You have learned about young people's rights online and about who is meant to protect them, including the platforms. Today you will look at the companies that build the apps and sites you use. You will look at the design choices they make, the rules they have to follow, and how reporting harm is supposed to work when something goes wrong. Then you will decide whether common features mainly help you or work against you.
Every feature on the apps you use is a choice someone made. That includes the next clip starting by itself, notifications, infinite scroll (a feed that never ends) and targeted ads (ads picked for you using information about you).
Digital technology companies have three jobs at once:
- Design: they decide how the app works and what it nudges you to do.
- Regulation: they must follow rules. In Ireland, the government makes rules about online safety and about how your personal data is used, and checks that companies keep them.
- Safety reporting: they must let you report harm and then act on it.
Think of one feature you notice every day.
Each card below describes a real effect of a common feature. No card tells you which box it belongs in, so you have to decide and be ready to explain why.
- Your teacher reads the first card aloud. Talk it over with a partner and decide whether it mainly benefits the user or can mainly work against the user.
- Before the card can stay in a box, someone finishes this sentence out loud: "It goes here because…" If you can, say who benefits: the user, the company, or both.
- Then you will play Class Play, a game where everyone answers on their own device. You sort all six cards, starting with the one you just did together.
Design features: help or hinder?
Now everyone sorts all six cards on their own device, starting with the card you just did together.
You can change your answer until the time is up. You also choose how sure you are: just checking, fairly sure or certain. The surer you say you are, the more points you win if you are right, and the more you lose if you are wrong.
Each card describes one effect, so each card has one box that fits it best. When the round closes, the board shows how the class split and the right box, and your teacher asks why.
Your table scores when you get it right together, so you can talk it through quietly first.
Class Play
Work with a partner, and then share with the class. First, read this invented situation together.
Jordan, 14, keeps getting private messages from an account they do not know. The messages turn nasty after Jordan ignores the first one. Jordan wants it to stop and does not want the account to keep finding them.
Write down the five steps you think should happen, in order, on your mini-whiteboard or page so you can read them out later. Use these five prompts to help you.
- What Jordan does first on the app or site.
- What evidence (proof of what happened) Jordan keeps, and why.
- Who Jordan tells in real life, away from the app.
- What the company is supposed to do with a report.
- One place Jordan can go next if the platform does not fix it. Pick one: a trusted adult, the school's own way of raising a concern, or making a complaint under the online-safety rules that the platform has to follow.
Be ready to read your steps to the class, and before you finish, check that you can give a reason for the order you chose.
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