Safe on Social

The person at the next table never signed up for any of it. Snap has just announced its latest Specs, they are marketed as augmented reality glasses. The website is slick and clearly focused on making them a fashion statement. With a price tag of US$2,195 they are not an impulse buy, but we have said that about a plethora of other consumer tech when first released and five minutes later there was buy now pay later options. The feature list of Specs is like someone emptied t

It is not hard to conjure up this vision in your mind, as you may have even contemplated it yourself. A complaint letter, often date-stamped as being sent late at night, when a parent may have spent the evening turning something over and over in their mind. It could be one of a million things that happened during the week prior, a phone call from the year adviser, a report comment that stung, a child who came home quiet and would not say why. Somewhere around 10pm, with the h

On Tuesday, the Government released its draft Digital Duty of Care, and with it a proposal that would let Australians switch off the algorithm. The Prime Minister has called it My Feed, My Way. I said publicly this week that algorithmic choice is the most consequential idea to enter Australian online safety policy in years, and I meant it. Then I read the draft, and the feeling I have been trying to argue myself out of for 24 hours is that, as it currently stands, this is a t

My inbox is full of the same question. Parents, principals, and wellbeing coordinators are all asking the same thing. Is this real? Could our government actually make the platforms turn the algorithm off? Here is what is on the table. Chanel Contos, who founded Teach Us Consent, used her National Press Club address to ask the federal government to make algorithmic feeds opt-in rather than opt-out. Her Fix Our Feeds campaign describes an experience that will feel familiar to a

Teaching is the only profession that requires you to front up in front of your abuser the very next morning, mark their work fairly, and keep them safe. If you know, you know. It is the morning after. You are in the driver's seat with the keys in your hand, and you have not started the car. You are not crying, not yet. You are running the words back, the ones a fifteen-year-old said in front of twenty-eight other children, and then the rest of it, the post that went up after