Safe social media app for children

chrismon: Nina and Kai, you have developed an app for children that helps them communicate safely with friends or family. How did you come up with the idea?

Nina Lindenblatt: When our children were small, they had their friendship books. Once they reached secondary school, they were no longer cool. But the children wanted to continue to communicate and stay in touch.

Kai Afflerbach: And since our two children were the same age, Nina and I started thinking about whether there might be a more modern and contemporary way to do this than with friendship books: with a secure app.

Is it desirable for children to be playing on their mobile phones at the age of ten?

Kai: Children are keen on social media. And the idea of ​​digital communication is great in principle. But parents are overwhelmed by the task of constantly banning children from using WhatsApp or Snapchat. And if they do allow it, the dangers are far too great.

Nina: We all know how it is: scrolling through Instagram for hours and looking at posts from people and influencers we don’t even know. It’s a waste of time, you get addicted to it, even children. And: There are dramatic figures about depression and suicidal thoughts in children due to too much social media.

Kai: My daughter keeps telling me that she is “approached” by strangers several times a week. Now, at 16, she is old enough and has developed enough digital skills to recognize and block these posts. We know from studies that 40 percent of all 10- to 17-year-olds have unwanted contact with strangers. That’s almost every second child. I find that very frightening.

Nina LindenblattPrivat

Nina Lindenblatt

Nina Lindenblatt, born in 1979, is a creative director and has been working in the fashion, design and lifestyle sectors for over 15 years. She has been working independently for ten years and is commissioned by her clients to develop, design and implement projects. She is co-founder of Nyzzu and, as managing director, is responsible for the Strategy and Creative areas.

Kai AfflerbachPrivat

Kai Afflerbach

Kai Afflerbach, born in 1971, is a lawyer and has worked in project management, corporate finance and investment advisory for more than 20 years. Until 2020, he headed the Hamburg office of a Norwegian investment bank. At Nyzzu, he is co-founder, managing director and responsible for corporate, finance & legal.

What is different about your app?

Nina: We planned safety from the beginning – it’s called “safety by design”. The children can only communicate with friends or family. Only “contacts” who know each other can network.

But then you also have to know the addresses – just like with Whatsapp.

Kai: Yes, that’s the only way the app can work and recognize acquaintances. But we don’t store addresses – that’s the difference to the big networks like Snapchat or Whatsapp.

Here too, parents have the opportunity to adjust the services to suit their children.

Kai: That’s what people say all the time. Anyone who has ever done it themselves knows how complicated it is. The functions are often hidden and don’t really make sense. I don’t know any father or mother who finds that satisfactory. In my opinion, these are marketing gimmicks.

Nina: With us, children learn digital skills: editing short films, adding music to them, sending them to friends. We’ve designed it to be easy to understand, but not in a child’s Mickey Mouse look, but with a style that older people will also like. Our goal is for the app to grow with the child and perhaps for parents and other relatives to get involved too.

How do you avoid hate speech or body shaming?

Nina: We work with artificial intelligence that immediately recognizes hate speech and, if requested, reports it to parents. We have no algorithm, no data analysis that pushes and distributes particularly “exciting” posts, for example. This is precisely why negative or scandalous news is more widely distributed on traditional social media, including in children’s feeds. No one can protect themselves against this. Children are at its mercy.

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On the other hand, that’s also the real world – your app seems like a bicycle with training wheels: an artificial shelter, somehow not quite real?

Nina: That’s exactly what children need, “training wheels” to learn to ride a bike properly. No ten-year-old child knows how to protect themselves from strangers talking to them on Whatsapp or Insta. Nyzzu offers this learning space. We also work with schools and want to expand this further.

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Developing an app is time-consuming. How do you finance yourselves?

Kai: First through friends, family and then crowdfunding. Later, the app will be financed through advertising and a subscription system.

Nina: We actually wanted to go online in 2021, but there were always technical problems that we had to solve with our programming team. This made the development much more expensive than expected. Now we have been working with a first real version online and hope that we can go viral. In principle, we can grow infinitely, even if we only have real friends of friends, only family members.