News

Global Action Plan is proud to be partnering with Dove on their powerful and important campaign for kids online safety. Dove’s new ad - featuring the Global Action Plan logo at the end - is filling an entire ad break during Love Island on two occasions at the end of June and in early July 2023. If the organic engagement and sector recognition is anything to go by, the public and in particular parents, will find it moving and galvanising. It feels like a mass moment of recognition that there is something going badly wrong.

Dove have recognised that in taking on the issue of the harms of social media, their role must be to not only raise awareness of these harms, but to be a voice for the need to change how social media is designed so it no longer causes them.

This led them to Global Action Plan as one of the leading NGOs (non-governmental organisations) campaigning for the need for change at a system level. Global Action Plan in turn convened a partnership of NGOs - 5Rights, Girlguiding and Parenting Mental Health – to raise awareness of the damage caused by the features of social media and to encourage new design standards that will make social media safer for kids.  

But why is an environmental charity campaigning to support young people’s mental health and to make social media safer?  

Our mission is to mobilise action on the systems that harm us and the planet. In 2023 one of the most damaging systems in which we are all trapped is the outrage economy, i.e. how and why we see what we see online.  

In our report ‘Big Tech's Dirty Secret ‘ we set out the multiple ways in which big tech is undermining the fight for climate justice. Most significantly, it outlines how a digital sphere constructed around anger and mistrust cannot and will not nurture collective action to address climate breakdown. 

Global Action Plan believes that socials will only ever be safer if we strike at the heart of the business model that perpetuates and relies on this content. We want the government to ban online ‘surveillance advertising’ – targeting people with ads based on their activities. 

The harm which social media causes to young people is heartbreaking and we simply cannot let that continue. This realisation also helps us recognise the extent and breadth of the harms which social media can cause for almost any social cause. Racial injustice, income inequality and much besides will persist if we are deliberately pitted against one another. Trapped in systems harnessed by those who wish to divide us. 

We are determined to build understanding of the personal, societal and ecological harms of this business model for the good of our young people and our planet. And we are thrilled to have a partner in Dove who is so committed to driving mass awareness of the need to take action on this harmful system.  

 

Sign the petition to make social media safer by design

 

Watch our explainer on the tricks used to keep us hooked to social media