Research group says planned social media regulation for children not backed by any data; Warns of intrusive identity-linked process

A Guyanese-led Research firm, Abrams and Associates Research, in offering an assessment on a proposal by the Government to establish a Child Online Safety and Ethical Technology Framework, is warning against a mandatory identity-linked age verification regime.

The authors of the assessment Dr Karen Abrams and Salima Bacchus-Hinds said protecting children online is an important and legitimate objective as children face genuine risks, including cyber-bullying, online exploitation, privacy violations, exposure to harmful content and digital fraud. However, they said the problem with Government’s approach lies with the proposed mandatory identity-linked age verification data, particularly at a time when data on the magnitude of the issue is lacking.

In an interview with News Source today, Dr Karen Abrams said the proposed mandatory identity-linked age verification data process would be intrusive.

“In order for them to verify where or not a 16 year old is logging into Facebook, they would essentially have to have every adult who uses Facebook from Guyana upload their IDs and either have Facebook maintain and store our IDs or have some intermediary store those IDs that are logged to the Facebook account. So, it is an intrusion into our privacy and especially one that is attempting to solve a problem that may or may not exist in our context,” Dr Abrams explained.

In her assessment with Bacchus-Hinds, Dr Abrams submitted that there is no publicly available Guyana-specific data that has been presented establishing the prevalence of social-media-related harm among Guyanese children. They said that it is not that the regulation is unwarranted, but that Guyana should first measure before it mandates.

“The fundamental issue for me is that I see it as a rapid move towards legislation and I am not entirely opposed to legislation but I believe that before legislation there should be some sort of research basis for it. So, essentially we need to have an understanding of whether this is even a problem in our context,” she said.

They submitted that to date, there has not been a comprehensive national study addressing those critical questions.

It was said that the absence of such information is not an indication that the problem is small but that the scale of the problem has not been measured.

“The first step is – commission a study, find out what percentage of our young people are actually online, find out when they are online where are they usually. I could tell you, you wouldn’t find 10 young people who are 14, 15, 16 years old, who are on Facebook, they are on TikTok or they are playing video games,” Dr Abrams said.

Further, it was submitted that Guyanese children remain digitally excluded.

“So, people may say a lot of western countries are doing this, are limiting social media for their children. Well, a lot of western countries have their children with internet access all day, they have WIFI in their home all the time, they have WIFI on their phones all the time that is not the profile of Guyanese children. Rather than an over exposure to social media, our young people have an under exposure to the internet, and this is something that is recognized by UNESCO and international partners…When I say our young people here in Guyana, we have an under exposure problem is that they do not have enough access to tools and systems and structures around the digital space and now we want to lock it down and we are locking it down at a time when they should be fluent in the digital world. Essentially, I am saying that parents should be the one to manage how these children interact online, parents give them the phones, parents give them the data, parents need to be the ones who manage that, not the government,” Dr Abrams said.

Dr Abrams and Bacchus-Hinds, in their recommendations want to see an evidence-first sequence that first establishes a baseline, assess the privacy risks, expand literacy and child-protection capacity, and a pilot programme before any nationwide verification mandate takes effect.

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

AG Chambers to release manual on Condominium Act