A digital companion that supports rather than lectures children and young people and is also entertaining: this is what the interdisciplinary and international consortium "COURAGE" is working on. However, constant parental supervision of what their children are exposed to on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat is neither realistic nor desirable.
But perhaps a digital companion could be the answer -- an assistant that recognises and comments on problematic content and at the same time sensitises users so that they do not spread it themselves. And the researchers are convinced it is possible to learn how to deal with virtual worlds much in the same way as you learn to drive a car: with theory and practical practice.
The digital companion is designed to help with this. Sabrina Eimler conducts research in Bottrop at the interface between society and computer science, psychology, cultural studies, and economics. She has a clear idea of the digital companion: it should be interactive and neither annoying nor patronising. This means designing information and communication technologies in such a way that they are seen to be beneficial, that they take one's autonomy into account and expand skills, but also strengthen empathy and solidarity with others: in other words, roughly the opposite of what only too often happens in social media.
If we succeed in strengthening autonomy, competence, and solidarity in the spirit of positive computing, we may be able to help reduce hateful attitudes and hate speech online," says Eimler, explaining her motivation. The researchers soon moved away from the original idea of developing a chatbot that would simply run on a mobile phone.
In Eimler' view, 'It's one thing to have an idea β and quite another to realise it in such a way that it complies with all standards of protection. That was one of our first realisations: The language is so finely granular that we can't even say exactly when we're dealing with a critical case of an interaction where a human should definitely intervene.
