Two concepts have recently emerged that invite us to rethink the relationship between children and digital technology: the datafied child (Lupton & Williamson, 2017) and children’s digital rights (Livingstone & Third, 2017).  The datafied child highlights the amount of data that is being harvested about children during their daily lives and the children’s rights agenda includes a response to ethical and legal challenges the datafied child presents. Children have never been afforded the full sovereignty of adulthood (Cunningham, 2009) but both these concepts suggest children have become the points of application for new forms of power that have emerged from the digitisation of society. The most dominant form of this power is called platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016). As a result of platform capitalism’s success, there has never been a stronger association between data, young people’s private lives, their relationships with friends and family, their life at school, and the broader political economy. In this article I will define platform capitalism, outline why it has come to dominate children’s relationship to the internet and suggest two reasons in particular why this problematic. 

‘At the most general level, platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact. They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects’ (ibid, p43). Examples of platform capitalism include the technology superpowers – Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. There are, however, many relevant instances of platforms that children and young people use. This includes platforms for socialising, platforms for audio-visual content, platforms that communicate with smart devices and toys, and platforms for games and sports franchises and platforms that provide services (including within in the public sector) that children or their parents use. Young people choose to use platforms for play, socialising and expressing their identity. Adults have also introduced platforms into children’s lives: for example Capita SIMS is a platform used by over 80% of schools in the UK for assessment and monitoring. Platforms for personal use have been facilitated by the popularity of tablets and smartphones. Amongst the young, there has been a sharp uptake in tablet and smart phone usage at the expense of PC or laptop use. Sixteen per cent of 3-4s have their own tablet, with this incidence doubling for 5-7 year olds. By the age of 12, smartphone ownership begins to outstrip tablet ownership (Ofcom, 2016). For our research at the OII, even when we included low-income families in our sample, 93% of teenagers owned a smartphone. This has brought forth the ‘appification’ of the web that Zittrain predicted in 2008. This means that children and young people predominately experience the internet via platforms that we can think of as controlled gateways to the open web.

In public discourse some of these platforms are called social media. This term distracts us from the reason many of these publicly floated companies exist: to make money for their investors. It is only logical for all these companies to pursue the WeChat model that is becoming so popular in China. WeChat is a closed circuit platform, in that it keeps all engagements with the internet including shopping, betting, and video calls within its corporate compound. This brings WeChat closer to monopoly on data extraction.