Reflection: safer social media is possible

In this episode, Andy, Jo, and Emily are joined by Ashley Mady, President of Zigazoo — a social media platform built specifically for kids that has been quietly growing its user base to over 10 million while the wider debate around children and social media has grown louder and louder. The timing feels right: with social media bans for under-16s being debated in legislatures around the world, Zigazoo makes the case that the answer isn't to shut kids out of online social spaces altogether, but to build better ones.

Ashley walks through what Zigazoo actually is and how it works. At its core, the platform is challenge-based — kids respond to video prompts by creating their own short-form content, and everything goes through moderation before it reaches the feed. The design philosophy is the inverse of most COPPA-compliant platforms, which tend to solve the safety problem by removing engagement entirely. Zigazoo keeps kids active and social, it just does so within guardrails built by educators rather than pure tech entrepreneurs. The founding team — husband and wife Zak and Leah — bring that dual lens of engineering and digital wellness to every product decision, and Ashley is clear that the mission is read aloud at every team meeting to keep it front and centre.

The moderation conversation is illuminating. Zigazoo started with round-the-clock human moderation but has since developed a hybrid "human in the loop" model where AI handles the initial filtering — including detecting whether a user is a child or adult and flagging inappropriate content — while humans remain part of the process. The addition of a comments feature, which was held back for years due to concerns about intent being lost in written text, was only made possible once AI became reliable enough to support it.

There's a lot of ground covered on what the platform has learned about kids' behaviour online. Notably, Zigazoo found that punishing bad content didn't work as well as rewarding good content — a shift from early notification-heavy approaches to a model that simply surfaces positive posts and lets the algorithm do the teaching. Kids who post well get featured; kids who don't get silence rather than a telling-off, and they adjust accordingly. The existing community of over 1,000 kid creators reinforces those norms organically, policing the platform's culture with a pride of ownership that Ashley describes as one of its most unexpected and valuable outcomes.

The platform's audience data is interesting in its own right. While Zigazoo launched as a preschool app, its core audience has aged with it — 9 to 12 year olds are now its most active creators, and some users who joined five years ago are still on the platform at 15. Rather than losing them to mainstream social media, Zigazoo has had to keep evolving to stay relevant, a challenge Ashley acknowledges openly and with some enthusiasm.

The brand and commercial side of the platform gets a thorough airing too. Over 100 brands — from Paramount and Amazon to toy companies, sports organisations, and publishers — use Zigazoo as a COPPA-compliant way to build genuine two-way community with kids. The platform vets all brand partners for mission alignment and manages their channels directly, which keeps the quality high but also means brands get something genuinely rare: verified, bot-free engagement with actual children. A wishlist feature that sends personalised emails to parents when a child saves a product is highlighted as a standout commercial innovation — formalising the influence kids have over family purchasing decisions in a way no other platform can currently match.

The episode closes on a broader cultural note. Ashley sees the current generation of kids as meaningfully different from their parents — more media literate, more aware of the downsides of social media, and more interested in positive online experiences. Jo echoes this from her own experience as a parent, noting a generational swing away from the open, unguarded approach their own generation took to early social media. The group agrees that banning kids from social media entirely risks pushing them towards unmoderated spaces via VPNs and hand-me-down phones, and that platforms like Zigazoo represent the more responsible path.

Key Takeaways:

1. Zigazoo makes the case for building better social media rather than banning it — the platform argues that keeping kids off social altogether drives them to less safe alternatives, and that the right response is purposefully designed, moderated spaces.
2. The challenge-based model is central to how it works — kids respond to video prompts with their own content, creating active participation rather than passive scrolling, while everything is moderated before reaching the feed.
3. Rewarding good behaviour outperforms punishing bad behaviour — early attempts to notify kids when content failed moderation created a negative experience. Surfacing good posts and letting poor ones disappear quietly proved far more effective at shaping behaviour.
4. AI-assisted "human in the loop" moderation has unlocked new features, including the comments section that was held back for years — a reminder that moderation technology, not just policy intent, sets the ceiling for what's safely possible on kids' platforms.
5. The platform's community polices itself — 1,000+ kid creators model positive behaviour, and when TikTok faced its US ban and new users flooded in, existing Zigazoo users actively told newcomers that this was a different kind of space.
6. Age-gating within the platform recognises that under-16 isn't a monolith — the experience for a 6-year-old looks nothing like that for a 13-year-old, a distinction that blanket social media bans tend to collapse entirely.
7. Zigazoo has become a Gen Alpha trend intelligence platform — with 10 million users and polling features originally built for fun, the platform now has genuine insight into what kids are talking about, buying, and looking forward to, before those trends surface elsewhere.
8. The brand model is built on mission alignment and white-glove management — brands can't self-serve onto the platform, which keeps commercial activity COPPA-compliant and maintains trust with parents and kids alike.
9. The wishlist-to-parent email feature is a commercial innovation worth watching — it formalises child-to-parent purchase influence in a privacy-safe, opt-in way that no other platform currently offers.
10. Parent involvement is baked in from signup, which Ashley argues leads to longer platform lifecycles — a child whose parent has given informed consent is far less likely to be pulled off the platform than one who has found their way onto something their parents don't know about.