Ten years ago, Baroness Beeban Kidron had a clandestine cup of tea with a tech executive, whom she refers to as a “Deep Throat”. “Everybody in Silicon Valley knows that they’re hurting kids,” the insider explained. “They know that people are coming for them . . . but at the moment, there’s money to be made. In Silicon Valley, it’s routinely referred to as the ‘lost generation’.”
It galvanised Kidron’s efforts to curb Big Tech. “I was angered, outraged, insulted. And whenever I get tired of doing this, I think, ‘Lost generation’?” Gazing intently from round tortoise-shell glasses, Kidron punches out each word: “Over. My. Dead. Body.”
This conviction has driven the 63-year-old to campaign for over a decade for age-appropriate design and protections for children on websites, messaging services and apps, and more recently on artificial intelligence protections for the creative industry. We are meeting as the release of Netflix’s drama Adolescence has intensified anxiety over teens and toxic online culture, while questions are being raised about the robustness of the UK’s new Online Safety Act.