While Congress debates children’s online safety, some ISPs aim to put the controls in parents’ hands

Many lawmakers, policy experts, and parents seem to agree: Social media platforms aren’t doing enough to keep children and teens safe online. Platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok continue to serve problematic content to their youngest users while proposed online safety legislation remains stalled in the halls of Congress. In the meantime, some internet service providers are taking matters into their own hands.

For example: Brian DeMarco, GM of Siyeh Communications, which is owned by the Blackfeet Nation in northwest Montana, started pairing content-monitoring service Bark with his company’s other connectivity offerings.

“We really want to bring more awareness to our parents and to community members on the reservation,” DeMarco told Tech Brew. “The internet is a very good thing. It’s a very powerful thing. But in some cases, it can be a very dangerous thing.”

Bark works on the household and device level, running content from specific apps that comes across the household’s router through machine-learning algorithms that include contextual analysis. This means Bark can alert parents when their child encounters potentially risky content. Cloud services provider Calix said it now offers integrated access to Bark to a thousand ISPs.

DeMarco said the service has already reaped results locally. He recounted a conversation with a parent in a local school who said her nephew had been experiencing suicidal ideation. Bark alerted the child’s father to the related content he’d engaged with, which led to a productive dialogue.

“It gave him the ability to be aware and to have this conversation with his son, about the things that he was going through in life,” DeMarco said, noting that this kind of content monitoring can be a powerful tool to help parents communicate with their children about their online lives “without being intrusive.”

A pervasive issue

Bark’s 2023 safety report suggests that potentially harmful content is widespread. A majority of teens in households that use the service encountered online content, experienced, or had conversations related to drug and alcohol use, sexual material, bullying, and violence last year, the report said.

Lawmakers hope to turn the tide by encouraging the platforms hosting the content to set aggressive account safety settings by default and aim to limit kids’ exposure to certain content. Senators grilled Big Tech executives from companies including Meta, Snap, and TikTok in late January about their plans to do so, with mixed results.

During a recent panel discussion at the Washington, DC, State of the Net Conference, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation VP Daniel Castro called the hearing “political theater, and probably in the worst possible way.” Ultimately, he said, the hearing was not an attempt to meaningfully address online harms. Instead, he said, lawmakers are using children’s online safety as a proxy to advance bills regulating Big Tech.

Speaking during the same panel, Haley Hinkle, policy counsel for nonprofit Fairplay, said there seems to be a consensus that platforms have failed to self-regulate, noting that “there are features and functions that exacerbate existing issues for kids as they’re developing.”

Instead of tweaking features that are integrated in long-existing products, some newer apps are trying to build safer online interactions into their product design. NoteIt, a smartphone app that bills itself as the “Snapchat replacement” for Gen Alpha and just reported surpassing 50 million users, doesn’t have a centralized feed. Instead, it encourages users to interact with people they already know by exchanging drawings and photos that display on a smartphone home-screen widget.

The company said in a press release that it is “making a huge bet in the opposite direction of large public communities, focusing solely on the people who matter most to you.”

“The socially responsible thing”

Despite increased awareness about the need to improve kids’ online experiences, Bark executive Titania Jordan said it’s a mistake for parents to rely on parental controls or safeguards built into apps. Even platforms that try to integrate more guardrails often do so superficially or in a way that children can easily disable, she said.

“Keeping kids safer online is a layered approach. It’s going to take a variety of methodologies, whether it’s at the router level, or the device level, or the network level, and then the relational level, to do the best you can,” she said. “You can’t just think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna lean on Apple Screen Time settings [to] keep my kid offline from 10pm to 6am and think everything’s gonna be fine.”

Ultimately, she said, platforms benefit from the time—and money—spent on them, which, in turn, tends to disincentivize efforts to limit usage.

Right now, Siyeh Communications customers must pay an additional fee to add Bark. But DeMarco, the company’s GM, said they’re considering whether to offer it for free across all Siyeh’s broadband subscribers.

“We haven’t had the adoption rate that we hoped…We’re evaluating, you know, how do we adjust our pricing? Maybe we include it in all our plans,” he said. “At the end of the day, more companies need to be doing the social[ly] responsible thing, providing more back to the customers that pay [to] access the internet.”