Co-Developing the Digital Wellbeing Hub to support Canadian Digital Citizenship

 

With funding from Heritage Canada’s Digital Citizen Contribution Program, this project will work together with youth and community partners in the unique co-development of Canada's first comprehensive Digital Wellbeing Hub as a safe online space for young people, parents, educators, decision makers, etc., to access the latest in trustworthy digital citizenship literature and to learn from new, innovative, experience-based educational tools that have been co-developed with Canadian youth from a digital rights perspective. Dr. Tilleczek and her team will work with a 10-person Youth Advisory Committee in the co-creation of this online space to ensure it will truly respond to the current needs of young people. The team collaborate widely to investigate new and ongoing challenges that young people experience in their online worlds, and this research will continue to provide a wealth of new and needed data on emerging trends and experiences of young Canadians with a) online surveillance and privacy-related issues, b) knowledge of digital rights, c) challenges, barriers, and inequities, d) mis/disinformation, and e) other online harms and threats (such as cyberbullying, hate speech, etc.). 

Challenge

With 99 per cent of Canadian homes connected to the Internet, Canada is one of the world’s most highly connected countries (Gruzd, 2020). A 2020 study surveyed 1,500 Canadians (18+) about their social media use and found that 94% of adults who are online are using social media (many of whom use it daily) with young adults (ages 18-24) being the largest adopters of social media (Gruzd & Mai, 2020). In the wake of increased, pandemic-induced online learning and socializing, young people’s online existences and identities comprise more of their everyday lives. 

Despite Canadian youth spending more time online each year, particularly during and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, understandings of the impacts of online disinformation and other online harms and threats on the wellbeing of youth, with particular attention to marginalized youth, are lacking. While the OECD (2019) reports that Canadians are faring well compared to other OECD countries in their experiences with online disinformation and other risks and harms, they acknowledge that this assessment lacks data on aspects of digital security and wellbeing. We know through our youth-centered work that young people living within today’s digital ecologies experience them as deeply paradoxical and a source of unease; they both value and question digital technologies - seeing opportunities for social connection, access to information, engagement and activism while simultaneously noting problems in becoming asocial, controlled, surveilled, and addicted/anxious (Tilleczek, 2019; Tilleczek 2023 a, b, c, d). They are concerned about privacy breaches, safety, loss of quality education, disinformation, and exposure to "nasty humanity" (Tilleczek, 2019). Youth are critical barometers of how digital technologies are working and how they impact the wellbeing of people. They help us to see if policies and regulations to improve digital ecologies are landing well and if not, which negative consequences most need to be redressed and how (Tilleczek 2023 a, b, c, d).

The purpose of this project is to leverage existing scholarship, policy frameworks and networks towards co-development of a new and much-needed Canadian Digital Citizenship tool - a Digital Wellbeing Hub. The Hub will also further the impact of the PI’s previous research on Youth in the Digital Age (Phases 1 and 2) which examines how various forms of digital technology (and the issues and harms encountered within it) are affecting and influencing the wellbeing of Canadians. The goal is to better educate, engage and inform Canadians (of all ages) about the potential harms and threats in online spaces and how to safely navigate and mitigate these from a rights-based perspective informed by the 2021 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, General Comment 25 on rights in the digital age. 

Outputs and Impacts

This project responds to an identified and urgent need for research and educational tools to address the threat and impacts of mis/disinformation in Canadian society, particularly for Canadian youth (Brisson-Boivin et al., 2023; Heer et al., 2021). Through critical and participatory engagement with youth and key stakeholders, this project develops and tests a new online educative space, the Digital Wellbeing Hub, as a repository for innovative, educative tools from current scholarship, research and investigations from the YLRL and contributing partners and their various networks (UNICEF Canada, The Students Commission of Canada, People for Education Canada, Pathways to Education Canada, the Canadian Mental Health Association and their Well Central platform, OPN Digital Transparency Lab, and the Civil Liberties Association of Canada). In doing this, the project objectives include: 

1) Co-develop and evaluate a Digital Wellbeing Hub for Canadians as a state-of-art educational space to address Digital Citizenship for young people, parents, educators, and policy makers; 

2) Populate the Digital Wellbeing Hub with tools (e.g., learning modules, briefing notes, youth testimonials) based on current scholarship into individual and societal digital wellbeing amidst emerging digital technologies (including generative AI) and their consequences for Canadians (e.g., mental health, security, privacy, safety, education, and surveillance); 

3) Provide new research evidence on how online tools and content (including mis-/disinformation, hate speech, and cyberbullying) influence youth wellbeing, what they still need to know, and how best to counteract it through digital literacy education and regulation; 

4) Connect the Digital Wellbeing Hub into a vast network of Canadian initiatives to better support digital wellbeing and citizenship for Canadians as the success of a whole network is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Expected project impacts include: 

1) Enhanced dialogue (academic and public) about digital wellbeing including online mis/disinformation, harms and threats with specific data on inequalities for Canada’s marginalized youth; 

2) Expansive public education (in French and English) through innovative knowledge mobilization*, teaching and outreach of team members and partner organizations and via the creation/promotion of the Digital Wellbeing Hub and a large, networked web of youth-serving NGOs that reach thousands of youth collectively as well as via the Youth Advisory Committee to their peers and communities; and

3) An engaged team, network and rich evidence base that helps to position Canada in the national and global conversation about digital wellbeing, citizenship and online mis/disinformation, harms and threats for youth and the types of education and responses that are needed to counter these issues. 

*co-created with the team and York’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit which will include various online methods focused on youth and the general public as well as academic promotion via conferences, publications and presentations with a focus on scale-up and impact at a policy and decision-maker level

This project has been made possible [in part] by the Government of Canada.
Ce projet a été rendu possible [en partie] grâce au gouvernement du Canada