The Future of Online Child Safety | FAD, Disney, Spain | Matthew Griffin | Futurist Keynote Speaker

Firstly, thank you to Beatriz Padura, the General Manager of FAD Juventud, an inspiring Spanish initiative working in partnership with Disney, that works diligently to educate and inform parents and children alike about the dangers of the online world and then develop education programs and strategies to keep our children safe from harm, in all its forms, both now and in the future. And, it was a privilege to be asked to share my views, as an educator, futurist, and parent, how we protect our children from abuse and harm, and from what, to keep them mentally and physically safe and well, today and over the long term.

During my virtual sit down with Beatriz we first baselined the future and explored all manner of topics, including the future of DeepFakes and the proliferation of disinformation and misinformation on the internet, the Psyops tactics malicious actors and governments use polarise and weaponise societies at speed and scale, the rise of automated and autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots and authentic life-like Digital Humans, and much more. Then, perhaps most importantly we dove into the solutions we have at our disposal to combat these and other rapidly emerging and rising threats, the importance of strong regulations and online policing, and explored the concept of Zero Trust – in anything and everything.

While many might have heard the term Zero Trust in the cyber security industry where the concept is used to try to prevent unauthorised access to data and systems by malicious actors I also feel it’s important to apply it in the context of child safety as well, especially as we head into a future where you cannot trust anything behind a screen. And I use “behind the screen” intentionally as well, because we so often talk about keeping children “safe on the internet.” But, today we’re seeing the “traditional internet” fade into the background as it becomes augmented and replaced by what are in many regards distinctly separate environments or systems, such as game environments, like Fortnite and Roblox, messaging and social media platforms, like WeChat, Whatsapp, as well as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X, and even emerging Spatial Computing and Virtual Reality worldscapes. All of which we can say are “online” and all of which are “behind a screen” but that aren’t really “the internet” any longer.

Spanish Deepfake Version

During the chat together I discussed in detail the plethora of problems we have today when we think about defining online safety, but also educating our children about how to be safe online and how they themselves should be taught to think about their own safety. And then I looked into the future and deep future to highlight the forth coming issues that no platforms or regulators are protecting us against – yet – and that no one in wider society is generally prepared for – yet.

We discussed the importance of Zero Trust in anything and everything online – whether that is human, Digital Human, or machine, or other and whether it’s content, data, interactions, video, or other. I also discussed the importance of seeing the world from a child’s view point, the lack of technical nous that most adults actually have, and the importance that children have a circle of trusted people they can turn to for advice including their parents, relatives, teachers, and also their main go to’s - their friends. We then discussed the importance of parents actively asking their children questions about their online activities and experiences in order to try to identify issues early, the importance of children’s self-esteem, and the importance of children being able to critique, question, and query content. Then we moved onto the importance – societally – of having trustworthy sources of information and ways and systems to validate online content, the tech giants ability to break societal echo chambers which polarise our society, and much more …

Then, to add a new twist, as you can see above, while we did the original interview in English I then deepfaked and dubbed the both of us into Spanish.