Pathways: How digital design puts children at risk

*CONTENT WARNING: These files include screenshots of content promoting eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, and offensive language.

Design choices embedded in digital products are negatively impacting the lives of children to an alarming and upsetting extent. The research undertaken seeks to establish the pathways between the design of digital services and the risks children face online. Through design features services such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok directly target children as young as 13 years old with multiple types of harmful content, within 24 hours of creating their accounts. Beyond their feeds, children are also being contacted by adult strangers recommending more harmful content, including material related to eating disorders, extreme diets, self-harm and suicide as well as sexualised imagery and distorted body images. 

These disturbing pathways are not deliberately designed to put children at risk, but the risks these features pose are not accidental.

The Pathways report is the outcome of a research project undertaken by Revealing Reality on behalf of 5Rights Foundation. Through interviews with digital designers and children and innovative research using avatars, it exposes how the commercial objectives of digital companies translate into design features that are putting children at risk.