Beauty ideals such as slim body contours and facial features, gender roles that are stuck in the past, as taught online by so-called “tradwives”, and discriminatory opinions spread quickly on social media. A single post may not pose a risk to the development of children and young people. But the sum of them does.
In their article on the online platform of the journal “mediendiskurs”, Dr. Stephan Dreyer and Sünje Andresen explore the question of what cumulative potential for harm can arise for children and young people when using algorithmized services such as Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok, and what challenges and opportunities arise for regulation.
You can read the article here.
Abstract
The flood of seemingly harmless individual pieces of content on online platforms, which, however, have the potential to affect development in their cumulative effect, has so far been difficult to grasp in the context of youth protection. This article highlights the challenges that arise for the regulatory framework of the protection of minors in the media from “micro content” and the cross-platform media use of children and young people. It also examines whether and in what way regulation can do justice to these new realities.
Andresen, Sünje & Dreyer, Stephan: Über stete Tropfen und die Summe ihrer Teile: Kumulative Beeinträchtigungspotenziale und regulatorische Antworten des Kinder- und Jugendmedienschutzes [About Constant Dripping and the Sum of Its Parts: Cumulative Potential for Harm and Regulatory Responses in the Protection of Children and Young People from the Media]. mediendiskurs, 17.01.2025. https://mediendiskurs.online/beitrag/ueber-stete-tropfen-und-die-summe-ihrer-teile-beitrag-772/.