Happy Human Rights Day 2019!

The final report from the 14th Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has been released, and it carries important conclusions such as this one:

With so many children making use of the Internet – 1 in 3 Internet users in the developed world, and 1 in 2 globally, are children – the main issue surrounding children’s rights in the digital age is how to interpret and uphold such rights, which are enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This Convention, promoted by President Ronald Reagan and signed by the U.S. in 1989, now is the most-signed human rights legislation in the world. There is just one country in the world refusing ratification.

America.

The refusal to sign the Convention is based on a false concept of sovereignty.

This false concept is implicated in the mass incarceration of children separated from their parents by America, disgraceful exposure of networks conspiring against women and children such as Epstein and Governor Bevin, as well extremist religious groups funding a minority of politicians being allowed to deny all American children the rights they would get anywhere else in the world.

Just for comparison to other nations in the world, America’s top two causes of death of children are cars and guns, which tend to be propagated by extremists as symbols of American sovereignty.

Motor vehicle crashes caused the death of 4,074 children in 2016. That’s more than 80 kids per state. “Motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, representing 20% of all deaths; firearm-related injuries were the second leading cause of death, responsible for 15% of deaths.” As you can see, #2 on the list is guns — no surprise considering we are bombarded weekly with news of random senseless deaths from revolvers to machine guns. Firearms caused the death of 3,143 children in 2016.

Abuse of children and murder with cars literally are so ingrained in the American power psyche they are being pardoned just this month by politicians.

The question becomes simply whether an honest campaign like the famous “Stop The Child Murder“, which dramatically improved quality of life in Holland, would ever work in America.

With cars came carnage. In 1971 alone, thirty-three hundred people—including more than four hundred children—were killed on Dutch roads. A number of organizations, including a group named Stop de Kindermoord, or Stop the Child Murder, began agitating to take the streets back from automobiles.

Forty years later America is still busy pardoning those who abuse and kill…so when will it wake up to reduce these top causes of physical death from the past age?

Other countries clearly have proven much better paths forward. What likelihood is there for America to catch up and sign the Convention to become at least a follower in child safety for the emerging digital age? Or could it even leap-frog and jump into a leadership role? One thing is certain: the current U.S. stance on rights is regressive relative to the world.

A researcher in America has posed a theory that children distrust technology because it is presented in an unfamiliar format to them:

Danovitch’s theory as to why kids behave this way is that the idea of voice assistants—and by extension, the internet—is amorphous and hard to grasp. If you’re a child who thinks there’s a tiny woman who lives in the kitchen called Alexa (as Danovitch says her son did), you’re trying to wrap your head not only around how this thing works but what its knowledge base is in the first place. Trusting another person, on the other hand, is hardwired into our brains.

It seems obvious that other countries, cultures, societies would help illuminate human reasons for distrust of technology. I wonder why only American children were studied. A call-out to “her son did” suggests the researcher may be operating with an extremely narrow scale of inward-looking human observation, rather than outward to help others in far more diverse situations.

Also the conclusion begs the question of how early an introduction to technology would achieve “hardwired” status for this researcher.

I’m skeptical of that hardwired theory. Moreover I’m skeptical that the issues observed are about trust that comes from familiarity as much as it is about social training in playfulness and boundaries of authority. Look at how the same researcher describes a teacher as a counterexample to technology:

Turns out kids overwhelmingly trust a teacher—even if the teacher is wrong. That makes sense: they know their teacher, and that teacher has developed a strong relationship with them. But the kids preferred their peers over the internet, too, even though they knew their friends had roughly the same amount of knowledge as they did.

A teacher typically gets presented to the children as someone who will penalize them if there is distrust.

In other words the cost of distrust in a teacher is a bad grade or even detention. The cost of distrust in peers is exclusion or social exodus. What’s the cost of disagreeing with a toy? Knowing something, as in being familiar, probably isn’t the trigger of trust as much as knowing the boundary of authorization to play and push back.

Another way of looking at this is children reflect active trends in society earlier than adults may recognize them. We of course see this in terms of clothing and music.

So if adults are giving off signals that technology is not to be trusted (as we should, for example because Amazon has serious and repeated ethics failures) then children will take that position much more readily (as they should, for example because they don’t have a history of trust to get in their way).

Studies do show that globally trust is declining in American technology companies because they get caught harming society.

The Trust Barometer survey revealed 61 percent of people in developed markets, believe technology companies have too much power to determine what news and information we see, and only 39 percent of respondents in developed markets believe tech is putting the welfare of its customers ahead of profits.

The researcher should be asking children whether they think the technology is working in that child’s best interest, or in the best interest of all children. And then ask them if they think there is any penalty for distrusting or disagreeing with the technology.