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Speakers at U.N. Action Day call for child-centered AI safeguards and warn against surveillance-driven misinformation
Summary
Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and Baroness Kidron urged the U.N. and member states to prioritize children's rights in digital policy and to curb surveillance-for-profit business models and biased AI systems.
Two speakers at the U.N. Action Day emphasized the need for child-centered safeguards in digital policy and spotlighted harms from surveillance-driven business models and online disinformation.
Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and co-founder of the Filipino news outlet Rappler, said the current AI and platform ecosystem is shaped by a "toxic surveillance model" and warned that misinformation and manipulation erode facts and trust. "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust," Ressa said, adding that surveillance-for-profit business models amplify social divisions and make public-information ecosystems "toxic sludge."
Baroness Kidron, founder of the 5Rights Foundation and a member of the U.K. House of Lords, focused on the Global Digital Compact's explicit commitments on children's rights. She cited the compact's text committing signatory states to "strengthen legal and policy frameworks to protect the rights of the child in the digital space and to prioritize the development and implementation of national online child safety policy and standards by 2030," and urged implementation. Kidron described the "Children and AI Design Code," produced by 5Rights, as a protocol to identify and mitigate AI risks to children and urged governments and industry to adopt child-specific design standards.
Kidron stressed that children are not a monolithic group and that protections must be age- and context-appropriate: "A child of 5 is not the same as one of 15," she said. She argued that past technological inflection points repeatedly left children out of design considerations and called for a proactive duty of care that looks beyond narrow safety to children's flourishing.
Ending: Both speakers urged that the Global Digital Compact's commitments be translated into legal and technical standards, national policies and enforcement mechanisms. Kidron and Ressa called on U.N. agencies, governments and industry to prioritize child-focused regulation, capacity building and design protocols so that digital systems support children's rights rather than undermine them.
