Human Rights, Digital Rights and AI: Children’s Online Rights

This is the second webinar in a series exploring the impacts of the digital world on human rights. It focuses on the rights of children and the importance and risks of children’s interactions online.

Children can benefit a great deal from the expansion of the digital world, particularly through greater access to educational materials and increases in social participation. This is especially the case with children in remote locations whose interactions are often enhanced through online activities.

However, there are also dangers. These include violations of privacy and other harms through corporate practices and parental oversight, disinformation/misinformation and propaganda, cyberbullying, and grooming and sexual exploitation.

In this webinar, Professor Tama Leaver will focus on the practices of social media companies and breaches of children’s right to privacy including the use of data collected, and the implications of attempts to regulate these companies. Dr Rys Farthing will address the way the digital world impacts on the rights of children in Australia and outline some of the responses in the protection of these rights both domestic and international.

SPEAKERS

Professor Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, and Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. His current research includes examining the impact of datafication and artificial intelligence on children and childhoods. He has received teaching awards from the University of Western Australia, and Curtin University, and in 2012 received a national Australian Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities and the Arts.

Dr Rys Farthing is a policy expert on children’s rights, especially around technology and disadvantage. Rys holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford where she was a Clarendon scholar, and a MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently the Director of Children’s Policy at Reset (Australia), a global think tank working to tackle digital threats to democracy.

Moderator

Noam Peleg is an Associate Professor and Director – Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of NSW. He is also a member of DTP's Board.