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.