Value Framework Update
CMF Deputy Director Colin Ward outlines the latest progress on CMF’s innovative Value Framework concept…
In February, the CMF announced it was developing a Value Framework to encourage government, regulators and video streaming services to focus their efforts on one of the key challenges we need to address; how do we ensure UK children access a range of media content that has value for them. No more slop, AI generated or otherwise! Nothing deliberately designed to be addictive. Just well-made media content created with sensitivity to the different developmental needs of the children’s audience. But if we want government and media platforms to support that high-value content, we need to agree on what it looks like.
Traditional broadcasters, along with streaming services who commission content, already have filters in place to achieve that goal, and taken overall, those commissioning structures do a good job of ensuring the audience sees content that has some value. That’s why the BBC’s services are so popular with parents. But, as we know, traditional children’s platforms are under severe financial pressures because of changing audience viewing habits. And when it comes to the video sharing platforms children are choosing to watch – like YouTube and TikTok – there is no obvious mechanism to bring content of value to the surface. The only content criteria that really counts for an ambitious VSP are; is it safe, and will it keep kids watching on our platform? And the VSPs are impressively good when it comes to at least one of those criteria.
I’m not sure it makes complete sense to blame the platforms for that situation. If you allow any business to operate without effective regulation then the directors will seek to maximise profits, as they are required to by law. That’s why we have, for example, regulatory laws to protect the environment, or to restrict what you can put in food to enhance flavours or reduce production costs. We even have laws to protect children online; we just haven’t been making a serious effort to enforce them.
But that’s a digression – although not entirely. Because some sort of Value Framework has to be part of a new and enhanced regulatory framework designed to ensure children access high-value, life-enhancing media content that is appropriate to their developmental needs. And it needs to be a regulatory framework that government is prepared to enforce.
The aim of the CMF’s Value Framework is to see if we can pull together our collective understanding of children’s media experiences – as parents, educators, commissioners, producers, digital content creators, animators, writers and performers, and over time with the input of children as well – and use that knowledge to develop algorithmic recommendations on VSPs that are appropriate for the children’s audience. We want to see if it is possible to train an AI-driven content filter to quickly identify, at scale, media content that has value for children, so we can give that content prominence on platforms via the algorithmic recommendations.
At the Children’s Media Summit we sent out an open invitation to join the project – which is still an option, if you are interested? – and we now have a group of ‘judges’ who have tested the first iteration of the framework to see if the proposed criteria can deliver a meaningful assessment of content. As of this week, we have a report based on the data and, as expected, there are some areas where there is agreement and others where we need to take a look at the questions we have used to explore the criteria. For example, the scores on ‘production craft’ were consistent, but when we looked at ‘educational value’, there were some significant differences in how our human ‘judges’ scored the same content.
The work on the Value Framework will continue at CMC (7-9 July) and over the summer of ’26. And if you think it sounds like a seriously difficult project to take on, well, you’re not wrong. But the CMF believes that how we identify value in media content is a critical challenge that we simply must address.
Ideally, we would like to see government and the big media platforms take a lead on this work, supporting academic research to develop and test a framework. But until then, we will keep reminding them that recent events – the anger from parents who can see their children exposed to low-value, addictive content and the proposed social media ban that grew out of their anger – have only sharpened the need for the Value Framework.
Everyone says they want online media experiences for children that are age-appropriate, life-enhancing and provide value to the audience. Why don’t we make that a reality? Why don’t we put our energy and resources into answering this question; in an online world that operates without human intervention, how can we identify high-value media experiences for young audiences and surface that content?
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