RTL Group | Brussels , 03/28/2018

Protecting Minors on the Web

The Alliance to Better Protect Minors Online, a multi-stakeholder initiative to tackle harmful content, met in Brussels on 21 March 2018 to discuss current and future projects. Claus Grewenig, Vice President Governmental Affairs at Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, participated in the meeting.

Numerous high-ranking representatives of endorsing media and IT companies such as Facebook, Google, Telekom, Twitter and Apple as well as NGOs, e.g. FSM and Unicef, came together for this conference. Claus Grewenig, Vice President Governmental Affairs at Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, attended the meeting representing Anke Schäferkordt, CEO of Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, and Claude Schmit, Managing Director of Super RTL.

Grewenig emphasised the commitment of Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland and in particular Super RTL – its children’s channel which is a co-founder of FragFinn, the search engine for children, which he described as a positive example of a very specific, successful and extremely high-reach project. Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland takes a multilateral approach to protecting minors, not only by preventing children from accessing inappropriate content, but also by creating a secure environment with FragFinn’s positive content white list. Grewenig thanked the participating companies for their commitment to FragFinn and went on to ask for further support from the European Commission in order to continue the successful work.

Claus Grewenig says: “We support the European Commission in providing a high-level exchange of best practice to aim for a safer internet, but also for anchoring the principle of self-regulation in other audiovisual initiatives like the Audiovisual Media Services Directive.”

Claude Schmit says: “We feel it is important to ensure that children’s first experiences with the internet are age-appropriate. As a founding member of FragFinn, we make every effort to live up to our special responsibility as a service provider.”

In the context of protecting young people online, at the start of 2017, Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland and Super RTL declared their support for the basic guidelines of the Alliance to Better Protect Minors Online, a major self-regulatory initiative to address harmful content, conduct and contact online. The Alliance was initiated by the European Commission in 2016 and succeeds the CEO Coalition to Make the Internet a Better Place for Kids.