How advertising works… even when you don’t realize it. Just letting kids know they’re being advertised to is not enough to make them engage critically with an ad. Helping kids recognize how advertising works is essential, too. Even young kids can become more skeptical about marketing when they’re told why and how ads try to persuade them.
"Given the opportunity, young people do care about issues relating to the harnessing and use of their information online. They want to know what information is being taken from them, and why. They want companies to be more open about how data is being used."
Advertising: It’s everywhere. No, it’s not your imagination. The amount of advertising and marketing we are exposed to daily has exploded: on average, we see more than four thousand ads each day.[1] At the gas pumps, in the movie theatre, in a washroom stall, on stickers on fruit, during sporting events and plastered all over social media—advertising is pretty much impossible to avoid.
Generative AI is what we call AI systems that can generate things like images, video, voice and text. They do this by first encoding many examples of the kind of content they’re going to make, then decoding to make something new.
Parents of young children have an important role to play in protecting their kids from invasive marketing and in educating them about advertising from an early age.
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The commercial features and distribution models of the movie, traditional television, streaming video and online video industries each exert an influence on the type of content produced, how it's crafted and how audiences engage with it.
Although many concerns remain about how gender represented in media, there are signs that things are changing. Roles for women on television, in particular, have become much more varied and complex in the last decade, ranging from the conflicted Star Wars hero Ahsoka to Marvel characters such as Echo and Ms. Marvel to more realistic characters like Never Have I Ever’s Devi, while a growing number of movies and TV shows are questioning narrow definitions of masculinity.
Given the high likelihood that youth are going to come across or seek out online pornography at one point or another, not to mention the many messages they receive about sex through other media, it’s important that parents take an active role in their kids’ internet use and start talking to them about healthy relationships and sexuality at early ages to help them contextualize and make decisions about what they’re seeing online.