Protecting children from Digital Media Overexposure: The urgency of Governments, Parents, and Industry Self-Regulation

Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Modern Approaches in Humanities and Social sciences

Year: 2022

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/5th.icmhs.2022.07.100

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Protecting children from Digital Media Overexposure: The urgency of Governments, Parents, and Industry Self-Regulation

Ljupka Naumovska, Irina Purcarea

ABSTRACT: 

The children’s unsupervised media exposure was underestimated in the past. Today, when lives are dictated by technology and digital media, children are considerably exposed to advertising content directed either to 1) them, or 2) to their parents or older siblings, that might cause set of disadvantages: materialism and snobbism, obesity, even anxiety. The theoretical research and the findings of the previous studies are strongly signal of a condition where kids are under significant unsupervised exposure of digital media and advertising content. Despite some initiatives and regulations, there is no unified and standardized method to fight this trend. The study aims to examine the role of the 3 most important stakeholders concerned with this mater: 1. Governments; 2. Industry (self-regulation) and the 3. Parents. The results in all three aspects show some improvements: Government regulations and policy making – however not fully adoptable globally or difficult to adjust to the algorithms od current social media platforms; Industry self-regulation has several challenges specially related with sustainable reasoning and the results show that children of parents who use mobile device for conditioning spend more time on mobile social media compared to those children who are not being conditioned. Following the EU Report (2020) of children time spent of media, the urgency is alarming for taking a balanced and systematic approach embedding all 3 stockholders as intersectoral solution is urgent.

keywords: Children, Generation Z, digital media, advertising, risks.