Earlier this year, we announced the expansion to Australia of Snap's Council for Digital Well-Being (CDWB), following a successful pilot programme in the US. The CDWB is designed to hear from teens on the state of digital life and their ideas for creating safer and more empowering online experiences. In June, we selected our Australian Council Members and today we are excited to introduce them! 

The Australian Council for Digital Well-Being is made up of eight thoughtful and engaging teens from across the country: 

• Aadya, 15 years old from Queensland

• Amelia, 16 years old from Victoria

• Bentley, 14 years old from Victoria

• Charlotte, 15 years old from Victoria

• Cormac, 14 years old from Western Australia

• Emma, 15 years old from NSW

• Millie, 15 years old from Victoria

• Rhys, 16 years old from NSW

More than ever, it's vital that young people are given a forum to share their perspectives on online safety and digital well-being, and for platforms like Snap to actively listen to their experiences.

Throughout the course of the programme, the teens will convene regularly for calls as a cohort and work on projects related to online safety. The teens, along with their parents and one grandparent, also gathered for an in-person summit at Snap's Australian headquarters in Sydney this July.

It was a productive couple of days, full of inter-generational discussion, breakout groups, guest talks and a lot of intra-cohort bonding. The teens also got a better sense of what it's like to work at a technology company through a "speed-mentoring" session with a diverse group of Snap team members across engineering, marketing, communications, safety and sales.

The summit included frank and insightful conversations on topics such as being (or parenting) a teen today, online pitfalls, misconceptions about teens' digital lives and parental tools. The teens told us that they feel adults sometimes misunderstand their online activities, noting that they believe online safety is a shared responsibility. With parents and grandparents, discussions revolved around the critical importance of trust between parents and teens, as well as online safety education. While the social media minimum age law was not a focus of the summit, both teens and (grand)parents raised concerns, including around the potential loss of social and emotional support for teens if they are banned from social media. 

We know the summit was as meaningful to the teens as it was to Snap. As one Council Member said, "Working together on important issues in the digital world allowed me to gain perspective and come up with different ideas and solutions for the problems that teens experience".

In addition to the summit, we've also held three cohort calls so far to discuss the programme and the Council Members' aspirations for it, establish group norms and discuss online safety-related topics including what the teens were experiencing online, why they might (or might not) report online content and child rights in online environments.

We look forward to working with our amazing Council Members throughout the rest of the programme and we can't wait to share further insights from them!

— Ben Au, ANZ Safety Lead