Empowering Young Digital Citizens: The Call for Co-creation Between Youth and Policymakers in Regulating for Online Safety and Privacy

Children and teenagers’ active use of social media is often seen as evidence that they are careless about their privacy (Marwick and Boyd in New Media & Soc 16:1051–1067, 2014). However, it would seem that they perceive privacy in relation to what they value within their digital communities, tending to have a more communal appreciation of privacy that focuses on their digital personalities. For instance, while teenagers may be less concerned about commercial entities mining their data (Ruck et al. in In Globalising the Streets: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Social Control and Empowerment. Columbia University Press, pp. 15–30, 2008), they do employ their own privacy-protection strategies against potential privacy intrusions from human actors, such as strangers, peers, parents, or their schools (De Wolf in New Media Soc. 22:1058–1075, 2019). They make efforts to manage their reputations on the private digital spaces they create, as they understand their online avatars to be extensions of their offline personas. As such, current regulatory approaches that focus on paternalistic top-down evaluations of ‘safety’ online and externally determined risk prevention may not resonate with young Internet users. Teenagers tend to associate top-down regulations with encroachment and unaccountable interference into their Internet use, and such policies are likely to be met with tactics of evasion (Coleman et al., 2017 ). This chapter will look at how recent attempts to legislate youth-specific online rules in three jurisdictions, the United States, China and Singapore can strip youth of the opportunity to mediate their mobile media use and crowd out their voices in determining the kind of Internet they want. Moving away from such hierarchical or protectionist approaches, this chapter calls for co-creation between youth and policymakers to determine more tailored notions of risk online, and to recognise and account for youth preferences when constructing regulatory policies specific to them. Actively involving young people in the deliberative process can also contribute to an increased awareness of common challenges and promote a joint commitment, between young citizens and policymakers, towards finding solutions, which only strengthens the legitimacy and effectiveness of regulatory policies implemented.