Katherine Langford

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, before the internet, sometimes I would see lone individuals standing on street corners holding large signs with hand­written messages along the lines of “The end is nigh” – often they were unkempt with a slightly crazed look in their eyes, and it was generally understood that they were to be avoided.

Imagine if you will, approaching a bookshop (if you are lucky enough to live in an area where there still are bookshops) or library to find a particular book, and the whole street is lined, crowded even, with people holding large, shouty signs that scream “He really said that”, “This is really happening”, “Is this collapse???” and “You won’'t believe this”, just to name a few.

The people are all shouting as loud as they can, crossing your path and trying to stop you from getting in the doors.

This is the modern gauntlet we must run in search of any real information on social media – YouTube I’m looking at you in particular.

The purpose of social media has devolved to provide impediments to finding any information that might actually empower us and make us useful.

These platforms are specifically tailored to distract, enrage, divide and isolate us.

We no longer choose what we are exposed to – the algorithm does it for us and its aim is categorically not in our interests.

It’s psychologically destructive and corrosive on our relationships and society.

We need to understand that this is the landscape our children, tamariki and rangatahi are more often than not left to navigate on their own.

And it is becoming more challenging by the day with Al and the deregulation of the tech industry.

Cyber-security company Norton released data recently that 23 percent of New Zealand school children are replacing friendships with Al chatbots for emotional support and companionship.

Google has also announced that its Gemini Al chatbot will soon be accessible to children under 13.

The ethical and moral implications of these developments are not considerations for tech companies, whose motto is to “move fast and break things”.

Social media and Al are facts of life now, but, just as we teach our kids about other pitfalls such as stranger danger, our kids should be equipped with knowledge about “the nature of the beast”, and the skills to act in their own best interests.

This should be on every school’s curriculum, now.

And by extension, that means that we have a responsibility to educate ourselves as well.