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Tag: monitor
Fewer than 1% of parents use social media tools to monitor their children’s accounts, tech companies say
Most parents whose children are on tech platforms such as Snapchat and Discord aren’t using parenting tools the companies designed for them, despite rising concerns around online child safety.
Data shared by Discord and Snapchat, both tech platforms favored by teenagers, after the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January on online child safety shows staggeringly low rates of adoption of platform-provided tools for parents to monitor their children’s social media activity.
On both platforms, fewer than 1% of minors have parents who use tools to monitor them.
During the congressional hearings, the CEOs of some of the biggest social media companies were grilled about the issue of child sexual exploitation on their platforms. Written follow-up questions from various senators were then submitted to each platform, and those platforms sent their responses to the Judiciary Committee in late March.
In their lengthy responses, Discord and Snapchat disclosed how many parents are using their parenting tools. X does not have parenting tools, while TikTok and Meta did not provide detailed data about the use of their parenting tools.
Discord CEO Jason Citron noted that out of more than 150 million global users — with approximately 2.7 million monthly active users under age 18 in the U.S. alone — only 15,000 parents are connected to 15,500 children’s accounts through the Discord Family Center. That means less than 1% of underage Discord users have a parent monitoring their account with the platform’s tools.
Most of the social media platforms called in front of Congress have resources called “parent centers” or “family centers.” These digital centers offer guides and tools to help parents monitor and even control the ability of their children to access certain content or features within each platform. The tools involve syncing a parent’s account with their child’s account. The only platform that doesn’t offer parent-child account syncing is X, formerly called Twitter.
Discord launched its family center in the summer of 2023, soon after NBC News reported an “explosive growth” in child sexual exploitation cases involving the platform. The family center, according to the Senate documents, allows parents to receive insights about the Discord communities and servers that their teen children have joined, the online friends they’ve chatted with on the platform and the amount of time their children spend on it weekly.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel wrote that, out of 60 million global daily active users under the age of 18, only 200,000 parents are linked to 400,000 teens’ accounts using Snapchat’s family center. That’s slightly better than Discord’s rate of adoption, but still less than 1% of underage Snapchat users are being monitored by their parents with Snapchat’s tools.
Similar to Discord’s family center, the Snapchat family center allows parents to view and manage how their children are using the platform on a weekly basis, including whether and if they can chat with Snapchat’s “My AI” artificial intelligence chatbot.
Parent and family centers have been some of the favored solutions of social media platforms to escalating concerns about child safety. Many lawmakers and parents have pushed for harder regulation of social media platforms that would force the companies to limit capabilities for minors or set default settings for minors as more restrictive. Despite the existence of parental control tools, parents have complained that children can oftentimes sidestep or circumnavigate them.
UN given green light to monitor peace deal between Colombia’s government and its largest rebel group
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The Security Council on Wednesday unanimously authorized the U.N. political mission in Colombia to help verify implementation of a cease-fire agreement between the government and the country’s largest remaining guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army.
The council also expressed willingness to do the same if a cease-fire is reached with another armed group, the Estado Mayor Central.
The U.N. has been monitoring a 2016 peace accord between the government and Colombia’s then largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. It ended more than 50 years of war in which over 220,000 people died and nearly 6 million people were displaced.
More than 14,000 FARC fighters gave up their weapons under that agreement, but violence between some rebel groups has grown in parts of Colombia.
Colombia’s government asked the council to extend the U.N. mission’s verification mandate to include the June cease-fire deal with the National Liberation Army. The rebel group was founded in the 1960s by union leaders, students and priests inspired by the Cuban revolution.
The Security Council said the agreement “should contribute to improving the humanitarian situation in conflict-affected areas,” and it encouraged the government and the National Liberation Army “to continue strengthening the protection of civilians in accordance with international humanitarian law.”
The U.N. political mission, whose year-long mandate expires Oct. 31, has an authorized strength of 120 observers. The resolution authorizes up to 68 additional observers and an “appropriate civilian component” to take on the additional job of verifying the cease-fire with the National Liberation Army.
The council expressed willingness to consider another expansion of the U.N. mission’s mandate if a cease-fire is agreed is reached by Colombia’s government and the Estado Mayor Central armed group. The group is led by former FARC commanders who refused to join the 2016 peace deal.
Colombia’s government has ordered its military to cease attacks on several armed groups in the country Dec. 31, as part of an effort to start simultaneous peace talks with different groups.
Britain’s political coordinator, Fergus Eckersley, whose country sponsored the resolution, told the council after the vote that its unanimous adoption “demonstrates the continued commitment of the Security Council to peace in Colombia.”
Deputy Russian ambassador Dmitry Polyansky said the resolution was timely, coming just before the cease-fire agreement between the government and the National Liberation Army fully enters into force.
Brazilian Ambassador Sérgio França Danese said the U.N. mission can play “a particularly important role” in supporting a national dialogue in Colombia on the benefits of peace and on helping to implement the cease-fires.
Israeli high-tech investment plummets in first half of 2023, industry monitor says
JERUSALEM (AP) — Investment in Israeli technology startups plummeted in the first half of 2023, an Israeli tech industry monitor said Tuesday, citing the government’s divisive judicial overhaul plan as a main driver of the downturn.
Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit organization that tracks and engages with Israel’s technology industry, said that it had seen a 29% decrease in private funding in Israeli tech in the first half of 2023 compared to the second half of 2022, and a steep drop in investor participation. Initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions also hit a five-year low, it said.
The organization said that uncertainty in Israel because of the judicial overhaul “is already being felt with indicators such as decreased fundraising and fewer emerging Israeli startups.”
Yaniv Lotan, a vice president at Start-Up Nation Central, said the correlation between the judicial overhaul and investor hesitancy is clear. He said that while technology investment has stabilized in the U.S. and globally over the past year, over the same period “here in the Israeli high-tech market, we are experiencing a continued downward trend.”
Israel’s high-tech sector is a major engine of the country’s economy, making up half of the country’s exports. It employs tens of thousands and its startup companies have drawn billions of dollars in investment in recent decades.
“In the end, markets don’t like uncertainty,” Lotan said.
The report was released a week after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies passed a law that weakens the Supreme Court’s oversight of government decisions, a key part of the government’s proposed judicial overhaul.
Since the plan was announced in January, Israel has been gripped with weekly mass protests, including from the tech industry itself, which warned that the overhaul would take a toll on its work. The plan has also drawn consternation from the White House and American Jewish organizations.
Opponents to the judicial overhaul have cautioned that changes to the system of government could impel the country’s economy.
Recent weeks have seen international credit agencies warn about greater financial risk in Israel because of the Netanyahu government’s planned overhaul and the deep division it has caused.
Netanyahu and his allies say the changes are necessarily to curb what they say is an overly activist court and its unelected judges. Critics of the plan say that if passed, they will erode the system of checks and balances between branches of government and lead Israel toward autocracy.
Netanyahu took office in December at the head of the most ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox government in Israel’s history following the country’s fifth election in under four years. Each of those parliamentary elections were largely seen as referendums on the longtime leader’s fitness to serve while on trial for corruption.