Why has Filmin joined UNICEF’s #AlgoritmoSeguroYa campaign?

• To mark World Mental Health Day on 10 October, Filmin is joining UNICEF Spain’s call on the tech industry to design algorithms that protect the emotional wellbeing of children and teenagers.
• The campaign has unveiled “La Lección” (The Lesson), an installation in Madrid where, for every signature, an algorithm copies out the sentence “I will not harm children’s mental health again”.

Comunidad Filmin has joined #AlgoritmoSeguroYa, UNICEF Spain’s campaign calling on the tech industry to build algorithms that are safe for children and teenagers. The company is signing up to mark World Mental Health Day, held on 10 October.

Social media algorithms repeat messages over and over until young people learn them. They are designed to capture their attention, not to look after their emotional wellbeing. According to UNICEF Spain, 4 in 10 young people believe they have had a mental health problem in the past year, and 1 in 3 have not talked to anyone about it.

A lesson for the algorithm

To make the problem visible, UNICEF Spain has unveiled “La Lección” (The Lesson), an installation in Plaza Ruiz Picasso in Madrid that turns a shared school memory on its head: copying out a sentence a hundred times to learn your lesson. This time it is the algorithm that has to learn. For every signature collected at algoritmoseguroya.es, an algorithm copies out the sentence “I will not harm children’s mental health again”. One signature, one copy. The petition has already gathered more than 21,700 signatures to date.

Comunidad Filmin’s commitment

As well as spreading the word about the campaign among its subscribers, staff and on its communication channels, Comunidad Filmin has signed the petition. For the company, joining this call is consistent with something it has championed for years: technological humanism. In its personalised recommendation system, the algorithm never works on its own. It always operates under a layer of human editorial judgement, and is not merely supervised by Filmin’s editorial team but subordinate to its judgement from the very start. Filmin believes that technology must start from people’s judgement, a conviction that carries even more weight when there are children and teenagers on the other side of the screen.

A local campaign with global reach

#AlgoritmoSeguroYa is part of NTP: Coméntalo, UNICEF Spain’s movement for the mental health of children and teenagers. It is also the Spanish version of Turn Down the Noise, the global campaign of the Coalition for Youth Mental Health.

Anyone can join by signing the petition at https://firmas.unicef.es/algoritmoseguroya-filmin