“Get out of my feed!”: Child-centered strategies to enhance well-being and agency on social media

  • Panel
  • Orangerie
  • Thursday 21.05 — 11:50 - 13:05

Organising Institution

University of Lausanne

Switzerland

The Legal Design & Code Lab at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) is on a mission to advance interdisciplinary research, legal innovation, and public interest technology to strengthen access to justice, AI and platform governance, and citizen empowerment. We leverage integrated and interdisciplinary approaches to ensure that automation, data use, and algorithmic systems serve the public good. We are an inherently interdisciplinary research hub that brings together scholars and practitioners interested in the intersection of law, technology, and design. Within our research and community activities, we aim to foster collaborations both within UNIL and with external partners.
  • Academic 1
  • Business 2
  • Policy 3
The continuous and deepening integration of generative AI and pervasive social media platforms is fundamentally reshaping children’s digital experiences. While these technologies offer opportunities for connection and learning, they simultaneously heighten the persistent challenge of exposure to harmful content, ranging from misleading information to unsolicited sexual contacts to hate speech. While the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) introduces stricter regulatory measures, including trusted flagger mechanisms for content removal, a significant gap remains: how to provide immediate, contextual support that is connected to a child's real-world social network. In this panel, we investigate child-centered strategies that move beyond mere restriction, through stricter age verification and prevention, and through increased content moderation provided by platforms, to actively promote children’s agency and well-being in the digital sphere.

Questions to be answered

  1. What evidence do we have about child-centered strategies and how they worked towards enhancing children’s agency and well-being?
  2. How can techno-legal tools that combine technical mechanisms and legal concepts enhance educators’ ability to provide child-centered support?
  3. How can mandating customizable user interfaces create a truly child-centered digital market that empowers children’s agency and digital self-control?
  4. What is the role of institutions in supporting the academic and civil society movements, and how can we ensure adaptive regulatory strategies for the future?

Moderator

Aurelia Tamo-Larrieux

University of Lausanne - Switzerland

Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux is an Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), Faculty of Law, heading the team of Digital and Computational Law and leading the Legal Design & Code Lab. She is also a lecturer at EPFL, teaching Law and Computation to engineers and computer scientists.

Speaker

Ulrik Lyngs

Oxford University - International

Dr Ulrik Lyngs is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and co-founder of the Reduce Digital Distraction Project (redd-project.org), which since 2019 has helped over 2000 students and staff in higher education control their time and attention on smartphones and laptops. The project has won multiple awards, including Oxford University’s 2024 MPLS Early Career Research Impact Award. Dr Lyngs serves as research representative on Denmark’s Media Council for Children and Youth and is also a visiting researcher at the University of Copenhagen.