Network Insights - Nov 15 2024
Weekly impact, news, and predictive insights from the world's largest social entrepreneur network.
Global – Last week, Australia’s Prime Minister announced a plan to ban social media use for children under 16 and hold platforms accountable for compliance. “Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it,” he said. This would indeed be “world-leading” legislation, as the PM noted, yet more tempered regulations have of course been appearing in Europe, India, the US, and elsewhere for a few years now – all aiming to balance child autonomy while safeguarding kids (also adults) from the harms of social media use. This week in Brazil, for example, a cell phone ban for schools across Sao Paulo state passed (yet to be formally signed into law) – Daniel Becker, a leading pediatrician, is a supporter. Meanwhile in India, Anshul Tewari credits the Internet with sparking his entrepreneurial journey as a teen and cautions against regulatory over-reach – see his post with survey results about parental permission requirements, relevant to India’s 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act. And in Singapore, Yuhyun Park of DQ Institute supports kids (and governments) to develop digital literacy and other competencies that will help children safely navigate their digital lives.
Chile – From?the 1950s to the 1990s, as many as 50k newborns and children were trafficked out of Chile and placed (for a fee) with adoptive families via international adoption agencies. Read a new account (here in Spanish) in the New York Times by someone who was taken from his mother at birth (she was told her baby had died), given a new name (“Jimmy”), and adopted and raised by a family in the US. He discovered the truth about his past and identified his mother with DNA matching arranged via Nos Buscamos (“we are looking for each other”), the organization of Constanza Del Rio, who was similarly trafficked as a baby. Worldwide, Fellows work to prevent and redress harm resulting from forced family separation – e.g., Cindy Blackstock who is a child and family services advocate for First Nations communities in Canada.
Brazil | US | India –?This week in Brazil, young changemakers were featured in leading media (see?anchor article from Ashoka); in the US, Scott Strode was?featured?in People magazine about his journey from substance use as a teen to recover and the creation of what is now a 500k-member network of “sober active” fitness communities across the US; and as much of the world faces more frequent and more devastating climate disasters, we’ll check in with?Manu Gupta who works globally on natural disaster response and resilience. Tune in.