Digital Dangers: Tips from a Tech Insider - from ADHD, Anxiety and More Podcast (Ep. 171)

Welcome back to Child Mental Health for Pediatric Clinicians, helping you help kids.

I'm your host, Dr. Elise Feluco, child psychiatrist and mom.

So I am beyond excited about this episode, which is gonna be part one of a series about how do we keep our kids safe in the digital world? How can we help parents help their kids stay connected and take advantage of all the positive things about access to various games and apps and social media while at the same time minimizing potential risks.

And so for that, I'm so happy to be able to introduce our expert guest for today's episode.

She's dedicated her life to keeping children and families safe.

Having worked in U.S. national security for 16 years, she currently serves as the senior manager of global risk assessment for Twitch.

She helps to lead an international team in the trust and safety field in tech that works around the clock across the globe to ensure that the content that children and teens are accessing online is safe.

Before Twitch, she worked at Twitter.

And you may be familiar with the names of these companies because they are global international tech juggernauts.

And in addition to all of this, Ashley is a mom raising young children in the world with us.

And so she brings her expertise and experience from all of these areas to help us better understand what are the risks and dangers in the digital world.

And most importantly, what can we do to help keep kids safe? I'm so excited to welcome Ashley today to the podcast.

Welcome, Ashley.

Hi.

So great to have you on here.

And I'm so excited to learn from your expertise.

I mentioned that you work in trust and safety, but a lot of us outside of the tech world may be unfamiliar with that.

Can you tell us a bit more about this field and about how it's helping to keep children and families safe?

Yeah, absolutely.

So trust and safety is an industry in which you have a lot of professionals looking at content online and trying to take it down when it does arise or trying to prevent the content from happening in the first place.

So you have a lot of people who are writing the policies for different websites and apps and platforms.

They're the ones that are kind of coming up with the rules as to what is and is not allowed online.

And then you have people who are actually looking at content and trying to determine whether or not the content is in violation of our rules.

So for my job, I work in the risk area of Twitch.

Within Trust and Safety, I'm the lead of the global risk assessment team.