More Tools, Less Control: Why the ‘Triple Shield’ is Failing Parents
By Parent Zone CEO and founder Vicki Shotbolt.
In November 2022, as the Online Safety Act made its slow journey through parliament, the conservative Secretary of State for the Department of Digital Media Culture and Sport announced in a statement that the government planned to “remove the clauses pertaining to ‘legal but harmful’ content for adults and replace them with a ‘Triple Shield’ that empowers users and ensures that control over the online experience rests with individuals rather than anonymous committees in Silicon Valley.”
The Triple Shield approach included the removal of illegal content, the removal of content that breached a platform's own terms and conditions and finally user empowerment tools to give users more control over the content they see. The shield approach was intended to protect freedom of speech for adults whilst ensuring that children were adequately protected. A potentially cunning solution to a challenging conundrum. Or was it?
Parent Zone decided to explore more fully the tools ecosystem looking at the number of tools available across 8 platforms.
In 2023, we found 121. A number we considered to be overwhelming. In 2026, we identified 747. An explosion that demonstrates compliance but not necessarily empowerment.
However, the picture is more nuanced than the headline numbers suggest. The tools are quicker to activate than we previously found, primarily because many more are on by default. Some tools have been ‘bundled’ meaning multiple tools can be located and activated at once. In other words, there are genuine signs that tech companies are trying to create tools that cover every eventuality and making efforts to make them easier to use.
There are, of course, buts. We found a lack of consistent definitions for user controls, parental controls and empowerment tools.
It’s impossible to figure out when any given tool was last updated, much less map those updates to changes to the platform itself. Crucial information if you’re a parent who wants to adjust settings as platforms change or as your child transitions to a new stage or circumstance.
The proliferation of tools is clearly something that has to be rationalised if the promise of ‘user empowerment’ and ‘parental control’ is to be fulfilled. We looked at a limited number of services. Add gaming and the plethora of other digital platforms that a young person might interact with and the complexity becomes staggering. Pity the parent with multiple children, enjoying multiple platforms with various digital interests and limited time to act as the family’s Chief Digital Officer.
Has the Triple Shield delivered or has it consumed large amounts of engineering time and vast amounts of parenting energy? We called it a False Hope.
We would probably reframe that now as misguided optimism that highlights the need for more technically literate policy decisions. Decisions that are designed to nudge joined up, cross platform cooperation and consistency not just compliance. A clear indication – if one were needed – that regulation that ignores unintended consequences is bad regulation. The line between intention and success needs to be carefully plotted and fully mapped. The state of the tools ecosystem needs to be resolved. Policy makers would do well to reflect on Jane Goodall’s famous quote: "You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
We encourage platforms and policy makers to challenge themselves to decide – do you want to make digital parenting easier or do you want to set and comply with regulation that makes it more complex and less effective.