The Bijou Lecture (2024)

Dr Victoria Nash is a Guernsey-born academic whose research focuses on children’s use of digital technology, both the opportunities and the risks that it poses. 

Dr Nash is Director, Associate Professor and Senior Policy Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford. She also holds several digital policy advisory roles, on internet and digital safety and consults on broader issues such as platform governance and Internet regulation.

Victoria has also recently analysed the UK’s Online Safety Act and the effectiveness of traditional forms of regulation. 

In this year's lecture she shares her insights with the ODPA’s Data Protection Commissioner Brent Homan.

They start off by discussing how keeping children safe online means striking a delicate balance between our parental urge to protect them, on the one hand, and the necessity to empower them on the other. They move on to explore the need for parents and children to share their experiences and knowledge with each other, and the fact that education leaders play a critical role in empowering young people to be safer online. Moving to the role of regulation, they explore the implications of the Online Safety Act which was passed into UK law in October 2023, and whether effective regulation can make the online world safer for everyone. Finally, they take an imaginary trip to the year 2054, to imagine how today’s children will look back, as adults, on the actions (and inactions) of today’s tech giants, parents, and policymakers.