Children’s rights and advertising literacy in the digital era: towards an empowering regulatory framework for commercial communication

On a daily basis, children are exposed to a broad variety of new digital advertising techniques. These new forms of commercial communication have specific features (i.e. immersive, interactive, personalised) that make them particularly appealing to children, but also raise concerns as children often do not recognise or understand the persuasive intent of these new forms. Accordingly, these new forms raise significant legal and ethical questions from a children's rights perspective (e.g. their right to development, privacy and data protection, participation). However, currently a wide array of provisions regulates commercial communication aimed at children, across various channels. The research starts from the observation that the regulatory framework is fragmented into both legislative and alternative regulatory instruments (i.e. self- and co-regulation) and takes as its working hypothesis that this potentially may lead to gaps or overlaps such as inter alia a lack of clear and uniform definitions and even contradicting rules, which in turn may have a negative impact on children's development and advertising literacy. Therefore, the project questions what substantive and procedural elements a regulatory framework on commercial communication needs for children to be educated and empowered to cope with commercial communication (i.e. ad literate), so that they can grow up to be critical, informed consumers who make their own conscious choices in today's new media environment.status: publishe