Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met today with Antigone Davis, Global Vice President for Safety at Meta, and other company executives, at Maximos Mansion.
During the meeting, the Meta delegation reiterated the company’s full support for Greece’s proposal to establish a common digital majority age in the European Union, which would require parental consent for minors to access digital services, including social media.
Greece’s leading role in the pan-European debate on protecting children and adolescents online was also recognised.
The parental control and age verification features available in the Greek Kids Wallet app, which has been presented at European Union level, were highlighted, and the possibilities for cooperation between states and social media were discussed in order to develop the most effective safeguards for underage users.
At the beginning of the meeting, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Antigone Davis had the following dialogue:
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Thank you for your presence here, I think we have a very important topic to discuss that concerns us all, and that is the protection of our children from online addiction and the dangers that lurk in the digital world. This is a topic that’s very dear to my heart. I had actually raised it at the level of the United Nations. I used part of my speech last year to highlight the importance of a global response to this problem.
As we will discuss, we have taken some very interesting initiatives when it comes to putting in place a platform that does two things: educates parents on existing parental control tools, but also offers a well-tested way to actually ensure that we know the real age of our digital users in order to be able to then define what access they can have to various types of digital services.
It’s an initiative, our “Kids Wallet”, that was presented at the level of the European Union, I think has gained a lot of traction and a lot of support. When we spoke about this problem in Greece, we really got amazingly positive feedback from parents, but also from kids who recognise that this is a problem that needs to be addressed.
Again, I’m very much in favour of engaging with the big tech players in order to find the win-win solutions, because I also am aware that you acknowledge that there is a problem that needs to be addressed, and this is not something that we can do on our own. Rather than taking two ways of doing it: we take a very confrontational approach or we can try to take a cooperative approach. I’m very much in favour of doing the second and finding solutions that will also involve the designers of the products that our kids and our teenagers use.
I think this is really the time to have this discussion. I was very much affected by a book you’re very much aware of, “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. I think he points out that it took us many decades to put seatbelts in cars. Now we know what problem we have to face. We have the tools. It’s a question of whether we have the willingness and the ability to create a proper regulatory framework where each partner assumes their own responsibility.
So, I’m very happy that you wanted to engage with us on this topic, and thankful for your visit to Athens.
Antigone Davis: I also really want to thank you. First of all, thank you for inviting me. I am aware of the legacy of my name, I take it actually quite seriously.
I also just want to thank you and acknowledge your leadership and your government’s leadership in this area, and in particular, your technical leadership in this area in developing a system by which we can verify age. We do, like you agree, that this should occur at the operating system level or at the device level. And we’re really appreciative to see the leading approach that you’ve taken. So thank you very much. And also thank you for your collaboration.
We are very supportive of additional majority age, as you are aware. We believe that it should be anchored in parental approval. We believe that it should be consistent across the industry, but we think that this is the right path forward. Very much like you, I agree that it’s important step that we are thinking about how we position children to safely use these types of tools that are, in the end, incredibly important, where they are creative, where they explore, and might be able to protect that, but also ensure that teens and their parents can be involved. And this will be accomplished in that way.
You know, I’ve been at Meta 11 years and for at least that time period, we’ve been quite focused on how do we put in place the right tools. We have over 50 tools. We recently launched Teen Counts, which won an award in Spain for our efforts. Teen Counts are designed to put in place the right defaults for teens, the right safeguards to give parents a piece of mind. But it’s also designed to ensure that we can figure out ways to bring parents in. Those defaults cannot be changed if you’re under 16 without bringing your parent in. And one of the key things that we are trying to sort is how we really make it easy for parents.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: It can be quite complicated, daunting for parents.
Antigone Davis: Yes, I mean, app stores have somewhere between 1. 5 million and 2 million apps. When you hand your child a smartphone, they are now available to them. So being able to have that first line of defence is incredibly important. So, I just want to thank you very much for your efforts in this.
The meeting was also attended by Minister of Digital Governance Dimitris Papastergiou and Minister of State Akis Skertsos.
