“We know all about you”: how are teenagers commercially influenced online?

What’s on offer?

This event will showcase the different forms of commercial harm experienced by teenagers online and aims to engage and facilitate teenagers to explore together different forms of online commercial harm experienced by teenagers. It will demonstrate how online platforms manipulate teenagers’ online commercial decision-making and will help teenagers develop awareness and techniques for the purpose of enabling them to identify and avoid online commercial harms in the future. Sessions include Online Commercial Harms Showcase Videos; Pairing & Sharing Showcase: reflecting on teenagers’ adverse online commercial experiences which they suffered as a result of online commercial manipulation; Expert led discussions in the “Whose watching You?” Workshop will help teenagers to see how online platforms use the teenagers Personal Data to build a profile of them; and the “Ways to manipulate You" Online Workshop will show teenagers how Consumer Decision Making is manipulated by online platforms. Finally, the Law workshop, “Your rights and your data” will illustrate how online platforms make use of consumers data, both legally and illegally, in order to manipulate your online purchasing decision-making.

What’s it about?

In 2022, Ofcom reported that 99% of UK teenagers are active online and recent research shows that over 70% of UK teenagers find online adverts attractive, with 39.8% (of that 70%) frequently making online purchases following exposure to such online manipulative content. 95% of UK teenagers use video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, exposing them to high levels of adversarial content of a commercially manipulative nature. Teenagers exposed to this online commercial content are highly influenced by it, yet are afforded little protection from different forms of online commercial manipulation deployed against them by influencers and online commercial platforms. If you would like to participate or learn more, please join us in November 2023 at the University of Leicester to discover how your personal data has been collected online, how it is analysed and used by online platforms to influence your online purchases, and why the Law has not been sufficiently effective to combat online platforms anti-consumer practices that adversely affects your commercial well-being.

Who’s leading the event?

Dr Jing Wang, Associate Professor in Law at University of Leicester, accompanied by Guest Speaker Professor Dermot Cahill, Expert in Competition and Consumer Manipulation in the Online Space

Open to

Young people aged 13-18, and families

Of particular interest to

This event will be of particular interest to young people who are: Internet and social media users; Interested in how their personal data is collected and used by online platforms; Interested in how their online purchase decision-making can be manipulated; Interested in seeing what kinds of interesting research law students can engage in at University; Interested in considering a degree in the Social Sciences (Law, Politics, Business Studies, etc).

Event booking deadline

Booking will close on Thursday 9th November (12 noon)