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Category Archives: Youth-Risk Research

Digital wisdom from young filmmakers: “What’s Your Story?” winners

24-May-13

This year was a wonderful departure – and I think trendsetter – not only for Trend Micro’s “What’s Your Story?” video contest but for Internet safety education as a whole. It asked filmmakers to show us what “the good side of the Internet looks like” to them. There are two grand prize winners, a school [...]

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Major update from Pew on teens’ privacy practices in social media

21-May-13

Contrary to how they’re typically represented in the news media, “few teens embrace a fully public approach to social media,” Pew Internet reports in a major new study, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy.” Yes, they share more about themselves than we did as teens, but “they take an array of steps to restrict and prune [...]

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Social cruelty on Ask.fm & the whack-a-mole tendency

22-Apr-13

Remember Formspring.me? Three years ago some terrible trolling that reportedly involved teens in New Jersey made the site, which announced it was shutting down* last month, a national news story in the US. Teens’ viral adoption of Formspring and its format (ask a question, get an anonymous answer) reportedly took the site by surprise. Disturbing [...]

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Net use: How young Australians line up with kids in 25 other countries

29-Mar-13

Australian young people are highly connected people, on the whole. Part of the reason, probably, is that they’re such mobile users. They’re “disproportionately likely” to be online with a smartphone or other handheld device, according to the AU Kids Online report. “Whereas 46% of Australian [9-to-16-year-olds] say they access the Internet via a smart handheld [...]

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Australian teen panelists on social media: Meaty insights

26-Mar-13

My visit to Australia for the World Congress on Family Law & Children’s Rights has been rich in hospitality and insight – I’ve had the privilege of talking with people in government, online-safety advocacy, industry, school (students!), primary and secondary education, research, of course many parents and grandparents, and even “Australia’s Dr. Phil,” as Michael [...]

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Online risk in kids’ own words: A research milestone

14-Feb-13

Up until now, the vast majority of studies about youth online risk have presented kid respondents with risks pre-determined by adults – for example, “the four main risks on the public policy agenda,” as the authors of a new report from EU Kids Online put it. Rarely do surveys of and about children ask the [...]

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Study on long-neglected factor in Net safety: Resilience

22-Jan-13

As a society, we’ve been talking about youth online risk for years, but we’ve only just begun to talk about young people’s resilience, which is what helps them keep risk from turning into harm. It’s important to know, as the authors of an important new report note, that resilience – the ability to deal with [...]

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Important granularity on Net risk for teens: Study

17-Jan-13

An article in the medical journal Pediatrics this month makes significant additions to what we know about youth risk online in two areas: parenting and risk factors for older teen girls (the sample was girls 14-17). The authors of “Association of Maltreatment With High-Risk Internet Behaviors and Offline Encounters” pointed to what we already know: [...]

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COPPA has likely increased minors’ risk: Study

29-Nov-12

If there were no Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, teens would be safer in social media, a new study from researchers at New York University indicates (pdf). Without COPPA, children under 13 would have little to no reason to lie about their age to set up a Facebook account, for example (this would be true [...]

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What is bullying & what can be done about it: Lit review

30-Oct-12

What a project and what a service to anybody trying to get a handle on a long-standing social problem! I’m referring to the recently released “Bullying in a Networked Era: A Literature Review” of more than 150 surveys, articles and other references from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the latest [...]

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