Ensuring a Safe Online Environment for Youth | ATIH x Safe Online - Sept. 2024
All Tech Is Human was privileged to partner with Safe Online to produce Ensuring a Safe Online Environment for Youth, on Tuesday, September 17th in New York City. This special gathering was a fringe event for the UN’s Summit for the Future.
Attendees of this curated gathering represented a spectrum across civil society, government, industry, academia, youth leaders, and more. Individuals came from 5Rights, Action Against Child Sexual Abuse Initiative, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard Graduate School of Education, ChildFund Alliance, Clinic to End Tech Abuse @ Cornell, Cyber Collective, Design it for Us, Fairplay, Meta, Mothers Against Media Addiction, National Center for Youth Law, Naver Z, NCMEC, Pinterest, Tech Coalition, Thorn, TikTok, UN, UNICEF, USAID, World Economic Forum, World Wide Web Foundation, Yahoo, and more.
Ensuring a Safe Online Environment for Youth featured a fireside chat with Julie Inman Grant (eSafety Commissioner of Australia) and Marija Manojlovic (Executive Director of Safe Online) and a panel discussion with Julie Cordua (CEO of Thorn), Vaishnavi J. (Founder & Principal of Vyanams, former head of child safety at Meta), Anne Collier (Executive Director of The Net Safety Collaborative), and Luke Drago (Senior Advisor to Encode Justice).
To start off the evening, we had welcome remarks by David Ryan Polgar (Founder & President of All Tech Is Human), Marija Manojlovic (Executive Director of Safe Online), and Dr. Renata Dwan, Senior Global Digital Compact Advisory. After the stage activities concluded, individuals spent time networking and have table conversations with Tech Coalition, Save the Children, Google, and Thorn who were all showcasing their impact in reducing harms against youth.
The gathering happened a few days after All Tech Is Human and Thorn’s industry-leading Safety by Design principles for preventing the misuse of generative AI in furthering child sexual abuse. You can learn more about that initiative here, and read the Safety by Design white paper here. And just a few days after this gathering, the UN’s Global Digital Compact (widely discussed at the event) was approved.
Fireside Chat: Julie Inman Grant on the importance of Safety by Design
Julie Inman Grant (eSafety Commissioner of Australia) joined Marija Manojlovic (Executive Director of Safe Online) for a fireside chat about strategies for protecting children online. Manojlovic and Grant discuss…
What “Safety by Design” means and how it can be implemented in digital products designed for youth.
How Basic Online Safety Expectations are enforced as it pertains to youth safety online.
The potential impacts of proposed social media bans in youth under 16 in Australia.
Strategies for parents to engage with their children’s online lives to promote safety and well-being.
Panel Discussion: Ensuring a Safe Online Experience for Youth
How can we ensure a safe online experience for youth? Julie Cordua (CEO, Thorn), Anne Collier (Executive Director, The Net Safety Collaborative), Vaishnavi J. (Founder and Principal, Vyanams Strategies), Luke Drago (Senior Advisor, Encode Justice), and moderator by Theodora Skeadas (CEO, Tech Policy Consulting) discuss…
The primary challenges and harms youth encounter on social media platforms.
The ways AI influences and exacerbates online harms for youth.
How Trust & Safety teams protect youth and the effectiveness of their work.
Strategies for different stakeholders, including parents, companies, and regulators, to come together to promote a safer digital environment for youth.
Photos from Ensuring a Safe Online Experience for Youth
About All Tech Is Human
All Tech Is Human tackles thorny tech & society issues through collective understanding, involvement, and action. Solving complex problems requires greater knowledge-sharing and collaboration, a diversified workforce, and a cohesive Responsible Tech ecosystem capable of moving at the speed of tech. All Tech Is Human's theory of change focuses on three pillars: multistakeholder community-building, education, and careers. This leads to a more robust Responsible Tech ecosystem that is able to surface values, tensions, trade-offs, and best practices.
Founded in 2018 and first funded in 2021, All Tech Is Human is quickly building the world’s largest multistakeholder, multidisciplinary network in Responsible Tech. Highlights include:
Regular in-person gatherings in NYC, SF, DC, and London with plans to expand.
A Slack community of 10k members across 100 countries.
Responsible Tech Mentorship Program
Working groups on Trust & Safety and Youth, Tech, and Wellbeing
Upcoming courses on Trust & Safety and Youth, Tech, and Wellbeing (Jan 2025)
Read about our mission | learn about our network | see all of our projects and links
SPEAKER BIOS
REMARKS
David Ryan Polgar, Founder & President, All Tech Is Human
David founded All Tech Is Human in 2018, seeing an immense need to strengthen the nascent Responsible Tech movement and ecosystem to tackle wicked tech & society issues and co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest. The organization has become synonymous with the Responsible Tech movement, uniting thousands of individuals across the globe.
While there were ample organizations focused on building awareness around complex tech & society problems and understanding root causes, David felt there was a strong need to develop a conducive environment for knowledge-sharing and collaboration and build a strong ecosystem that welcomed more perspectives, disciplines, and lived experiences. This has since evolved in All Tech Is Human’s unique grassroots-power model to rapidly distribute power and ideas across an interconnected multistakeholder, multidisciplinary network.
Marija Manojlovic, Executive Director, Safe Online
Marija is the Executive Director of Safe Online. Overseeing a robust USD 100 million investment portfolio, she strategically channels resources into tech, capacities and research to combat digital threats to children, especially online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA). A fierce advocate, Marija ensures children's digital safety is a keystone in global policy discussions on sustainable development and frontier technologies. Before her role at Safe Online, she honed her expertise with the End Violence Global Partnership and UNICEF across diverse regions working on issues at the intersection of innovation, research, partnerships and system reform. Marija is passionate about building and working with diverse teams. In her free time, she likes to paint and listen to jazz.
Renata Dwan, Special Adviser, Office of the UN Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology, United Nations
Renata has worked on multilateral issues for over 25 years at the UN, EU and leading research institutes. As Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva (2018-2020) she led initiatives on digital technology governance and arms control. She drove major UN-wide initiatives on peacekeeping reform and support to countries emerging from conflict as Chief of Policy and Best Practices in the Department of Peace Operations. She served in UN peace operations in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and Syria, heading UN integrated teams on Afghanistan and Mali. Renata was an adviser to the Council of the European Union for the planning of its first crisis management operation (Bosnia).
As Deputy Director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, Renata oversaw the Institute’s research agenda (2020-22). Renata also served as Programme Director at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and visiting fellow at the WEU Institute (now EU Institute for Security Studies). She received her B.A, M.Phil and D.Phil in International Relations from Oxford University where she was Hedley Bull Research Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar (Princeton University, USA). Renata is an Irish national.
PANELISTS
Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner
Julie Inman Grant is Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. In this role, Julie leads the world’s first government regulatory agency committed to keeping its citizens safer online.
Julie has extensive experience in the non-profit and government sectors and spent two decades working in senior public policy and safety roles in the tech industry at Microsoft, Twitter and Adobe.
The Commissioner’s career began in Washington DC, working in the US Congress and the non-profit sector before taking on a role at Microsoft. Julie’s experience at Microsoft spanned 17 years, serving as one of the company’s first and longest-standing government relations professionals, ultimately in the role of Global Director for Safety and Privacy Policy and Outreach. At Twitter, she set up and drove the company’s policy, safety and philanthropy programs across Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.
As Commissioner, Julie plays an important global role as Chair of the Child Dignity Alliance’s Technical Working Group and as a Board Member of the WePROTECT Global Alliance. The Commissioner also serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety and on their XR Ecosystem Governance Steering Committee on Building and Defining the Metaverse. Under her leadership, eSafety has joined forces with the White House Gender Policy Council and Government of Denmark on the Global Partnership
External link for Action on Gender-Based Harassment and Abuse.
In 2021, Julie oversaw significant increases in the eSafety office’s budget, increased staffing levels and launched the global Safety by Design initiative. As Commissioner, she has led work to stand up novel and world-first regulatory regimes under the new Online Safety Act 2021, with implementation of a sweeping new set of reforms beginning on 23 January 2022. Commissioner Inman Grant was reappointed for a further 5-year term by the Australian Government in January 2022.
The Commissioner was recently named one of Australia’s most influential women by the Australian Financial Review and a leading Australian in Foreign Affairs by the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Apolitical appointed the Commissioner as one of the #Agile50, the world’s most influential leaders revolutionising government.
Julie Cordua, CEO, Thorn
Julie Cordua is CEO of Thorn, a nonprofit that builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse.
Since Julie joined the organization over a decade ago, Thorn has become a pivotal force in creating safer online environments for children, developing tools and solutions for digital platforms to help them prevent and respond to all forms of online abuse, and implementing solutions for law enforcement that have led to the identification and rescue of thousands of child victims on a global scale.
Under Julie's leadership, Thorn has built and deployed products designed to equip those on the frontlines of defending children from sexual abuse in the digital age. Thorn’s solutions are used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies globally to help drastically reduce the time it takes to find child victims; have helped content-hosting platforms identify 7 million potential CSAM files (and counting); and have equipped more than 800,000 parents with talking tips and resources they need to confidently serve as their kids’ safety net.
Thorn is a leader in tackling emerging threats such as the rise of financial sextortion, the misuse of generative AI for creating and distributing CSAM and facilitating online grooming, and other modern and evolving threats against children in the digital age. Julie leads the organization's efforts to make the internet a safer space for young people, focusing on the prevention of abuse and ending cycles of revictimization.
Julie has also fostered Thorn's collaborative, and ecosystem-wide approach, partnering with tech companies, law enforcement, parents, youth, policymakers, and other entities to develop innovative solutions to these challenges.
Before leading Thorn, Julie served as VP of Marketing/Communications at (RED) and helped establish the brand as one of the most successful cause marketing initiatives in history, working with a team to deliver more than $160 million to fight AIDS in Africa. Prior to joining (RED), she spent nearly a decade in the wireless industry. Julie holds a B.A. in Communications from UCLA and an M.B.A. from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
Julie’s vision and Thorn's impactful work are at the forefront of creating a safer online environment for children, reflecting the urgent need for solutions in an era marked by technological advances and their potential for harm.
Anne Collier, Executive Director, The Net Safety Collaborative
A writer and youth advocate, Anne Collier has been chronicling the public discussion about youth and digital media since 1997. She is founder and executive director of national nonprofit organization The Net Safety Collaborative, which runs NetFamilyNews, and piloted a social media helpline for schools in California.
Anne has served on three national task forces on youth and Internet safety, including as co-chair of the Obama administration’s Online Safety & Technology Working Group, which delivered its report to Congress, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet,” in June 2010, and the national Internet Safety Technical Task Force of 2008 at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. In 2013-’14 she served on the Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning & the Internet. In 2011 and ’12, she was a member of the curriculum working group that helped launch Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation at Harvard University and produced several papers for the Berkman Klein Center’s Kinder & Braver World Project. She also helped develop the foundation’s inaugural Youth Advisory Board.
Anne has collaborated with scholars on a number of academic publications, most recently Social Media and Youth Mental Health, published in July by the American Psychiatric Association, and “Leveraging Dignity Theory to Understand Bullying, Cyberbullying, and Children’s Rights,” led by researchers at Dublin’s Anti-Bullying Center. Books she has contributed to include Children’s Privacy and Safety (IAPP, 2022), Bullying: Perspectives, Practice and Insights (Council of Europe Publishing, 2017), Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Cyberbullying Prevention and Response: Expert Perspectives (Routledge, 2011). Since 2017, she has worked with Google on its “Be Internet Awesome” safety and citizenship curriculum for elementary students worldwide. With tech journalist Larry Magid, she co-authored MySpace Unraveled (Peachpit Press, 2006), the first parents’ guide to teen social networking, and a number of guides for parents published by ConnectSafely, which she co-founded and co-directed with Magid for nearly a decade. In addition to her industry advisory work, she serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the Advisory Board of the Young & Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University.
Vaishnavi, Founder and Principal, Vyanams Strategies (VYS)
Vaishnavi is the founder and principal of Vyanams Strategies (VYS), helping companies, civil society, and governments build healthier online communities for young people. VYS leverages extensive experience at leading technology companies to develop tactical product and policy solutions for child safety and privacy. These range from product guidance, content policies, operations workflows, trust & safety strategies, and organizational design.
An expert in online child safety, privacy, and age-appropriate design, Vaishnavi has held significant roles in the tech industry. She was the global head of youth policy at Meta, supporting age-appropriate content and product policies across Instagram, Facebook, VR, and messaging services. She previously led Twitter’s video content policies, was their first head of safety policy in APAC, and served as Google’s child safety policy lead for APAC. Vaishnavi is a recognized commentator on child safety and privacy, featured in BBC, NPR, CNN, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Rolling Stone.
Learn more about VYS’s work at www.vyanams.com, and subscribe to our monthly newsletter for insights on building healthier digital experiences for young people at https://quire.substack.com.
Luke Drago, Senior Advisor, Encode Justice
Luke is a senior advisor to Encode Justice – the world's largest youth movement for safe, beneficial AI. He is a co-author of Encode Justice's AI 2030, a globally scoped platform for AI policy action endorsed by world leaders, AI safety and ethics experts, academics, and organizations representing over 13,000 young people. He sits on the executive leadership team and the AI advisory board at Encode Justice. He is also the AI Governance Specialist at BlueDot Impact, where he designs and implements industry-leading courses on AI governance. He is part of AI & Faith's expert network. He is an alumnus of the University of Oxford, where he earned his undergraduate degree in History & Politics. He currently lives in London, and is a native Charlottean.
Panel Moderated by: Theodora (Theo) Skeadas, CEO, Tech Policy Consulting
Theodora (Theo) Skeadas is the CEO of Tech Policy Consulting, where she works on AI governance and online safety issues, including Humane Intelligence on algorithmic assessment for bias, Domelabs AI on AI in healthcare and national security, National Democratic Institute on online gender-based violence and gendered disinformation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Partnership for Countering Influence Operations on government efforts to combat disinformation in Ukraine, Partnership on AI on responsible AI, Effective Institutions Project on forecasting and philanthropy in AI, and the Committee to Protect Journalists on a journalist safety tool. Previously at Twitter, she managed the Trust and Safety Council, a research hub within the Public Policy team, and a trusted flaggers program for human rights defenders, and she supported Twitter's global civic integrity, transparency, and crisis response efforts. Before, she worked in national security at Booz Allen Hamilton, examining public sentiment, social movements, and disinformation using social media for the U.S. Federal Government. Theo serves as an Advisor to All Tech Is Human, a responsible technology nonprofit organization based in New York with a global audience and lens. She has also worked with nonprofits in Morocco, Turkey, Greece, and Costa Rica. She has an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BA from Harvard College. She has language experience in French, Modern Greek, Modern Standard Arabic, Modern Turkish, Moroccan Arabic, and Spanish.