6th November 2023
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Trigger warning: contains references to suicide and self harm
Last month I had the pleasure of attending the Liverpool Literary Festival, a highly anticipated annual event returning for its 10th year this year. Author, journalist and online safety campaigner, Adele Zeynep Walton delivered a powerful talk about her recently published book: Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World. In conversation with Adele was Dr Mark McGlashan, an expert on online safety language.
Walton’s novel explores a gripping personal story, an examination of tech practices, case studies of online harm and proposals on what must change. Her book aligns heavily with Walton’s engagement in advocacy and campaign work in the field of online safety. She is a member of Bereaved Families for Online Safety and a youth ambassador for People Vs Big Tech.
Walton explained she was first driven to write her book after her younger sister, Aimee, became involved in online forums that promoted self-harm, leading to her death in October 2022. After losing her sister, Walton became more critical of technology, questioning how her sister’s despair was exacerbated by the digital world. To find answers, she asked bigger questions about how tech platforms are constructed, who they serve and how they may potentially cause harm. This is how Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World started.
Dr McGlashan inquired: ‘Is there anything going on now in the world that you couldn’t cover in the book?’. Walton, in response, highlighted the prominent and crucial realm of AI. She continued saying she wished she could’ve called attention to the circumstances around Adam Raine’s death, in which the 16-year-old boy received validation from ChatGPT to take his own life. Walton asserted that the only aim of OpenAI is to encourage users to keep using it, a dangerous revelation especially with the pre-existing rise in correlation between mental health and online harm. Walton concluded that Big Tech is not keeping up to protect against this addictive design. This has been incorporated not only into social media, but the AI platforms rising in popularity.
Big Tech is defined as the largest and most influential technology companies in the world. In her book, Walton examines the idea of improving safeguarding and exhibiting the flaws in how online platforms are controlled. This is negated by the argument for ‘individual responsibility and blame’, that individuals are responsible for what they see online and not the systems set up to show this. Walton said, ‘There is a side of tech that is insidious and can shake us at any time of life’, that it is not passive or ethically neutral; it is shaped by design, profit, power and politics.
In conjunction with this, Dr McGlashan questioned how do we prevent future harm in this case. Walton responded saying community features such as collective mobilisation, regulation, public pressure and rethinking data rights are key to actually implementing a safer digital world. She also commented that an issue lies in our incessant use and dependence on our phones. Whilst acknowledging we can’t all log off, we need to be strategic, control our own algorithms.
The topics Adele Zeynep Walton advocates for is and always has been prevalent. If media were more regulated today, maybe Aimee and many others would still be here today. I had a captivating time listening to Walton’s talk and look forward to seeing her journey in campaigning for a safer digital world.
To read the rest of our coverage of the Liverpool Literary Festival, please click here:
https://www.liverpoolguildstudentmedia.co.uk/category/on-campus
