What is digital safety and how do we measure it? – Safe Online

What is digital safety and how do we measure it?

A new white paper by WEF’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety offers a roadmap

A recent white paper by the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety highlights the critical need for assessing digital safety. It provides a roadmap to navigate the complexities of measuring digital safety in the context of ongoing technological advancements and evolving regulatory frameworks.

Accurate measurement of online safety is crucial for creating a safer and more reliable digital environment. It supports informed decision-making, guides policy development, and raises awareness of digital safety issues among all stakeholders.

However, measuring digital safety is not an easy task – fundamentally, digital safety involves preventing and minimising harm in the online environment. This includes moderating illegal or harmful content, promoting responsible platform design and governance, and empowering users to customise their digital experiences. This is especially complicated in a fast-evolving environment with rapid technological advances and regulatory interventions.

Given the complexity, the white paper proposes a set of metrics grouped into three basic categorisations to most meaningfully measure digital safety.

3 Metrics for Digital Safety

Impact: Metrics that illuminate the impacts on individuals and provide insights into characteristics and patterns of lived experiences.
Risk: Metrics that enable the detection and mitigation of potential harms.
Process: Metrics that cover the approach, implementation and outcomes of systems relating to digital safety.

These categorisations are not meant to be comprehensive and instead offer a guiding framework for tracking and measuring digital safety. Read the white paper here

Images: Safe Online/Vincent Tremeau

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