Reducing Online Harms via Content Regulation: Balancing the Policy and User Interests to Improve the Cybersafety of Young People

Over the past ten years, there has been a growing effort to moderate and regulate content present on online services such as commonly used social media platforms. Rather than leaving it up to individual companies and platforms to decide what stays and what goes, governments and international organisations have drafted and enforced regulations to reduce the amount of harmful content online and protect users. As a jurisdiction, the UK has joined other countries and conglomerates like Australia and the European Union in mandating that platforms reduce harmful online content introducing a suite of online safety regulations in 2019, culminating in the Online Safety Bill set for Royal Assent in Autumn 2023 set to change how platforms determine and reduce the content which poses a risk of harm online.

At the same time, there has been increasing awareness of how content seen and interacted with can harm young people and children. Various studies have highlighted how specific types of harm can be caused to young people via their online interactions and consumption of content. However, minimal work is concerned with the mundane, everyday interactions, the types of content young people are seeing and the harms they are experiencing should they pick up their phones or log onto devices as an increasing part of everyday life.

In light of new regulations being enacted with young people as a targeted user group, this project investigates the contemporary everyday interactions of young people with harmful and potentially harmful content to determine how effective new regulations being introduced in the UK will reduce the harm they come to. Based on the hypothesis that a better balance can be struck between the policy interests concerning regulation and the user interests concerning interactions online, this research centres on the regulatory developments in the United Kingdom and uses the following research question as a guide to inquiries:

To what extent will the digital duties of care as regulatory mechanisms online impact the cybersafety of young people aged 12-20 interacting with user-to-user services?

This project aims to capture their everyday experiences of online harm by engaging directly with young people as a user group. By comparing these experiences with the UK's regulations, the project aims to determine how effective the new digital duties and obligations platforms are in reducing harmful content and limiting children's negative experiences online. The anticipated impact of this project is to provide recommendations for additional regulatory guidance to the appointed online safety regulator Ofcom, addressing the gaps potentially present in the primary legislation and enhancing the understanding of the contemporary experiences of young people as they use platforms daily.

We will collaborate with over 40 partners drawn from across FMCG and Food; Creative Industries; Health and Wellbeing; Smart Mobility; Finance; Enabling technologies; and Policy, Law and Society. These will benefit from engagement with our CDT through the following established mechanisms:

- Training multi-disciplinary leaders. Our partners will benefit from being able to recruit highly skilled individuals who are able to work across technologies, methods and sectors and in multi-disciplinary teams. We will deliver at least 65 skilled PhD graduates into the Digital Economy.

- Internships. Each Horizon student undertakes at least one industry internship or exchange at an external partner. These internships have a benefit to the student in developing their appreciation of the relevance of their PhD to the external societal and industrial context, and have a benefit to the external partner through engagement with our students and their multidisciplinary skill sets combined with an ability to help innovate new ideas and approaches with minimal long-term risk. Internships are a compulsory part of our programme, taking place in the summer of the first year. We will deliver at least 65 internships with partners.

- Industry-led challenge projects. Each student participates in an industry-led group project in their second year. Our partners benefit from being able to commission focused research projects to help them answer a challenge that they could not normally fund from their core resources. We will deliver at least 15 such projects (3 a year) throughout the lifetime of the CDT.

- Industry-relevant PhD projects. Each student delivers a PhD thesis project in collaboration with at least one external partner who benefits from being able to engage in longer-term and deeper research that they would not normally be able to undertake, especially for those who do not have their own dedicated R&D labs. We will deliver at least 65 such PhDs over the lifetime of this CDT renewal.

- Public engagement. All students receive training in public engagement and learn to communicate their findings through press releases, media coverage.

This proposal introduces two new impact channels in order to further the impact of our students' work and help widen our network of partners.

- The Horizon Impact Fund. Final year students can apply for support to undertake short impact projects. This benefits industry partners, public and third sector partners, academic partners and the wider public benefit from targeted activities that deepen the impact of individual students' PhD work. This will support activities such as developing plans for spin-outs and commercialization; establishing an IP position; preparing and documenting open-source software or datasets; and developing tourable public experiences.

- ORBIT as an impact partner for RRI. Students will embed findings and methods for Responsible Research Innovation into the national training programme that is delivered by ORBIT, the Observatory for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT (www.orbit-rri.org). Through our direct partnership with ORBIT all Horizon CDT students will be encouraged to write up their experience of RRI as contributions to ORBIT so as to ensure that their PhD research will not only gain visibility but also inform future RRI training and education. PhD projects that are predominantly in the area of RRI are expected to contribute to new training modules, online tools or other ORBIT services.