Vision: Smart Prevention

If you ask me, I think we must be able to develop a prevention strategy similar to the one we know from physical space. This means, for example, that we prepare children for road traffic in such a way that we say parents teach them traffic skills: look left, look right, do not get into the car with strangers, do not cross the road at red lights. We have schools that pick up on this: the police come, bicycle driving licences. But what’s the point of telling them “don’t cross the road at red” or better “cross the road at green” if there is no rule in return that prevents a driver from driving at red. But is it the rule? No, everyone crosses the road at red sometimes and everyone drives too fast sometimes. It is the enforcement of the rule and at the same time we have to have rules at all. Like sidewalks, like visible police, like traffic lights. These mechanisms, which are interlocked, also protect children whose parents have little interest in them. And this is exactly the point that I miss in the digital space. In the digital space, I actually lack a fundamental answer on how to protect children whose parents and also school do not teach them media competence, but who are nevertheless moving in the digital space. And for this we actually need a structure similar to that of the traffic system. That clearly means media literate parents, whether they do it or not. Schools that take this up, police that come. But at the same time we need something like red traffic lights or sidewalks, because in road traffic it is like this: even a child who is not competent but walks on the sidewalk has a low probability of being hit by a car.

There are no such digital sidewalks on the Internet. This could be done, for example, by carrying out age verification for children in the programme they use. And then, of course, we also need something like a visible police presence on the Internet to enforce these rules and to do so as a constitutional state and not, for example, leave it up to the operators alone. But of course the operators also have their responsibility, for example by using certified moderators in their chats. I believe that we need this strategy, this structure, to create a kind of digital general prevention, where children are effectively protected beyond the issue of media literacy. But I do not yet see this strategy being coordinated between ministries, for example.

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