Anne Collier’s Bio
Journalist and youth advocate Anne Collier is executive director of the new national nonprofit organization, The Net Safety Collaborative, that’s piloting iCanHelpline.org, the U.S.’s first Internet helpline for schools. TNSC is a partnership of Anne’s NetFamilyNews.org, founded in 1999, and #ICANHELP, a national nonprofit founded by student leadership educators Kimberly Karr and Matthew Soeth in 2014. In 2006, she founded ConnectSafely.org with technology journalist Larry Magid, which they co-directed for nearly a decade.
She gave her most recent talk, “The Heart of Digital Citizenship,” at TEDxGeneva during the ITU’s World Summit on Information Technology, May 2016.
Anne has served on three national task forces on youth and Internet safety, including as co-chair of the Obama administration’s Online Safety & Technology Working Group, which delivered its report to Congress, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet,” in June 2010, and the Harvard Berkman Center’s national Internet Safety Technical Task Force of 2008. Most recently she served on the Aspen Institute Task Force for Learning & the Internet of 2013-’14.
In 2011 and ’12, she was a member of the curriculum working group supporting the launch of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, and helped form its inaugural Youth Advisory Board. In conjunction with the Foundation’s launch, she collaborated on several papers for the Foundation and the Berkman Center’s Kinder & Braver World Project. Between 2011 and ’14, she helped spearhead and facilitate workshops on digital citizenship for young people from many countries at Internet Governance Forums in Vilnius, Nairobi, Baku and Istanbul.
Books Anne has contributed to include Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents (Oxford Press, 2014) and Cyberbullying Prevention and Response: Expert Perspectives (Routledge, 2011). With Larry Magid, she co-authored MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking (Peachpit Press, 2006) and a number of social media guides for parents.
Anne has spoken widely on Internet safety myth-busting, the digital age literacies and digital citizenship; appeared on PBS Frontline’s “Growing Up Online” (2008); has been heard on public radio and nationally syndicated commercial radio in many states; and has been quoted in the New York Times, Business Week, the Associated Press, and many other publications.
She currently serves on the Safety Advisory Boards of Facebook, Ask.fm and Snapchat and the advisory board of the London- and Washington-based Family Online Safety Institute. Prior to working in the Internet safety field, Anne worked on print, radio, TV, and Web versions of the Christian Science Monitor, having served as its first Web editor.
A Massachusetts native, Anne holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Principia College and the University of Chicago and lives with her family in the Seattle, Wash., area.
