Portugal “should invest much more” in digital literacy
“ÇI continue to think that, for example, Portugal should invest a lot more not only in digital literacy, but also in creating or having working groups, institutions, whatever, that help to combat what is false information”, namely in social networks , says the partner of the law firm CMS in the area of technology, media and communication.
And “no matter how careful we are in fine-tuning the security measures that are available, what is a fact is that we continue to receive information on a daily basis that we did not request, that we do not betray, why it is addressed to us” and which “we must know how to filter and decide for ourselves, which makes everything much more complicated”, he continues.
João Leitão Figueiredo gives as an example the invasions of the Capitol, in the United States, in January 2021, and the recent invasion of the headquarters of the three powers in Brazil, which, he says, “turn out to be paradigmatic of this reality”.
That is, “from one moment to the next we can have a mass reaction and not understand why, we have to go much further, we have to be much more careful”, consider the lawyer.
Responsible registration, for example, that children under 13 should not have accounts on social networks.
However, it is a fact “that most children aged 9, 10 or 11 have an Instagram account, have a TikTok account” and how a parent “in conscience allows certain (…) kind of situation like this”, he asks.
“Because they don’t have adequate knowledge of the risks associated with the use of these tools”, he replies, noting that everyone is free to choose.
However, “there is a rule that at the age of 13 the child – and we are still talking about children – already has sufficient cognitive capacity to understand some issues, not all, but at least some”, he continues.
“We are talking about very young children and, by allowing them to relax and have their accounts, we are not emancipating children”, but rather “exposing them to risk”, stresses João Leitão Figueiredo.
And this is, “for me, a clear example that digital literacy was important to discipline”, he defends.
This is because does the father or mother “have enough knowledge to make a decision? Is he aware of the risks? Or is he just one of many who trusts that nothing bad has happened”, he questions.
Incidentally, for “a long time”, the major problem surrounding children on the Internet was only aimed at pornography, copying images, alcohol, drugs, but “nowadays” this “is much more complex”.
That is, “today we are talking about how we participate in changing the mind of an entire generation based on the information that we feed nonstop [sem parar] every day, because children are massive users afterwards — adults still go to work, children don’t, every school break they turn on the social network”.
João Leitão Figueiredo underlined that “it is always important to take into account that in the space of months, due to the pandemic”, everyone had to “take a leap from the point of view of dependence on technical and technological tools of years”, namely with telework .
“This implied, from the outset, the use of digital tools by people who were not used to doing so”, accompanied by an increase in the use of these by people who, despite being routine, came to depend, “if not exclusively, almost exclusively” of technologies for the exercise of their professional activity.
Now, “none of us, in fact, with the exception of technicians and professionals in the field, is fully aware of the impact of using these tools” because “they do not exist to date, in any country, at least that is To my knowledge, legislation, or if there is legislation, there is no ‘enforcement’ that allows ensuring citizens that companies will share information in a transparent way”, he says.
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