Episode Title:

This is a special compilation episode revisiting two of the Kids Media Club's most popular conversations on kids online safety — with Ashley Mady from Zigazoo and Chris Heatherly, former General Manager of Club Penguin at Disney. With regulation around kids social media still very much in flux, it felt like the right moment to bring these two perspectives together.

Ashley walks through how Zigazoo works — challenge-based, fully moderated, no bots, no personally identifiable information — and makes the case that safe social media for kids isn't an oxymoron, it's a design choice. The platform's hybrid AI and human moderation model, its age-gated content tiers, and its wishlist-to-parent email feature all point to what's possible when child wellbeing is built into the product from the ground up rather than bolted on afterwards. When TikTok faced its US ban and new users flooded in, existing Zigazoo kids told them how to behave — which is probably the most compelling endorsement of a platform's culture imaginable.

Chris brings the historical weight. Club Penguin at its peak had 200 million registered avatars and was, as he puts it, the biggest playground in the world — and his job was to keep it safe and keep it fun. The corporate story is a cautionary one: Disney's MBA-led strategy teams couldn't quantify the value of community, and the platform was eventually shut down despite fierce internal opposition. But the emotional legacy Chris describes — kids who found belonging and identity on Club Penguin that they couldn't find at school — is a reminder of what's genuinely at stake when these platforms get it right.

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Regulations are still very much a point of discussion around Kids Media and we thought it was a good opportunity to look back at two of the past.

Two of our past episodes.

One was with Ashley Maddie from Ziggur Zoo and the other one was with Chris Heverley who previously worked at Disney during the Club Penguin days.

We chatted to both of them about safe social and regulations around Kids Media and how you create an environment that's both fun and safe for kids online.

Let's take a listen.

Thank you all for having me on.

Really excited for an important and relevant conversation.

Yeah, Ziggazoo is really safe social media for kids.

It was created by two parents and former educators really out of need for their own kids to have safe, safe spaces online.

And in today's world, kids are, you know, living in this half digital, half physical world and there really needs to be a safe space for them.

So that's, that's why we exist.

And we really are pioneering what social media can look like for kids.

And we've been ahead of all the trends that have been happening in our world and it's something that we're really proud of.

Awesome.

Can you explain?

So I'd love to understand a bit more.

Like how does the platform work?

What does the platform look like?

How do kids interact on it?

Give us the nuts and bolts.

Yeah.

So the center of Ziggazoo is all actually based around project based learning.

And so we designed the app to be fully interacted.

Do the kids know that?

Shh.

We're like a gummy vitamin.

We don't tell them about all the stuff underneath the hood.

We can bake in all of the good stuff and still give kids that social digital experience that they're looking for.

So everything's challenge based.

We take a short form video, pair it with a challenge question, and then kids actually get to respond by commenting or making their own video.

We moderate all the content we're moderating out, you know, everything where kids can't share personally identifiable information.

There's no cursing, there's no bullying.

Like it's, it's really all positive interactions.

So they get to actually create videos, share them with, with their friends, and also respond and engage with polls.

So they're really building a community and brands are getting to build communities within the ecosystem.

Celebrities are getting to interact with kids, and kids get to be creators, which is ultimately what they're, what they're looking to do.

Tell us about the moderation, because we were speaking with Chris Heatherly on the podcast a few weeks ago recently, who was there for the early Club Penguin, Club Penguin days.

Because, you know, both from a creator point of view and from a swearing point of view, kids can be very innovative, right?

Or like in the ways that they speak and in the ways that they, you know, they learn the game and they try to circumvent the game.

So like, how do you guys manage that?

Because that's like an ever changing code, right?

It's a great question.

When we first started, we were all human, moderated, and we moderated 247 our around the clock.

And that worked great in the beginning.

And I think as we're, as we're growing and as we look to what we can become, humans alone are not the perfect solution.

And fortunately, AI has really helped us create what we call human in the loop moderation.

So AI can quickly recognize, is this a kid or an adult?

Did they use a swear word?

And we have a, a really complex matrix that it moderates through and it's able to keep kids safe.

And yeah, I think on the positive experience side, we aim to teach digital citizenship.

All that stuff that we didn't get, we were just thrust into the world of social media and then we created our own rules on how to behave.

And now we're looking back saying we, we know we definitely got it wrong.

So we're making sure that there's the proper guardrails and teachings.

Last year when the TikTok ban happen, we had a lot of new users come to the app and kids were telling their friends.

And then a lot of the kids within the walls of Zigazoo are like, this is not like TikTok.

It's positive only.

This is our space and really kind of telling the outside world how to behave.

I think that's the biggest difference.

You know, we're founded by a husband and wife team, is our director of digital wellness.

And so she, I, I call the heart of our organization.

She's, she's the one that's baking in all the good stuff.

And even as we as a team to do more commercial things in nature, she's always the one pulling us in other directions and challenging us to make sure we're doing what's right for kids.

So even at every single team meeting that we have, we read out our mission because we want to make sure we keep center in what we're building.

They're not leaving.

We have 15 year olds now that we've been around over five years that are on Zigazoo and they're still creating.

So.

So we age gate all the content within Zigazoo because we recognize, you know, a 13 to 15 year old experience looks very different.

The most interesting thing that shocked us as an organization is that they're not leaving.

And, and that's an incredible challenge.

And now we're at a point where we really are the collective tastemaker for Gen Alpha because we have over 10 million users and they are, you know, shaping the trends, they're sharing the trends.

We can see what they're talking about, what they care about, their view of the world.

We want to lift their voices.

And also we added a polling feature which we created as a just for fun engagement feature for the kids.

And now there's so much that we're able to learn, like we asked them questions about our own app to guide us on features and things that we should do and create.

And now the industry is tapping into that in really interesting ways as well because we have a lot of, a lot to learn if we can listen to the voices.

That's really fascinating because one of the things we've ended up discussing a lot about the proposed social media ban for under 16s and one of the things that we've often talked about is how sometimes there can be quite a crude filter in which people just talk about everyone under 16 is treated the same.

Whereas it's always seems kind of crazy to us that you'd treat somebody that was 5 year old the same as you might treat a 13 year old.

Yeah.

So it's interesting that you're already looking at age gating and kind of aging up with your audience.

Are you finding the other kids, brands or other parents are kind of receptive to, to that that might be concerned about having their children on social media.

But do you find that there's kind of an understanding that actually you can treat those age groups very differently on.

Social media that comes on Zigzoo isn't seeing something on Zigzag for the first time like we want, we want to make sure that, you know, their lunch table conversations are different at every age and stage and they can still follow creators based on interest.

And, and, and we're also making sure the content that ends up on the app is positive and good.

So like the stu.

I wouldn't Want them exposed to that song or those words or this kind of behavior that's not going to make it up on the app anyways.

So we want to keep, we want to keep kids innocence and you don't have that on other platforms that kids are on.

They can stumble into the wrong space very quickly.

Yes, we actually, we have no bots on our platform.

That's one of our roles and we can guarantee that you're reaching an actual Kid.

So over 100 brands partner with Zigazoo and I'm talking everyone from Paramount to Amazon.

I think every major publishing company is on Zigga Zoo, most of the toy companies, U.S. soccer, the NBA, Urban Air, the list goes on and on.

So it, it's really become the destination that if you are talking to kids that you need to be on Zigzag we have a wish listing feature where kids can see the product that they love, wish for it and then it sends a personalized email to the parent.

And there's no other platform that can do anything like that.

Usually you're either targeting the kid or parent separately or it's some kind of co viewing.

We have this co creation with the whole family and we know how important.

That pest of power which used to be just you know, running into your.

Mom or your dad now that they get an email, you can pester your parents via email.

I think the most challenging is we amassed a great amount of users and we're really proud of our growth.

And we also recognize that there's still more work to do to make sure every parent, every family, every brand knows about and they're turning to us as a solution.

The biggest challenge is the re education of the world and legislation meeting us where we are is helping to, to educate the world.

It's not all scrolling is doom scrolling.

100% And it's better for you, right?

Like we compare ourselves to the Whole Foods movement.

You know, it's better for you.

There's better choice.

Yeah.

So I'm Chris Heatherly.

Thank you for having me on.

I've been in games, media and Entertainment for over 25 years.

I was at Disney for half of that.

I ran parts of their games business including club where I was a general manager for probably about seven years.

My background really has always been in tech and innovation.

So I tend to focus on skating where the puck is going which, which means often you're too early.

And I had left.

It's actually one of the reasons I left is because I just, I refused to shut it down.

Disney was Just extremely short sighted about gaming.

And Club was built by, you know, a bunch of like artists who could code, not engineers.

So the tech was actually pretty.

It was a huge online community.

It was a huge online community and we were doing sometimes 300,000.

Problem was that no one understood gaming in those terms at that time, right?

It was, did that, did that, did they also understand, do you think there was an issue with a corporate mindset not maybe understanding building community at that point?

And the value of community over.

Oh, they had no had suits.

Tell me what's the value of community?

What's the value of a network?

Can you quantify it?

And I was like, well I mean look at the, you know, market cap of Facebook, right?

Like that's predicated on community MBAs who parachute into the strategy group at Disney and you know, never work as operators.

And all they know how to do is look at spreadsheets.

And so, you know, they're, and, and they were going to get promoted by, you know, cutting.

It's always easier to cut than it is to grow.

One thing I want to say that Club Penguin was like, you know, it's kind of like this, this legend now, like that team.

What I loved about working with that team is everyone woke up every day focused on the kids and making the best play experience for the kids.

And we were listening.

Most of our best ideas came from the audience.

Like that card jitsu game I talked about was based on a meme kind of legend that the community came up with.

Around there were a bunch of blotchy images in some of the early art.

And so the kids started speculating, oh, those are ninjas.

And so when we wanted to create this card game, the kids had been wanting this for a long time.

Let's just do it.

And I don't think that Disney really understood the kids, you know, threatening suicide or reporting, you know, sexual abuse at home or you know, there were all kinds of things like that where, you know, we were constantly working with law enforcement to keep kids safe, respond to kids emails.

And the idea that kids could get was like, oh my gosh, they listen to me, they recognize me, they responded to me.

And that made a lot of kids feel very special.

There, there's a massive community that, that still is involved in Club Penguin.

And so Club Penguin is like this for them, youthful innocence.

Our job was to protect the innocence of the audience, push more mature culture on younger and younger kids, and that our job was to protect that innocence for as long as we could.

She said, at school, I'm not the most popularest one, but on Club Penguin, I could be who I want to be and people like me for who I am and that.

And we took that clip and we were like, that's really the heart of what we're trying to do here.

Yeah.

I used to say, like, I run the biggest playground in the world.

My job is to keep it safe and to keep it fun.

What I found is, like, you can appeal to their.

To their better angels, not just their worst instincts.

A lot of media is too cynical to actually believe that something can be good.

You're funding it like a cause, and.