‘Any young person is vulnerable’: Leitrim professor warns of growing dangers online

The world children live in is increasingly far from the one their parents grew up in. Children today have a world of information at their fingertips but also face the dangers posed by AI, brain-hacking social media algorithms, and Deepfakes.

Carrick on Shannon woman, Dr Louise Heeran Flynn, is an Assistant Professor in Teacher Education in the School of Education at Trinity College Dublin, and works on designing policy documents for the European Union on how to protect children from these dangers.

The Carrick Native co-authored a policy document given to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in July, advising on legislation to protect children online.

A new world - a scary world

With literally billions of hours of content accessible online, the world is just a few taps away - the best and worst of it.

From their formative years right through adolescence, young people’s interactions with the online world can affect them tremendously.

A misuse of social media is linked with lower attention spans, exacerbating mental health issues and fostering negative behaviours including self-harm, self-radicalisation, sexual exploitation, and dangerous activities.

Nationally and internationally, there is a lot of attention on social media bans at the moment; however, for Dr Heeran-Flynn, these bans may be politically popular, but scientifically they are weak.

She feels that there needs to be a more holistic education-first approach to preparing children to deal with these dangers.​

Education

As part of her role in Trinity College Dublin, Dr Heeran-Flynn works on training student teachers to deal with that very problem.

Teacher education is a powerful “non-legislative weapon” to equip children with the tools to deal with the online world, according to Dr Flynn.

“Digital literacy, including disinformation, media, AI literacy, digital wellbeing- all of those things- we have to embed them into our pre-teacher training,” she said.

“We also have to make sure that we have mechanisms that allow for updates, because we know we have to keep pace.”

Teachers report that confidence in their ability to teach digital literacy skills to students drops the longer they are in the classroom.

The notion that young teachers should know how to deal with these technologies just because they are “digital natives” is a dangerous fallacy, according to Dr Heeran-Flynn.

“I think it’s really important that we understand that we have to ensure that our student teachers are equipped and don’t make assumptions that they implicitly know something because that isn’t always the case.”

Moreover, often young teachers themselves need to learn to navigate the new digital landscape as well as their students. Teachers can

“We’re certainly seeing that they have to learn not just to teach digital education, but they also have to learn how to manage their own digital wellbeing, their own digital reputation.“

A whole ecosystem

Though she believes that teachers must be equipped to prepare children, they need to be part of “a whole systems approach to children’s safety” where governments, parents, and teachers work together to keep children safe.

That said, Dr Heeran-Flynn feels that the primary responsibility falls on social media providers who are designing platforms with the goal of maximising engagement and attention in mind.

“We have to remember that these are business models of the platforms. So their design choices are, in most cases, not accidental or incidental.”

Engagement-maximising platforms have predominantly negative effects on adolescents and can lead to self-harming activities, radicalisation, and sexual exploitation.

“Any young person is vulnerable, but I should say that any young person or adult with pre-existing or well-being issues are particularly vulnerable.”

High-profile cases over the summer brought this issue to the fore as several groups of teenagers drove down motorways in the wrong direction, reportedly on the back of a TikTok trend, which led to the deaths of five young boys in Kildare.

Dr Heeran-Flynn says platforms need to proactively detect and suppress content that seems illegal or presenting life-threatening content.

“They have to reduce things like the rewards associated with such kind of behaviour, because we know that this is intersecting at a time where for adolescents, they are looking for attention, they are looking for social status, and they’re looking for followers.”

“Providers have to look at preventing and disabling and taking down such videos more swiftly, disabling the visibility of such videos, absolutely preventing them from coming up in trending sections.”

​Lawsuits

A number of cases against social media companies over the last year in the US have resulted in companies having to issue major payments for failing to protect young users, including last month, Meta agreeing to a reported settlement of $17 billion after it was proven that they knowingly designed social platforms to addict children in a way that then caused harm.

Given the EU’s stronger consumer protection laws, Dr Heeran-Flynn believes that similar cases against social media giants could be down the road in Europe.

“The burden of proof should be on them to prove that their platforms are safe, rather than on regulators to prove that they’re not, and that should be done before they get access to anyone’s children and the commodity that they now see childhood to be and attention to be.”