In Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, journalist and online safety campaigner Adele Zeynep Walton explores the real human cost of an online world run by ‘big tech’ companies which strive for profit and refuse any responsibility for the harms created by their platforms. Mickey Noonan interviewed Walton for LitFest, posing thoughtful questions. As well as outlining the issues, Walton offered workable solutions and ways which we can all contribute to ‘logging off’ a bit more and being more intentional with our phone use.
When asked by Noonan to describe her own relationship to the internet, Walton, like many of us, described herself as “chronically online”. Making social media accounts in her early teen years and then social media forming an integral part of her community as a teenager and her work as a journalist, Walton’s relationship with the online world is familiar to many of us, particularly those like myself who are Gen Z ‘digital nomads’. However, in 2022, Walton’s “optimistic view” of the online world was shattered overnight when she lost her sister Amy to online harms. An online forum had groomed and encouraged her sister to take her own life.
Walton has since become involved in online safety activism, having conversations with politicians and pushing for legislation to be changed. ‘Big tech’ companies, she explained, rely on outdated legislation which was originally designed to prevent lawsuits against small forum owners if harmful content was published on their site. Now, this small group of companies which control most of the online world use it to remain self-regulating and governments, fearful of economic repercussions and burdened by the complexity and pace of change, struggle to legislate against them.
Walton outlined two key changes in legislation which would help us to prevent the harms like those her sister suffered. Firstly, the removal of the outdated legislation that allows tech companies to act only as platforms and not publishers, making them responsible for harmful content posted on their sites. Secondly, a ban on ‘addictive design’. Currently, social media algorithms show us whatever will keep us watching, regardless of whether that is cute videos of cats, misogynistic content or posts promoting self-harm. Once you enter a certain ‘echo chamber’, Walton explained, it is very difficult to leave.
The online world is not all bad, Walton explains, after all it is an essential part of her work as a journalist and campaigner, and a key way she keeps up with friends. It can also be a brilliant point of connection. After moving to a small town, Walton answered an advertisement in a local newsletter written by Tony, a pensioner seeking smartphone tuition. This was the start, she described, of a brilliant friendship.
Walton wants her book not to be a source of fear for readers but to empower us to act, both politically by writing to our MP or becoming involved in campaigns, or by being more intentional with our internet use in our own time and having conversations with our friends and family. We, she stated, as the users of these platforms are the best informed about the issues they cause, and there is a need to counter our ‘imposter syndrome’ and realise we can fight back. Walton also discussed practical solutions such as apps like Opal which control screen time (which I have since downloaded) and asking guests to leave their phones at the door when they come round for dinner to create a space of intentional ‘logging off’.
Walton, who will be speaking to St John’s students next week about online safety, offered an eloquent, thoughtful and insightful exploration of the problems of the online world and their potential solutions. It is brave, to share such a personal story and to confront such giant tech companies who have become so closely involved in our personal lives, politics and society. I, for one, am definitely inspired to, as Walton put it, make social media work for me rather than the other way around.
‘Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World’ by Adele Zeynep Walton published by Orion
Financial Administrator – Perspective Financial Group – Marlborough
