A Non-Profit Organisation, Techsocietal, the Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) Internet Society Nigeria and TikTok on Tuesday held a workshop for parents and educators on online safety for children.
The workshop hosted by TechSocietal is to commemorate Safer Internet Day (SID) celebrated every second Tuesday in February
This year’s theme is: ‘’Digital Safety Conversations with Children/Youth’’.
The Executive Director, of Techsocietal, Mrs Tope Ogundipe said that the aim was to teach them how to engage in digital safety conversations with children.
Ogundipe said that the internet was the new playground, and as such there were a lot of things that should be monitored.
She said one such thing was screen time because excessive screen time could be detrimental to children’s development.
‘’Kids are a priority, according to NCC research, about 79; per cent of Nigerian kids are not safe online.
‘’So it is very important that we continue to evolve the strategies, policies, initiatives, and programmes that will engage all stakeholders.
‘’We need to have a multi-stakeholders affair to this issue and drive it down to the grassroots with awareness and education about online safety for children,’’ Ogundipe said.
According to her, we should have conversations about contact risk, the thing that children come across online about people who contact them.c
She said that children should be aware of using privacy settings not to share information with strangers.
Ogundipe said that children should also be educated about their behaviour online and not bully other kids and know who to talk to if they should see anything that was funny online.
‘’We should empower them with tools and resources and how to keep themselves safe online and we should not stop them,” she said.
Ms Ijeoma Bassey, Senior Manager, NCC Zonal Office, Lagos said that NCC had organised a parenting workshop, and collaborated with NGOs and others for the dissemination of Child Online Protection (COP) materials.
Bassey said that NCC had also talked at the Parents Teachers Association’s meeting on online protection of children.
She urged educators and parents to create a safe space for children; they should anticipate risk and they should be empowered to face the challenges.
According to her, educators, and parents should be observant and engage children to ensure a healthy balance between fun activities online and fun activities offline.
Mr Adewolu Adene, Public Policy Manager, at Google, said that denial of access and shutting the gate to the online activity of a child was not the answer to a child’s online safety.
Adewolu said that rather education, awareness and shared responsibility would help in children’s online safety.
The Chief Executive Officer, of Data Science, Nigeria, Dr Olubayo Adekambi highlighted seven tools to ensure online safety for children
Adekanmbi said that there were Comment filters, Account and Video Privacy, Screen time management, safety Centre, reporting inappropriate content 13+ functionalities and for your feed to check children.
He said that bad words could hurt a child’s esteem and TikTok hides, filters that could determine what people could put on one's page to avoid bullying.
