On the hustings …

And a big welcome back to parents and teachers all over the country as we tackle Term 4. Is anyone else just the slightest bit freaked out that we’re already halfway through October?

What did you get up over the school holidays? A camping trip, perhaps? Interstate jaunt? Or maybe you kept it quiet on the home front and worked through?

Yeah – me too. Except for my visit to Canberra to give evidence to the Parliamentary Inquiry on Social Media, the trip to Sydney to present at the Google-sponsored Fighting Misinformation Summit and then the other trip to Sydney to take part in the NSW and South Australian governments’ Social Media Summit.

I’m ready for a holiday.

Except that misinformation is having a moment (as you might have noticed). And we are here for it (as the young folk say).

It’s all gotten suddenly busy for us at Squiz Kids HQ thanks to Newshounds – the free media literacy program for primary school kids that we’ve had in market for the past eighteen months and which has just ticked over its 3,345th teacher sign-up. 

The highlight of my heady last three weeks? That would have to be sitting alongside the remarkable Christy Hutt – a Year 6 teacher from Exeter Public School in the beautiful NSW Southern Highlands, who had been summoned to Canberra with me to give evidence from the classroom coal face on the extent to which kids these days rely on social media for news and information – and how Newshounds was helping her class tell online fact from fiction.

Now I’m a show pony from way back, so while I was a tad anxious, it was just another day at the office, including hitting the Sky News studios immediately afterwards. For Christy, however, it was nerve-wracking in the extreme to sit in Federal Parliament and be quizzed by a panel of MPs.

But, as you will see from the YouTube video of evidence we gave (watch from the 2 hour 32 minute mark if you’re so inclined – or read the transcript in Hansard here) she was eloquence and poise itself. I dips me lid.

What’s Kevin Bacon got to do with it?

The extent to which our kids are in thrall to social media was explored in detail at the two Social Media Summits held last week in Sydney and Adelaide respectively.

And at the end of last week, Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland announced plans to create a bill to force social media companies to keep kids under a certain age off their platforms.

And while it’s a welcome step, there remains the very real danger that with all of this banning-teenagers-from-social-media-platforms, all we’ll succeed in doing is force them onto sites we’ve never heard of, in dark corners of the Internet that harder to find and impossible to police.

As I argue in this opinion article (paywall protected) published on Friday in The Australian newspaper, and as I explained a fortnight ago at the Fighting Misinformation Summit at Google HQ in Sydney (below): it’s all just a little reminiscent of the dance ban in the classic 80s movie, Footloose.

Remember the preacher dad in the Kevin Bacon classic who said that dancing was the devil’s work? And how that only forced the kids to stage secret underground dance parties? Same thing.

Which is why as well as exploring a ban or age-verification, we also need to educate our kids how to think critically about the flood of information to which they’re exposed on a daily basis. And crucially, at a young age – before they get a smartphone in their hands and disappear into the social media vortex. And we need to do it now.

This week on Squiz Kids …

We’re back to normal programming now for the remainder of the school term, and that means a new edition of our award-winning daily news podcast Squiz Kids Today every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday – with our excellent Classroom Companion teacher-created, curriculum-aligned worksheets out every Monday.

Every Tuesday, there will be either a Squiz Kids Shortcut or an episode of Squiz The World – where we take a virtual excursion to a different country. And on Fridays, it’s time to test how well you’ve been paying attention to the week that just was with the Kids v Adults Weekly News S’Quiz.

In this week’s episode of Squiz The World, which drops tomorrow morning, we strap ourselves into the Squiz Kids Super-Fast Supersonic Jetliner to visit Bangladesh. A fascinating look at the country where this month’s T20 Womens’ World Cup is taking place. Don’t miss it.

On our radar …

We’re up to our eyeballs all day, everyday in all things kids and parenting. So when we see an article or come across a topic we think you might be interested in, we’ll post it here. And this week, given the events of the past week, it’s a social media-themed radar ..

Haidt praises bans … best-selling author Jonathan Haidt – scribbler of The Anxious Generation – has praised the Australian government for going hard in its crusade against social media platforms, saying he hopes it sparks a global crackdown.

Bans are a rocky road … while Haidt is cheerleading, the ABC’s respected tech reporter Ange Lavoipierre takes a more measured approach to social media bans in this article, pointing out that many other countries have tried and thus-far failed. She asks: are we brave to take this road, or just lost?

Smile on your dial … 

How can you not love Ned Brockmann? The long-distance runner whose larrikin spirit and incredible stamina has enchanted a nation. Hats off to Ned and his Uncomfortable Challenge – running 1000 Miles in 10 Days. If you got a bit of spare change, flick some his way to help him raise money for people experiencing homelessness. Legend.