going to start at 14. You can actually get on the electoral roll.
Darren:
Wow.
Will:
So, it’s all these sort of madness. But the thing that I always think for brands is forget the fact they’re brands. The marketers or the c-suite that run them, they’ve got children, they know when they go to the supermarket, if they bring home the wrong brand, they’ve got to get attacked.
And yet at the same time, they will actually say, these policies are important for child safety, and yet it actually hurts their business longer-term. So, we also know too, that brand loyalty, which is really, really interesting, happens at a very, very young age.
And our child psychologist had actually sort of created a really surprising, quite a frightening sort of document around the fact that it does start as early as sort of two, three years of age, really, really sweet spot, meaningful around this sort of life and life of firsts around sort of 13.
And if you don’t get these kids at that stage, you lose forever. So, everyone has their Dave, we can continually put our head in the sand as brands and say, we won’t go under 18, or we won’t come to 25, but it will impact their bottom line.
And eventually they should be talking to businesses. And there’s a lot of them out there that are very smart about how you can really guarantee age appropriation as opposed to going underage.
Darren:
Now, throughout our conversation, across the two episodes, it’s been very clear that the perspective is that this is not banning or prohibiting, but educating is probably our strongest defense. To protect children and teens, we need to inform them, and we need to support them in the decisions that they make and to minimize the harm as much as possible. So, education’s great.
Here’s the issue. I’d be really interested to understand the role that all of these different stakeholders; parents, government, tech platforms, and advertisers can potentially play in that process, either by delivering the education, or more importantly funding it. Because that’s always an issue, is where the money’s coming from.
Will:
Yeah. Well, the thing that we know with government, and again, we can always default to government as the proxy to make change, but it’s too slow. And we know that corporate tends to be the one that is the fastest. They’re the ones that have their finger on the pulse of research.
They know what their audiences are doing, how they’re consuming, and they are then going out there innovative ways. It could be within gaming channels or whatever else of how they best engage.
But mostly, how do they provide a utility to that I guess that person, that target audience as opposed to not. And if you even think about the way advertising has changed over the years from the last sort of 20 plus years, it’s not about somebody putting a big sort of feel-good advertisement out there. It’s about actually serving a purpose. It’s about giving something that’s relevant at a right point in time so that someone actually does go, “Right, I’m on board.”
So, first of all, I think the brands that are getting it right are doing that, and they are investing in ways within environments like gaming that is providing utility that kids may not even know about. And that could be around games that are running about problem solving or critical thinking. We mentioned this the other day.
So, there’s lots of great paths to market that brands can curate that actually have a really big impact. And it could even be the funding of games around the ADHD, which we mentioned. There’s lots of opportunities now coming through the U.S. and through game developers about helping kids get off their meds.
So, again, a great thing how you help kids socialize. I know that they were talking about if we are banning social media, is there something that maybe the education system can create that is an app that is within a closed environment that still enables kids to communicate?
So, I think what happens when we get forced, and it’s this sort of pendulum of life really, is that when you get forced into a position or into a corner, you do find a way of coming out of it to the best of your ability.
And I think brands, yes, there is a way they can lean in and infuse within their communication, a framework that is about digital wellbeing. It is about I guess providing utility to kids as opposed to simply just going out there and doing anything.
And you’ve got a lot of brands that they’ve got their own mandates and whatever else, they just the way they do go to market. But from the parent perspective, I think the parents are just too hands off. And even, as we did speak the other day, you have parents simply saying, “Look, if you can’t get on with your phone, use mine.”
So, we’ve got to start drawing, I guess, boundaries. And we’ve got to start being true to those boundaries and walking the talk as opposed to talking. And I think at this point in time, we do too much talking. We do too much sort of politicizing, we do too much sort of nodding to what should be right.
But no one actually does much about it. And I mean, brands aren’t doing it, really. Media agencies aren’t doing it, or creative agencies, and I don’t think parents are.
Now, what does it take to break the back of the camel? Something pretty nasty, unfortunately. I wish we didn’t have to go down that path, but the fact is until we do, I think people aren’t going to wake up. And that’s the travesty of it all.
Darren:
There has to be a role law for government in going back to this idea of a social license or what was it called? The sort of giving them guidelines of what’s expected of them, to take the duty of care, but to take some responsibility to actually invest some of those profits back into either building or providing resources for parents, you know?
Will:
Yeah. Absolutely. The government, I think, is good at this because well, they have to be, and I think it’s also one of the easiest paths for them to activate across.
So, duty of care is all about the education as it is about arming parents with the tools to understand what is happening. Because we do know that kids do not share with their parents. I mean, they like to sort of keep this to themselves. This is their last bastion of freedom.
So, why on earth would you want to share that with your parent? Now, it’s a difficult one, but I understand it completely. So, when we start thinking about that we need then parents to have more confidence to then say to their kids, “Look, I just saw this the other day that I thought was super interesting. What’s your take on it?”
Like, bring them into the conversation. We spend more time trying to sort of tell them what to do. And it’s really easy if you show anyone respect, especially your children bring them into the conversation and say, “Look, this is, this is our challenge as a family, not just yours. And how do we do it? How do we then help your friends do the same thing and get the parents together?”
And that sounds like it’s sort of a little bit of a kumbaya scenario, but it can be done in a way that’s very effective, very efficient.
I know the school system coming to this next year particularly off the back of what Peter Malinauskas is proposing, is putting a lot of education into schools, a lot of literature to start to help parents understand what they’re up against and then how they then start to embrace their child or children and friends of what to do on social. But remember too, social can be really good.
Darren:
That’s right.
Will:
That’s everything in life. We’ve just got to start to be a bit sensible and not knee jerk. And I think also too, rather than not look at it, shine a light on it. And I know that one of the biggest challenges that happens for businesses in the pedophile space is that it is such an abhorrent thought for most of us, that that happens. That you don’t want to actually look at it. It’s too confronting, so you ignore it.
Now and that goes back to when we were younger, all the sort of the roadkill driving campaigns that the government would put out or in the cigarette packets by showing bleeding lungs and all this ugliness, it’s just so horrific. You actually shut it out.
So, we’ve got to stop shutting this out, and we’ve got to actually put it front and center of all of us as, as a family and as a community, and really understand to what level is it breaking us as a community or to what level is it helping us? And that sets is it right for what even AI is doing, it’s a common sense approach of us helping our sovereignty as humans.
Darren:
Well, it’s not going away, is it? We’re not going to see technology disappear. AI is not going to shut down tomorrow, social media platforms and messaging apps are not going to disappear. There’s going to be more and more of them.
So, what you’re saying is that while laws and legislation can be a baseline of acceptability and behavior, it actually requires communication, education, really building this generation to be able to thrive within that, to take the best of it, and to minimize the worst.
Will:
Absolutely. And that’s where I believe the brands have a key role because they can move fast. Government, unfortunately, just through the nature of government is slow. But again, even on that level, it starts at home with all of us.
Darren:
Well, look, I think we might leave it there. I’m feeling equally sort of inspired and a bit depressed, but-
Will:
That sounds like most of my friends at my dinner parties. No, no. It’s a tough one. It is complicated, Darren, and there is no easy fix. I think we have to again, stop listening to the noise and actually focus on what we’re doing at home. And then, let us all get-
Darren:
So, then the role beyond the home is to create support mechanisms, resources and things to actually — because parents are stressed, with work and life generally. But supporting that has to be a big part. And that’s, as you say, where brands, government and even the technology platforms could find a big opportunity to be seen more as a friend than the enemy in all of this.
Will:
And I think the other principle too is stop talking and walk the talk. I hear it so much from the brands and the media agencies is it’s just becoming, again, white noise.
Darren:
Yeah. Well, Will Anstee, thank you very much. The onlinesafetyagency.com has got some terrific resources for anyone out there that’s interested in finding out more. But Will, thanks very much.
Will:
Thanks Darren. And please anyone reach out to me directly. Love to hear from you.
