Representatives from Tiktok, Snapchat, Meta and Google are participating in Wednesday's meeting, along with Bris, Child X, Ecpat and the Swedish Gender Equality Authority.
The background is a new report from Bris which shows that almost one in five children felt unsafe online and that many believe it would be safer if companies took greater responsibility.
"It's yet another report that shows the complete vulnerability that many young girls and children in general are exposed to online," says Nina Larsson (L).
Every fourth child
A report from Allmänna barnhuset in 2021 showed that every fourth child has been exposed to grooming attempts online before they turned 15.
It is enormously extensive and we need to understand and raise awareness of this, but also put much greater pressure on the companies.
Larsson points out, among other things, that the platforms need to have better controls for age verification, but also that they should introduce better tools that in various ways limit and stop perpetrators who target children.
According to her, for example, there are a large number of users who explicitly write that they are looking for children for grooming purposes.
As a company with technical AI support, you have to be able to eliminate that. Anything else is contributing to the normalization of child exploitation.
Regulations on the way
What do you hope the meeting will result in?
Because I am bringing together the largest players and several civil society organizations that have worked on this for a long time, I hope that we can gain a better understanding of how extensive the problem is, so that companies realize that in the short term they are the ones who can act to eliminate this to a much greater extent than they are doing.
From a political perspective, there will also be strengthened regulation, according to Larsson, who says that they are working both with national legislation but also through the EU.
It is important that the platforms understand this so that they adjust their systems now.
