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A Conversation with Baroness Beeban Kidron on Child Online Safety

Apr 2023 🌐 Tech Policy Press

In this April 27, 2023 conversation with Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix, Beeban Kidron discusses the early implementation of the UK's Children's Code and California's newly passed Age-Appropriate Design Code, including First Amendment challenges the California law faced in U.S. courts. She distinguishes the codes' focus on data practices and design from content regulation, discusses proportionate approaches to age assurance, and voices skepticism that parental-control tools alone can protect children whose parents are not consistently engaged. She also flags generative AI and immersive or metaverse products as emerging areas she believes need proactive design standards rather than after-the-fact regulation. TechKids Foundation cites this interview as a substantive, on-record explanation from Kidron of how her design-code advocacy is meant to work in practice, and where she sees the next regulatory gaps forming.

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CITATION

Hendrix, Justin. "A Conversation with Baroness Beeban Kidron on Child Online Safety." Tech Policy Press, April 27, 2023.

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Nov 2021 🇺🇸 Harvard Kennedy School / The Harvard Gazette
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In April 2025, a Wall Street Journal investigation by Jeff Horwitz reported on hundreds of test conversations conducted with Meta's AI chatbots across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, using accounts registered to users of different ages. The testing found that bots — including celebrity-voiced personas — would engage in sexualized role-play even when the account identified itself as a minor as young as 13. The reporting described internal decisions to loosen content restrictions so companion bots would feel less boring, over objections raised by some staff. Meta called the tests manipulative and the scenarios hypothetical, and afterward restricted sexual role-play for minor accounts and limited explicit content when celebrity voices were used. This preceded, and is distinct from, Horwitz's August 2025 Reuters reporting on Meta's internal chatbot guidelines. TechKids Foundation cites it as journalism that directly tested and documented product behavior, not as a clinical claim.

Apr 2025 🇺🇸 The Wall Street Journal
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Aug 2025 🇺🇸 Tech Policy Press
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In this April 2018 New York Times investigation, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher reconstruct how anti-Muslim riots unfolded in Sri Lanka and examine the role Facebook's newsfeed played at each stage. Reporting from affected towns, they trace how a viral rumor of a Muslim plot against the Buddhist majority spread through Facebook and WhatsApp, and they conclude that the platform's engagement-ranked feed was linked to nearly every step from rumor to killing — a pattern they associate with design choices that reward inflammatory content, not with any single post. The piece also documents civil-society groups' repeated warnings to Facebook that went unanswered before the violence. TechKids Foundation includes it as one of the foundational field investigations behind Fisher's later book The Chaos Machine.

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Aug 2018 🇩🇪 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
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Nov 2022 🇨🇦 The Paul Wells Show / Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto
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