January 9 2025 GM

Welcome Back Glitter Meetup

Glitter Meetups What are Glitter Meetups Notes from Past Glitter Meetups Virtual Events Calendar Join the TCU Mattermost

• Date: Thursday, January 9
• Time: 9am EST / 2pm UTC
• Facilitator: Mardiya
• Where: On TCU Mattermost "IF Square" Channel.
  • Don't have an account to the TCU Mattermost? you can request one following the directions here.

What is Glitter Meetup?

Glitter Meetup is the weekly town hall of the digital rights and Internet Freedom community at the IF Square on the TCU Mattermost, at 9am EDT / 2pm UTC. It is a text-based chat where digital rights defenders can share regional and project updates, expertise, ask questions, and connect with others from all over the world! Do you need an invite? Learn how to get one here.

Notes

We had a quick Community Roundtable where we shared that some of us are attending the Children's AI Summit in London and that the 2025 Global Gathering dates are out.

We talked about our plans for this year in Digital Rights:

• This year 5Rights is kicking off an exciting project with the IEEE to develop a code of ethical principles for engineers that make digital experiences for children. The IEEE (Institute for Electrical & Electronic Engineers) is a professional body that engineers can join - many are from the US but there is a global cohort. If you're interested in the ethical principles project specifically they recently set up a project page.
  • One of the main issues is that the digital things made for or accessed by children tend not to be made with children's best interests in mind - e.g. they harvest and monetise child personal data, they push towards extremist content rabbit-holes, they don't have terms of service that are written in child friendly language and so on.
  • By making a set of ethical principles with a professional body that so many engineers are already part of, we hope it will raise awareness around how their products can do better, and hopefully this may form some kind of certification or training scheme in future!
  • There are laws in Europe that disallow companies from harvesting minor's personal data. The US situation is a bit more complex as COPPA only applies to under 13s and states have different approaches.
  • The rabbit-holes are one of the most pressing issues for online culture at the moment. If we can get the issue taken seriously for children, then we can see where it can be made better for adults too.
  • 5Rights is kind of unique in our space - we are centered around children, but we're not your standard child protection or privacy organisation. We try to fight for all of children's human rights online and we do it by centering the voices and opinions of young people themselves - talking with them rather than just about them.
• We talk about the future of platform moderation regarding the decisions made by Meta and the platform kwnon in the past as Twitter. It feels like pushing responsibility onto the community to have to fix problems, rather than the companies who are enabling (and profiting from) the problems existing.
• Amnesty Tech's Digital Forensic Fellowship 2025 call is open. This is an opportunity for 5 – 7 human rights defenders, journalists, and/or technologists working in civil society organisations around the world to train with Amnesty Tech's Security Lab to build skills and knowledge on advanced digital threats and forensic investigation techniques. The Fellowship is expected to run from April – July 2025 and successful applicants will be given a stipend of £500 per month totalling £2,000 for the duration of the Fellowship. Deadline to apply: January 23, 23:59 pm UK time on.