“We, the Leaders of the G7, are committed to providing a safe digital space for our minors, which include children and youth under 18, for their development, for their education and for their well-being. Children and youth’s online experiences should be safe, enriching and development focused. Digital service providers have the important role and opportunity to provide digital platforms which are safe-by-design, secu...
“We, the Leaders of the G7, are committed to providing a safe digital space for our minors, which include children and youth under 18, for their development, for their education and for their well-being. Children and youth’s online experiences should be safe, enriching and development focused. Digital service providers have the important role and opportunity to provide digital platforms which are safe-by-design, secure, privacy-preserving, age-appropriate and protective of children and youth, including by default settings. Parents, guardians and carers should be empowered to guide minors’ online experience, including through parental control tools. Partners countries of the G7, Brazil, Egypt, India, Kenya, and the Republic of Korea also support this call. Digital technology can play a positive role for our children and youth, societies and economies, through learning, expanding access to education and healthcare, fostering creativity and social connection. Parents, teachers and education systems should empower and equip them with the necessary skills and literacy to critically and responsibly engage with digital technologies, media and information. Digital education programs complement offline educational and social activities. Despite these benefits, digital service can pose risks for children and youth. They can be exposed to illegal and age-inappropriate content and interactions damaging their mental health and well-being. The use of certain digital service that incorporate attention and engagement maximizing features that can lead to compulsive and habit-forming behaviours, as well as others risks have raised concerns. Recommendation systems should, when used, be designed to elevate age-appropriate content and to reduce exposure to risks. Digital service should be designed to empower parents and minors with tools to be more in control of their experience and data through safety-by-design approaches, such as protective and by default settings, including parental control tools. Minors’ safety is ensured safeguarded by the implementation of risk management, assessment and mitigation. We therefore call on all governments, digital service providers, public authorities where applicable and relevant stakeholders to prioritize the protection of children and youth’s physical and mental health, privacy and safety online. We call on digital service providers to develop and apply technology and systems that ensure safe, secure and age-appropriate experiences including through effective and innovative age assurance mechanisms while preserving the privacy of users according to respective jurisdictions, national circumstances and applicable legal frameworks. We support comprehensive risk-based approaches, and empowering parents and guardians through meaningful and easy-to-use parental controls tools and information. We welcome the G7 Common Set of Principles adopted by our ministers, and call for further action. In this regard, we will work to ensure a safe, age-appropriate experience online for children and youth through all relevant tools. While conversational artificial intelligence tools offer important opportunities for innovation, education and development, we recognise risks associated with children and youth’s use of conversational artificial intelligence systems, undermining their well-being and safety and reinforcing the need to build their critical skills to engage responsibly in digital space. It is important for providers to develop and apply safety settings by default for children and youth, including parental control tools and age assurance solutions, to make conversational artificial intelligence tools safer for children and youth, in a timely manner. Given the importance of helping children and youth to seamlessly distinguish authentic from synthetic content and to identify content provenance, we support ongoing efforts by the industry to strengthen the reliability, interoperability when feasible, effectiveness and robustness of their technical means. Digital service providers have a critical role to play in enhancing transparency through enabling an understanding of content provenance, promoting digital literacy and awareness to engage with digital technologies, media and information. We encourage continuous dialogue between G7 members’ governments, public authorities and digital service providers, as approaches to content transparency continue to be explored. We remain strongly committed to prohibiting the generation, the manipulation and the distribution of child sexual abuse material and criminal activity related to non-consensual intimate imagery, including deepfakes particularly when they involve children and youth, in accordance with national circumstances and legal frameworks. To contribute to the necessary prevention of these criminal acts, digital service providers must implement effective detection and removal measures on their platforms. The prohibition of such content as well as online grooming, sexual exploitation and sexual extortion, remains a non-negotiable principle in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems and digital service. Some of these harms, including non-consensual intimate imagery and sexualized content, may disproportionately affect girls and young women, affect boys and young men, and encourage self-harm. We are committed to preventing and countering the exposure of children and youth to violent extremism and terrorism online. Digital service providers should adopt appropriate safeguards and work collaboratively with law enforcement to reduce the targeting of children and youth and the recruitment, especially into organized crime including for drug trafficking and violent extremism. To this end, parents, guardians and carers should also be empowered to prevent these phenomena. We recognise the benefits of sharing best practices, to produce coordinated and effective efforts, gathering a broad range of actors, including researchers, educational systems and digital service providers, and to work on the opportunities and impacts of digital service and artificial intelligence on children and youth. We are committed to fostering a research and scientific ecosystem capable of studying those benefits and challenges. Advancing scientific knowledge and evidence-based policymaking benefits from sharing of data, impartial evaluations and common standards in assessments methodologies of artificial intelligence models and algorithmic systems, to objectively evaluate impact on minors’ safety. In order to support an evidence-based approach, transparency and accountability are essential. We will work together with relevant stakeholders to support this research and evaluations. We welcome the G7 Common Set of Principles defining a safer and more secure digital space for minors adopted by our ministers, and ask them to meet regularly and to assess the progress of this work at the latest by the end of this year. This call reflects the outcome of the discussion between G7 members, benefiting from productive exchanges of views with partner countries, Brazil, Egypt, India, Kenya and the Republic of Korea.”
Speech Brief