Can the social Web be policed?

In "Cyber-bullying cases put heat on Google, Facebook," Reuters points to increasing signs around the world that people want to hold social-media companies responsible for their users' behavior. "The Internet was built on freedom of expression. Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused. And major Internet companies like Google and Facebook are finding themselves caught between those ideals," it reports. Back before social networking, when people harassed or fought merely over the phone, people didn't hold phone companies accountable for settling the disputes. In the US, the Communications Decency Act extended that "safe haven" to Internet service providers, and courts have included social-media companies in that category ever since.

Here's the view from Australia, where the Sydney Morning Herald reports some cruel defacement of tribute pages in Facebook have gotten Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to consider "appointing an online ombudsman to deal with social networking issues." [Maybe that's where we're headed: countries having ombudsmen able to decide if complaints in their countries should be "escalated" to their specially appointed contacts at social sites at home and abroad? But what about sleazy social-media operations that fly under the radar or refuse to deal?]

Certainly it's understandable that people expect more from social network sites than they do from phone companies because bullying is more public and harder to take back, but is the expectation logical? That's an honest question, not a rhetorical one (please comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum), because what does not seem to be different in this new media environment is how arguments and bad behavior get resolved: by the people involved. It may take time with complaints sent from among tens and in some cases hundreds of millions of users, but fake defaming profiles and hate groups do get deleted by reputable social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. Deleting the visible representation of bullying behavior, however, doesn't change much. Bullies can put up new fake profiles as quickly as – often more quickly than – the original ones can be taken down.

Of course we should expect companies to be responsible and take such action, but can we reasonably blame them if doing so has no effect on the underlying behavior? What court cases like the one in Italy against Google executives for an awful bullying video on YouTube that the court felt wasn't taken down fast enough (see the article in the Washington Post above) illustrate are: humanity's struggle to wrap its collective brain around a new, truly global, user-driven medium where the "content" is not just social but behavioral – and the full spectrum of human behavior at that.

If you do, please comment, but I know of no real solution to social cruelty on the social Web as yet except a concerted effort on the part of the portion of humanity that cares to adjust to this strange, sometimes scary new media environment by adjusting our thinking and behavior. That includes teaching children from the earliest age, at home and school, social literacy as well as tech and media literacy (social literacy involves citizenship, civility, ethics, and critical thinking about what they upload as much as download) – as well as modeling them for our children. Can it be that universal, multi-generational behavior modification is not just an ideal, but the only logical goal? What am I missing, here?

NY predators deleted from Facebook, MySpace

The state of New York has made it easier for social network sites that work with it to deleted sex offenders registered in that state. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo this week announced that two sites that do use the state's database to check for predators, MySpace and Facebook, have purged the profiles of more than 3,500 sex offenders - "Facebook was able to identify and disable the accounts of 2,782 registered sex offenders" and MySpace 1,796 accounts, ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid reports in CNET. New York has a law that "bans many registered offenders from using social-networking sites while on parole or probation and requires all registered offenders to disclose their email addresses, screen names, and 'other Internet identifiers.' That data is provided to social-networking sites to run against their rolls" (some states just fax over a list, Facebook says, making it difficult to identify the offenders in sites with hundreds of million profiles). MySpace says there has never been a case reported of a registered sex offender deleted from the site being prosecuted for illegal contact on the site. Cuomo praised both sites for their work in this area, adding that many other social network sites are slow to cooperate. "As always, it's important to put this news into perspective," Magid writes. "It only involves registered sex offenders, which of course,is a good start, but it only includes people who have been caught and convicted. And, while the companies do their best to ferret out registered offenders who try to hide their identity, there is no way to know how many people succeed in eluding them. Also, we know of very few children who have been sexually molested by someone they met on social-networking sites or any Internet sites. The vast majority of child sex abuse victims know the offender from the real world.... And, based on conversations with security officials at social-networking companies, I am not aware of any cases where a registered sex offender has been convicted of using the site to aid in harming a child he or she met on that site."

Students sue school for social Web-related discipline

The two Indiana girls who, during a sleepover before their sophomore year started this fall, posted some sexually suggestive photos in a MySpace profile set to private, thought of it as a joke among friends, says the ACLU, which filed the lawsuit on the girls' behalf. "The suit contends that someone copied the pictures and shared them with school officials, and they eventually were given to the principal," the Washington Post reports. "None of the photos made any reference to the school," it adds. The girls, athletes, were suspended from all "all extracurricular activities for the year" at first, but the school later "reduced the penalty to 25% of fall semester activities after the girls completed three counseling sessions and apologized to the coaches board." The school's attorney "said [the principal] was enforcing the northeast Indiana school's athletic code, which allows the principal to bar from school activities any student-athlete whose behavior in or out of school "creates a disruptive influence on the discipline, good order, moral or educational environment at Churubusco High School." Do you think the school's definition of "material disruption" (of students' ability to learn, a test that has been used in a number of cases involving student free speech and off-campus behavior in social media) is too broad? Your comments welcome, via email (anne[at]netfamilynews.org) or, better, posted in our forum at ConnectSafely.org.

MySpace: Entertainment hub that tweets

MySpace is taking steps in two directions, both solidifying its entertainment focus and expanding its social-media offerings. According to CNET, it "plans to launch a new video service sometime in the next several months with the help of sister site Hulu," in which MySpace parent News Corp owns a significant stake. The first step will be an overhaul of MySpace Video, adding more "feature films, TV shows, and music videos," CNET adds. On the social front, MySpace is syncing up with Twitter, TechCrunch reports. So – like Facebook users – MySpace members can opt to have their MySpace status updates automatically shared with all their Twitter followers (Twitter's version of MySpace "friends") and vice versa. "A couple weeks ago, AOL made its AIM lifestream go both ways with Twitter (and Facebook) as well. So we are definitely seeing a trend here," TechCrunch adds. Also on the social side, ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid reports in CNET that the Department of Justice now has a MySpace profile partly to drive traffic to its new Justice.gov site" but also apparently to provide "unmoderated forum where users can comment and 'interact with the Department in entirely new ways'." [See also my "MySpace's metamorphosis?" this past August.]

A different sort of back-to-school tip: Kindness

Kindness and mindfulness, really. Those two approaches to the Internet as well as life are both attractive and protective. "Attractive to others, maybe, but protective?" your kids might ask. Yes. Because aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized, researchers have found (see Archives of Pediatrics). Mindfulness covers both alertness and critical thinking - about what's going out via connected devices as much as what's coming in, whether to/from peers, advertisers, or strangers, as well as about how much and how we're involved in it all. Hemanshu Nigam, a dad and MySpace and News Corp's chief security officer, wrote about the kindness part this week, zooming in some important "how-tos" for social networkers: how to "post with respect, comment with kindness, and update with empathy." Help your kids remember how protective – of them, their friends, and their online experience – this approach is.

As for how we approach the online experience (as well as online friends), the other day I wrote about the 24/7 connection to friends and the drama that both the collective and the constant connection (texting, updating, commenting, chatting, etc.) seem to generate and perpetuate (see No. 2 in this post). If the scene is important to them (and it probably is) and they feel the need to stay very engaged, then here's one way to think about it from youth adviser Annie Fox, which also picks up on the kindness issue: "Don't Add to the Garbage." MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle wrote: "Tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people" (see her article "Can You Hear Me Now?" in Forbes last year.

MySpace & iLike get together

Now, this makes perfect sense - MySpace is acquiring iLike, a little music-sharing app very popular on many social network sites - given MySpace's growing focus on participatory music (see "MySpace's metamorphosis?"). "The [acquisition] strengthens MySpace’s grip on the music market – iLike is second only to MySpace Music in popularity [with 55 million users] – and extends the reach of the social network, which has lost serious traffic in recent months to Facebook," the Christian Science Monitor reports. The creators of iLike says it's "the dominant music application" on Facebook, Google's Orkut, Hi5, and Bebo, and Business Week reports it won't leave those sites when it belongs to MySpace. Here's a 2007 interview USATODAY did with iLike CEO Ali Partovi in which he explains how it works. [Also related is "'Beatles: RockBand' & participatory music."]

India's digital natives

Nearly 10% of the world's under-25 population live in India, and they "are shifting their career aspirations and social life to the digital world," India's Economic Times reports. The study, by Tata Consultancy Services, surveyed 14,000 high school students in 12 cities and found that over 93% of respondents "were aware of social networking sites and used it in some way in their daily life. Bangalore students are "leading the pack, as 66% of them said they were active on blogs and social networking sites, compared with 39% nationally." Nine percent of them use Second Life and MySpace and do podcasting. "Among social networking sites, [Google's] Orkut was most preferred, followed by Facebook, while Google continued to be the most preferred source of information." Careers that top their list are the ever-popular IT and engineering, but "other fields like travel and tourism, media & entertainment are emerging as professional choices." The US and UK are the top picks for overseas university study (40% want to go to the US), but Singapore and Dubai "are preferred by one in five students in Chennai and Cochin, respectively, as top choice for overseas education."

Russia's avid social networkers

Russians are the most engaged social networkers in the world, spending an average of 6.6 hours in social sites a month, based on comScore's survey of online social networking in 40 countries. "Of the 1.1 billion people age 15 and older worldwide who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 734.2 million visited at least one social networking site during the month, representing a penetration of 65% of the worldwide Internet audience," comScore's press release says. The rest of the Top 10 countries in May were Brazil (6.3 hrs), Canada (5.6), Puerto Rico (5.3), Spain (5.3), Finland (4.7), UK (4.6), Germany (4.5), US (4.2), and Colombia (4.1). Russia's Top 3 social network sites were Vkontakte.ru (18.9 million people or 45% of Russia's Net users), Odnoklassniki.ru (24%), and Mail.Ru-My World (20%). Facebook (2%) and MySpace Sites (1%) were 7th and 9th place, respectively.

Teen social-networking fatigue?

Now that parents are flooding Facebook, might it be losing cachet for teens? The fastest-growing age breakdowns in the past three months were women 55-65 (175.3% growth), 45-54 (165%), and 35-44 (154%), according to InsideFacebook.com (the site also just passed the 200 million mark for users worldwide, the San Jose Mercury News reports). Not that it's a quid pro quo, but people who follow this stuff are wondering if there's a new "place" on the horizon where teens might prefer to hang out - for example, maybe the part of the wireless spectrum that text messaging uses. The indicators of texting's popularity (teens are sending and receiving 2,274 a month, on average, the Washington Post reports) suggest that it may be stealing some of users' Facebook time. But a sudden mass migration is unlikely (people don't just leave social sites - not if their friends don't leave). More likely is that "FB passion among youth is fading," as social media researcher danah boyd observed in Twitter and Facebook the other day.

Responding to that, YPulse founder and youth marketing blogger Anastasia Goodstein wrote in her blog that "it may be that teens aren't necessarily going somewhere else; they’re just spending less time on social networks and more time socializing in real life, texting, etc. That makes sense to me, that Facebook (and for many teens MySpace) will need to move over and make room for the growing number of other tools in their social toolbox - an important one, nonetheless, because it does represent a tool *bundle* (email, real-time chat, asynchronous wall comments, etc.). So it may be kind of naïve and adult to think there has to be a single new place or technology teens will adopt en masse, (though social networking was like that back in 2005, that was then, this is now). [Other noteworthy FB numbers: though no longer the fastest-growing, 18-to-25-year-olds are still the biggest population segment of Facebook by far (43%), parents may be interested to know that 13-to-17-year-olds make up only 12% of the FB population.] There's more on social-networking fatigue, enthusiasm, and ambivalence at Yahoo News. And from the "This just in!" Department: comScore just released data showing that Facebook now accounts for about a third of all online social networking worldwide and 4.1 out of every 100 minutes we all spend online, The Guardian reports.

Facebook friend saves suicidal teen

A girl in the US saw a suicidal comment from a UK boy on her Facebook friends list, and within three hours he was found and taken to the hospital for treatment, The Daily Mail reports. "Shortly before 11.30pm [last] Wednesday [the 16-year-old boy] wrote: ‘I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out'." His friend knew the school he went to but not his address, so she told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in Washington. Police local to the boy "had just a name to go on but narrowed the search to eight addresses in [his] county. Officers were dispatched to each location, and three hours after the boy had filed his Facebook message, he was found at home [conscious] " conscious but suffering the effects of a drug overdose." He has since been released from the hospital and "is recovering at home," The Daily Mail adds. The story bears out what the US's National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told me for a 2007 profile of its work with MySpace and other social sites, that peers are often the first to know when a teen's in trouble, so social network sites are a vital source of referrals to hotlines.

Teens' online friends = offline friends: Study

Fresh evidence this week that most teens use the Web to socialize with their "real life" friends - "people they already know rather than strangers who might turn out to be predators," USATODAY reports. A study of students in grades 9-12 by University of California researchers "will be presented at a meeting of the Society of Research in Child Development" this week, and similar findings were "published last year in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology." Among the former's key findings: For 44% of youth surveyed, using social network sites "had no effect on their relationship with their friends and 43% said it made them closer; 5% had "friends known only from the Internet."

Cellphones = wireless connected computers

Landlines may be going away (see CNET), but don't think of cellphones merely as their replacement for voice communications - at least not if you're a parent. Because to get a better handle on how young people use phones, think of them as "the world's most ubiquitous computers," as the New York Times put it recently, adding that there are 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide right now. The social network sites certainly get it. MySpace "has seen its mobile user base grow by 400% from last year, and now nearly 20 million users access the site through [mobile] phones," InformationWeek reports, and Facebook "is also looking to expand its mobile presence and is reportedly in talks with Nokia and Motorola for tighter integration into handsets." (BTW, on the landline subject, CNET reported that 17.5% of US households depended solely on cellphones for their phone communications during the first half of 2008, up from 13.6% a year earlier.)

Parental social networkers multiplying

Well, an actual group labeled "parents" wasn't measured, but I suspect parents figured prominently in a Nielsen study that found 35-to-49-year-olds are the fastest-growing group in social-network sites. "Time spent on these sites is growing three times faster than the overall Internet rate ... [and] more than two-thirds of the world's online population now visits social networking and blogging sites," USATODAY reports, citing the study. In fact, one out of every 11 minutes of the average Web user's time is spent in a social site, the USATODAY article says, and one out of every 6 minutes in the UK, reports the BBC. The Nielsen study looked at nine countries. Among these, Brazil was No. 1 in social networking and blogging with 80% of Net users visiting such sites. Spain and the US were Nos. 2 and 3, at 75% and 67%, respectively, according to USATODAY. Social networking has surpassed Web email among top computer activities across the user population, the (others are search, portals, and PC software). As for mobile social networking, the numbers of Britons accessing a social site via their phone was up 249% (the BBC doesn't say, but that's probably in the past year). If you're a parent in Facebook or MySpace, check out "Virtual helicopter parenting" and, in the Los Angeles Times, "Big Mother is watching."

The Dunbar no. & online social networks

A few years ago, extrapolating from her study of primates, Oxford Unviersity-based anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that "the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148," The Economist reports. That's usually rounded off to 150 and called "the Dunbar number." The Economist interviewed Facebook's "in-house sociologist," Cameron Marlow, whose findings pretty much match up with the Dunbar number - an average of around 120 "friends," but ranging from a handful to thousands. I've long suspected that people whose friend lists are at the upper end of the spectrum are marketing more than being friends or, in the case of young adolescents, working through the "popularity contest" that school social scenes can represent. Here's the thing, though: Marlow told The Economist that the average person with 120 Facebook friends responds to the comments of (keeps in close touch with) only 7-10 friends (men at the low end of that range) - their "core network." Beyond that are the "casual contacts that people track more passively." The Economist ends with the observation that "humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever." Not that everybody uses social network sites to advertise themselves, but I do think the second half of that observation is exactly right. [See also the UK's NewScientist.com on "how social networking might change the world."]

*Social* classifieds: Safer

Combine social networking and classifieds and online buying and selling really start to make sense. Why? Because you can get a much better feel for who you're dealing with. You can peruse the profile of the person who responded to your ad. Even better, you can go to your network of friends and acquaintances first when you're ready to unload that laptop or car, no screening required. And you can donate the proceeds to a charity of your choice in a few clicks. I'm mentioning all this because Oodle, which started providing online classifieds to MySpace last summer, today launches Facebook Marketplace (disclosure: Oodle is a sponsor of NetFamilyNews, but even if it weren't I'd tell you that selling stuff to the wider circle of friends and acquaintances that social networking allows makes sense and is safer than other forms of classifieds online and offline). Where charitable selling on Facebook is concerned, members "can go to Marketplace, post a listing and select ‘Sell for a Cause.’ Once posted, the listing will be distributed to their friends through news feeds allowing the seller to tap their social network for fundraising." This classified advertising's free. Here's the San Jose Mercury News's coverage, and here's Oodle's own Safety & Fraud Center.

Guide to Facebook privacy features

What users do with their own and others' content is just as big a privacy concern on the social Web as what a responsible social network site does with it. Certainly terms of use need to be looked at, but so do your own privacy options, people! Even privacy features can't offer total control over what people do with your content, but they can help a lot - for example, they can keep it so that the photos in your MySpace or Facebook profiles (as long as they're not copy and pasted elsewhere) can't be searched with Google, Yahoo, and other search engines out on the Web. So take advantage of the degree of control privacy features give you. Here's a video tutorial for Facebook's users by my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid, and here are little instructional videos for MySpace and Xanga too at GetNetWise.org. But remember, as Larry put it in his CNET post, "regardless of how you configure your privacy settings, there is a reality of the social Web that can't be configured away. Any digital information that is posted can be copied, captured, cached, forwarded, and reposted by anyone who has access to it."

MySpace's PR problem

MySpace's image problem is partly everybody's problem. It says something about how we view teens - and how willing we are to accept the complexity of teens-on-the-social-Web and our unprecedented inability to assert control in this space. Though the headlines suggest otherwise, this story is not just about crime. It's more about growing up more publicly than ever and maybe a bit of denial on our part that it's the heightened exposure that's new, not the adolescent behavior, and that that exposure - like everything in this picture - is both good and bad. But let's drill down a bit....

1. The myths we develop

Increasingly, the Web is a mirror of all of human life - not just a communications technology or a global collection of hyperlinked documents or even a channel for individual and collective self-expression. So what we're seeing, learning, worrying, and mythologizing about teens in "real life" is directly related to their online experiences as well.

In "The Myth of Lost Innocence," New York Times commentator Judith Warner describes the experience of two Philadelphia sociologists and specialists in teen sexual behavior, Kathleen Bogle of La Salle University and Maria Kefalas of St. Joseph's University. Even though "teens are, in truth, having sex less and later than they did a decade or two ago," Warner reports, Bogle and Kefalas have "had to struggle mightily to get people out of their 'moral panic' mindset, and make them understand that teens are not 'in a downward spiral' or 'out of control'." People "just don’t believe you," Bogle and Kefalas told Warner. The same is true for anyone trying to present the big picture of online teens. In the current moral panic about predators, the fact that overall child sexual abuse has declined by 51% since the Web took off (between 1990 and '05), according to the National Data Archives on Child Abuse & Neglect), and the fact that Internet-related abuse is well below 1% of the overall child-sexual-exploitation figure get drowned out in 1-millimeter-deep reporting about 90,000 predators having been deleted from among some 150 million MySpace profiles. [No one knows, much less reports on, the more important question of whether those profiles led to any communications with teens or how teens deal with them (delete, ignore, block, or reply?). In fact, there have been zero reports that any of those 90,000 offenders have been prosecuted for illegal contact with teens on MySpace (and that would be covered if it happened). For a sample of what we do know about predation risk, see this.]

Meanwhile, amid all the numbers-out-of-context noise, parents, counselors, educators, and social workers can't hear or don't know where to listen for the signals they do need to hear. As Warner puts it, "details concerning exactly which children are suffering, flailing or failing, and in what numbers, and how and why, and what we can do about it – are lost."

In focusing on worst-case scenarios and making them the reality of all online teens, we do parents a disservice and teens a double disservice - by selling them short and distorting the picture of teen social-networking in the eyes of those with authority over them. See also "Chances are, your kids are savvier online than you think" in the Toronto Globe & Mail and New York Times health reporter Tara Parker-Pope's "The Myth of Rampant Teen Promiscuity."

2. How did we get here?

MySpace has become the subject of this kind of hyperbole-fueled, negative myth. Having watched its emergence as a vibrant social and media-sharing tool and music community from mid-2005, I've puzzled over how MySpace got from there to here - how it has come to be almost demonized in the eyes of the adult population, or the portion of it that views the social site through either a strictly law-enforcement lens or that of an adult with no interest in trying to understand social networking in young people's terms.

Its first full year as a Fox Interactive property, 2006, was telling. MySpace found itself, I later told Business Week, in the middle of a "perfect storm" of parental concern development. The converging conditions were:

Its sudden arrival out of nowhere (only as far as parents and other adults - including reporters - were concerned, and adults did not understand this social-networking thing).

Its exponential, viral growth that year (a story that a lot of uncomprehending reporters were compelled to write, well before there was any known social-media research to cite).

A high-profile news story out of Connecticut about a police investigation into whether "as many as seven teenage girls" had had sexual encounters with men they'd met in MySpace. It was a tipping point (see my commentary on that, 2/3/06). Though similar stories have been rare since then, this Connecticut one led to Fox hiring former federal prosecutor Hemanshu Nigam as its chief security officer and turned state attorneys general into social-networking watchdogs (Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, co-leads the AGs' Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking that created the Internet Safety Technical Task Force on which I served).

The launch of Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series, which in no way represented risks to youth on the social Web or even child sexual exploitation in general, but distorted associations were made (see "Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check").

DOPA and a mid-term election. All the above made for great stump speeches about championing child protection, an uncontroversial way to garner votes, and the ill-conceived Delete Online Predators Act, which never reached the Senate but passed the House with an overwhelming majority (maybe partly because voting against it would've somehow looked in the voting record like a vote for predators?). The law would've done more to delete teens from social-networking sites at school than to "delete online predators" (see this item).

Interestingly, though, the clouds of that perfect storm started gathering much earlier on - right at the beginning, in fact. Besides the lifelike picture she paints, I'm seeing in danah boyd's account of what drew teens to MySpace, in her doctoral dissertation, that the site's roots in the music scene have a role in the challenge it faces today too: "Most early adopter teens were attracted to MySpace [in 2004] through one of two paths: bands or older family members. Teens who learned of MySpace through bands primarily followed indie rock music or hip-hop, the two genres most popular on MySpace early on. While many teens love music, they are often unable to see their favorite bands play live because bands typically play in 21+ venues. MySpace allowed these teens to connect with and follow their favorite bands.... Given its popularity among musicians and late-night socialites, joining MySpace became a form of subcultural capital.... Early adopter teens who were not into music primarily learned about the site from a revered older sibling or cousin who was active in late-night culture. These teens viewed MySpace as cool because they respected these family members.... While teens often revere the risky practices of [older nightclub and concert goers], many adults work to actively dissuade them from valuing them. By propagating and glorifying 20-something urban cultural practices and values, MySpace managed to alienate parents early on."

This takes us back to my first points about 1) how behavior, culture, and perceptions offline are mirrored online, and 2) how myths develop out of fears and too much emphasis on the negative part of a phenomenon, which is only a fraction of the reality. Which brings me to the final factor I've seen in MySpace's PR problem: the development of the online safety field itself. The field got its start in and is still dominated by law enforcement and its expertise - all those good people in local police departments and state Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces giving Internet-safety talks in schools about criminal activity in chat, instant messaging, on cellphones and on the Web. Law enforcement people are experts in crime, not adolescent behavior and development (so should they really be giving talks about cyberbullying?), and the latter, certainly not crime, is the lionshare of what's going on with and among teens in social network sites - good, bad, and neutral. What's happening with teens on the social Web is infinitely more about adolescent development than about technology or crime.

Yes, we need to teach children how to keep away from predators of any form, online and offline, but the public discussion has to broaden to reflect reality, from the negatives - the full spectrum of online risk (including noncriminal bad behavior like bullying and harassment) - to all the rest, teen online socializing in general. As for the dark side, even one exploitation case is too many but, for perspective, it helps to keep in mind that what the attorneys general are talking about - social-networking-related crime involving minors (see Newsweek) - represents only a fraction of Internet-initiated sexual crimes against minors, and the latter figure itself, the Crimes Against Children Research Center tells me, "was too low to calculate" in two national samples it used in studies on child sexual exploitation (for more context, see this).

3. MySpace's child-protection record

At my last check of Google News, nearly 900 news outlets around the world ran reports this week that MySpace "evicts," "boots," "deletes," etc. 90,000 predators (the headline at India's Techtree.com was "No space for sex offenders on MySpace"). For brevity, the headlines are in the present tense, of course (I used to write headlines at a newspaper), but the present tense suggests this just happened this week.

What MySpace wrote in a letter to Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina about all this offers another perspective that rarely gets play in the news media:

"Some reports wrongly suggested that there are 90,000 RSOs [registered sex offenders] on MySpace today. This is wildly inaccurate and irresponsible. All 90,000 profiles were removed from MySpace upon discovery and preserved for law enforcement investigations. Such inaccurate reports send the message to other sites that they will be publicly criticized and punished for taking similar steps to protect teens online. While much is being made of the increase in the number of RSOs removed from MySpace since the inception of our program, the fact is that as long as the program is working, the aggregate number of RSOs removed will increase - it is a cumulative number representing all of the profiles deleted over time. The program has been a tremendous success: not only have 90,000 RSOs been removed from MySpace, but MySpace has seen a 36% reduction in RSOs attempting to access the site year over year."

Concerned parents may be interested in this lengthy bulleted list of child-safety steps MySpace has taken on the site, at its headquarters, and in Washington. But short of shutting down its site (which wouldn't "help," because there are zillions of social network services, tools, and technologies provided by businesses worldwide), MySpace or any other social-media business couldn't possibly bar all hurtful or criminal activity from its site - anymore than the phone company can keep people from having any arguments on the phone. Technologies, good business practices, and laws may be able to help keep users safer, but they can't change human behavior or nature. That takes education.

Related links

John Palfrey, author of Born Digital: a print interview in ComputerWorld, a video interview at CNET, and a YouTube video of a keynote he gave at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which he directs

Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital: a video interview on YouTube

Larry Magid and me: 2006 was also the year I met and first interviewed danah boyd, who was a source for our book published that year, MySpace Unraveled: A Parent's Guide to Teen Social Networking.

Sex offenders in social sites: Consider the facts

The only way we can have solid, progressive parent-child and public discussions about children's online safety is if we can keep the facts in mind when we read the latest news about predators in Facebook and MySpace - facts based on consistent, peer-reviewed academic research about online risk. So here are the key facts to keep in mind:

Not all children are equally at risk of Net-related sexual exploitation (see "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies" from the US's Internet Safety Technical Task Force, with a summary of all child-online-safety research to date).

A child's psychosocial makeup and family environment are better predictors of risk than the technology he or she uses (also from the ISTTF report).

The kids most at risk offline are those at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim" and the ISTTF report).

Sexual exploitation as a result of Internet activity (much less social networking) is statistically rare - "too low to calculate in the two national samples we conducted," the Crimes Against Children Research Center has told me.

The vast majority of teens - 91% - use social sites to keep in touch with friends they see frequently (mostly at school), not strangers ('07 Pew/Internet study).

The offenders in the vast majority of child sexual abuse cases are not strangers to their victims (multiple sources).

Despite the establishment of one or more public profiles of "teens" (fake profiles) on MySpace by the Pennsylvania attorney general's Child Predator Unit, "there has apparently not been one successful sting operation initiated on MySpace in the more than two years during which these sting profiles have been in existence" (see "Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context").

Even one case is far too many, but parents deserve to know that - no matter how many news reports they read about predators in social network sites, including this week's - the risk of online kids being exploited by a stranger in such a site is statistically extremely low, and even more unlikely for healthy teens with engaged parents. Parents may find it helpful, too, to read such reports critically - maybe with their online teens, asking them about their own experiences, if any, with strangers in social sites and what they do about them.

Consider, too, the possibility that there may be other interests in addition to children's safety involved in criticizing a whole body of research and keeping predator fears fanned, including political and financial interests (see Washington policy analyst Adam Thierer's commentary and this New York Times article quoting the CEO of a company with significant financial interests in promoting the adoption of age verification of online kids, a serious privacy issue). As CNET blogger Caroline McCarthy put it, "Shock-and-awe press tactics aren't the way to go, especially because threats on the Web are much more complicated than they may appear."

Pennsylvania case study: Social-networking risk in context

This is interesting in light of criticism by state attorneys general of the peer-reviewed research in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report this month: a just-released study from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU). The attorneys general have said the research is outdated (it's actually not, but see the Wall Street Journal) and not enough about predators in social-network sites, so study author Nancy Willard analyzed some data that couldn't be more current: all online predator arrests in Pennsylvania from 2005 through the middle of this month, cited in press releases in Attorney General Tom Corbett's Web site.

In a recent statement, General Corbett said, "I believe this [Task Force] report is incredibly misleading.... The threat is real.... In the last four years, my office has arrested 183 predators, all of whom have used the Internet for the purpose of contacting minors to engage in sexual activity."

No one - in the Task Force report, the research community, or certainly the online-safety field - disagrees that online predation is a risk, and all agree that the attorneys general are performing an important public service in reducing Internet-initiated predation. The risk does need to be put into context, though. A whole lot of parents (those of the 65% of US teens with social-network profiles, according to Pew/Internet) would really like to know how dangerous social networking actually is, since it's so much a part of their kids' lives now.

Willard's analysis looks at 1) Internet-related child sexual exploitation in context (what proportion of overall exploitation involves even the Internet, much less a single social technology on it) and 2) social networking in the context of all online social technologies teens use - chat, IM, etc.

Internet-related child sexual abuse in Pa.

During one year (FY '06-'07) Pennsylvania rape crisis centers and sexual assault programs served 9,934 child victims of sexual abuse, Willard reports.

Over four years (2005 through ’08), the Pennsylvania attorney general's office made 183 arrests concerning Internet-related child sexual abuse through its Child Predator Unit.

Only 8 of the 183 cases involved actual minors (the rest were sting operations involving police posing as minors) - though certainly these arrests may've prevented cases involving minors.

Only 5 of the 183 involved sexual contact.

The only national figure we have is from 2000, when the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that 508 out of 65,000 child sexual exploitation cases were Internet-initiated (where offender and victim "met" for the first time online). [An update from the CACRC is expected to be released soon.]

Social networking compared to other Net technologies

Willard writes that, "because the attorneys general have been focusing their attention on the social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, this analysis gave special attention to any case that mentioned any activity occurring on either of these two sites." She found that:

144 of the sting operations involved chat, 11 instant messaging, and 9 unspecified in the press releases; the rest were cases of child porn possession.

Only one case involved both a teenager and MySpace, "a re-arrest of a person who had already been arrested through a sting," Willard reports.

One case involved a police officer committing child sex crimes: He "was arrested for sexual abuse of many teens with whom he had interacted in the line of duty. [He] also had a MySpace account with links to teen girls, but there was no assertion that these communications had led to sexual activity."

"One predator in a sting provided the agent with a link to his Facebook page," Willard writes.

"In 5 of the stings that took place in a chat room [no minor involved], reference was made to the fact that the predator had either looked at the 'teen’s' MySpace profile or suggested the 'teen' look at his account."

And the Child Predator Unit itself has, since November 2006, "maintained one or more public sting profiles [depicting teens] on MySpace," but in four years not one arrest has occurred as a result of communications through its fake teen MySpace profiles.

What Willard concluded was that, though a single state's arrests are not a representative sample, "the arrest reports on the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s site fully support the insight and conclusions of the Berkman Task Force Research Advisory Board. The incidents of online sexual predation are rare. Far more children and teens are being sexually abused by family members and acquaintances.... It appears that chat rooms are far less safe than social networking sites and that there is limited inclination and ability of predators to use social networking sites to contact potential teen victims.

"However," she notes, "some predators are apparently looking at non-protected social networking profiles to obtain more information about victims," and more research on the secondary role social and media-sharing sites might be playing is needed. The attorneys general are right - we need more granular understanding of how predators operate - and we can only get that when they make their case records available to the research community. By law, the Electronic Privacy Communications Act, Internet service providers (including social sites) can't share data on users' communications without a subpoena or other court instrument. Once that subpoena has been served, for example by an attorney general's office, that information can be made public. Let's hope the attorneys general, who didn't provide predator data to the Task Force researchers whose report they're criticizing, can soon make it available to the research community.

Let's broaden the discussion

But online crime needs to be seen in context too. Crime must be addressed, but so much of what is happening online - including among teens, of course - is good. Or neutral. Or bad but not necessarily criminal. Increasingly, the Web mirrors all of "real life." Our kids deserve more from parents than fear about it and from the rest of us than overemphasis on crime.

I like the metaphor used by Barry Joseph of Global Kids, a nonprofit organization in New York that does a lot of educational work with youth in virtual worlds. Referring to Teen Second Life, an all-teen virtual world that may merge with the main SL world, he writes, "Why is it important for youth to have their own community? How is this different from a focus on keeping youth safe? The difference is that keeping youth safe, while a desired goal, sells everyone short. Youth deserve support to access their inherent abilities to fully participate in society.

"Let's take the example of a playground," Joseph continues. "What makes a playground safe? Recreational equipment that isn't broken, for example. Barriers to keep out drug dealers or predatory adults. Authority figures to police the space. How would this playground change if it were redesigned to not just keep youth safe but also support their development? The recreational equipment would be selected with an eye toward their developmental impact, such as supporting collaboration or creative play.... The authority figure would do more than just watch and observe but get actively involved, building supporting relationships with the youth, and offer activities designed to engage and develop their abilities."

How might our kids' experience of the social Web change if we were to redesign our collective thinking about it and them - if we saw them less as potential victims and more as participants in and producers of a digital place they can help make safe?

Related links

"How risky are social networking sites?", by Michele Ybarra and Kimberly Mitchell in the journal Pedatrics: "Our findings suggest that 15% of all youth report being targeted by unwanted sexual solicitation, 4% in a social networking site specifically. Similarly, 32.5% of youth report being harassed, either by threats or aggressive comments, or having rumors spread about them," 9% while on a social networking site specifically. "Youth are less likely to be targeted for unwanted sexual solicitation in social networking sites than they are through IM and in chat rooms, however, and are less likely to be a target of harassment on social networking sites than they are through IM."

For even more context (and a view from Washington), head over to Adam Thierer's blog, TechLiberationFront.com.

"New study challenges attorneys general on predator danger," by Larry Magid of CBS/CNET and ConnectSafely.org

"Social networking benefits validated" in the Washington Times

"Serious informal learning: Key online youth study" in NetFamilyNews

"Greatest Internet threat to teens may be teens themselves" - best coverage of Task Force report in the mainstream media I've seen, appropriately in the Los Angeles Times's Health section

"Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released," my thoughts on the Task Force report

ISTTF report

Youth perspective essential

I've been reading social media scholar danah boyd's PhD dissertation, "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics," the result of her 2.5-year enthnograpic study of how teens use social-network sites. The study is unique in a couple of ways: she was like an embedded reporter, not a data cruncher, and she approached her fieldwork very differently than most adults - "with the belief that the practices of teenagers must be understood on their own terms."

I think the perspective this approach brings is essential to understanding teen use of social networking, a medium so youth-driven - not the only perspective, just one very important one. Sure, the data crunchers of quantitative research ask young people questions, but those questions are generally formulated by adults. We can't sufficiently understand teen social networking when we view it through an adult lens. Just as always in parenting, but even more so now with our digital natives, we need multiple inputs - our own children's, that of current teen practices and behaviors in general, that of research where available, and that of the contexts (school, community, society) in which young people are growing up.

So the other day, when boyd was blogging about the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report released last week (she led its research team) and wrote, "I strongly believe that we need to stop talking about the Internet as the cause and start talking about it as the megaphone," she was referring to two perspectives. The adult view is that the Internet (or Net-based technologies such as social networking) is the cause, while the youth (and researchers') view is that it's more the amplifier of the problem. [Other distinguishing and destabilizing factors the Net brings to the mix, boyd says, are persistence and searchability (Net as permanent searchable archive), replicability (the ability to copy 'n' paste from one site or phone to another), scalability (that anything posted has high-visibility potential), invisible audiences (not always thought of before posting), collapsed contexts (lack of spatial and social boundaries), and the blurring of public and private (the one probably best-known to parents).]

The rest of boyd's post about the Task Force is really worth considering too: "The Internet makes visible how many kids are not ok. We desperately need an integrated set of compassionate solutions. Digital social workers are needed to reach out to troubled kids and guide them through the rough spots. Law enforcement is vital for tracking down dangerous individuals, but we need to fund them to investigate and prosecute. Parents and educators are desperately needed to be engaged and informed. Technical solutions are needed to support these different actors. But there is no magic silver bullet. The problems that exist cannot be solved by preventing adults from communicating with minors (and there are huge unintended consequences to that, including limiting social workers from helping kids), and they cannot be solved by filtering the content. It's also critical that we engage youth in the process because many of them are engaging in risky behaviors that put them in the line of danger because of external factors that desperately need to be addressed."

In that point, boyd's echoing the Task Force report's finding that children's psychosocial makeup and the conditions around them are better predictors of online risk face than what technology they use. [For more on the Task Force report, see "Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released."]

Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released

Online safety has reached a major crossroads, here in the US. The Internet Safety Technical Task Force's report is being released tonight, and to me (a Task Force member), it represents a stark choice all stakeholders have going forward: continue down the road of fear-based online-safety education or together match all messaging to what the research says - be fear-based or fact-based.

Having observed and participated in this field for more than 11 years, I think it's understandable how we got here. The US's public discussion, fueled by mostly negative media coverage, has been dominated by law enforcement. Starting in the mid-'90s, police departments representing the only really accessible, on-location expertise in online safety, filled an information vacuum. They and members of the growing number of state Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces were the people who spoke to schoolkids and parents about how to stay safe online, and their talks, naturally, were largely informed by criminal cases. When online-safety education is carried out by experts in crime - those who see the worst uses of the Internet on a daily basis - fear is often the audience's take-away. That's not to say there aren't amazing youth-division officers who really understand children and technology giving online-safety talks - there are, we have one, Det. Frank Dannahey in Connecticut, on our Advisory Board - but their voices have so far been drowned out by the predator panic the American public has been saddled with.

Meanwhile, over the past decade, a broad spectrum of research has been published about both online youth risk and young people's general everyday use of all kinds of Internet technologies, fixed and mobile. And now it's all reviewed and summarized in this report (downloadable here), one of three major accomplishments of the Task Force, the other two being the national-level discussion it represented, involving key stakeholders, and that it acknowledges the international nature of the Internet, essential to any policy discussion about it.

One of the researchers' most important findings - information really helpful to parents, finally - is that a child's psychosocial makeup and the conditions surrounding him are more important predictors of online risk than the technology he uses. Not every child is equally at risk of anything online, including predation. The research shows 1) only a tiny minority of online youth are at risk of sexual exploitation resulting from Net activity, and these are at-risk kids in "real life," and 2) online risk of all forms - inappropriate behavior, content or contact, by peers or adults - has been present through all phases of the Web and all interactive technologies kids use; it doesn't show up only in social-network sites. It's rooted in user behavior, not in crime.

As an online-safety advocate who talks to parents all the time, I kept wanting to say to the attorneys general - since they announced their online-safety prescription, age verification, 2.5 years ago at a DC conference on social-networking I attended - that focusing solely on predation, or crime, doesn't help parents. Parents need the full picture - all the risk factors and danger signs, the positives and neutrals, too, not just the negatives - in order to guide their kids.

I think any parent gets why the full picture is needed. Most parents know they can't afford to be like deer in the headlights, paralyzed by the scary evidence coming from those focused on crime (and those covering them in the media). Kids sensing irrational fear want to get as far away as possible. They know it can cause parents to overreact and, based on misinformation, shut down the perceived source of danger. That sends them underground, where much-needed parental involvement and back-up isn't around. How, I kept wanting to ask the AGs, who are parents themselves, does that reduce online kids' risk? To young people, taking away the Internet is like taking away their social lives, and there are too many ways kids can sneak away - to overseas sites beyond the reach of any US regulation, to irresponsible US sites that don't work with law enforcement, to and with other technologies, devices, and hot spots parents don't know about it - including friends' houses, where their rules don't apply.

Certainly the attorneys general have played an important watchdog role, here in a country where a discussion about industry best practices hasn't even begun. Now, with the release of a full research summary maybe that discussion can start. That's possible because, with a national report that says the most common risk kids face is online bullying and harassment - bad behavior, not crime (and their own aggressive behavior more than doubles their risk of victimization) - and with the Task Force's technical advisers concluding that no single technology can solve the whole problem "or even one aspect of it 100% of the time," we're moving closer to a calm, rational societal understanding of the problem - the Task Force ended up working toward a diagnosis rather than filling a prescription for one of the (certainly scariest) symptoms.

With the release of the Task Force report, online safety as we know it is obsolete. The report lays out more than enough reasons to take a fact-based approach to protecting online kids - to stop seeing and portraying them almost exclusively as potential victims and work with them, as citizens and drivers of the social Web, toward making it a safer, more civil and constructive place to learn, play, produce and socialize.

Related links

The ISTTF report download page - with links to PDFs of the full report, executive summary, research summary, and all other appendices

"Net threat to minors less than feared" from my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid at CNET

"Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown" in the New York Times

"Internet Child Safety Report Finds No Easy Technology Fix" in the Wall Street Journal

Over in the UK, "Bullying biggest online threat to children" at the Financial Times

"Teen frustrated that parents restrict access to social-networking sites" in the Lawrence (Ks.) Journal-World

Past blog posts on age verification in NetFamilyNews

Toward fixing teen risky behavior in social sites: Study

A professor of pediatrics said she was a little surprised by how much information about risky behaviors teens post online - information for all to see but that their doctors struggle to get out of them. In a random selection of 500 MySpace profiles of people who say on their pages they're 18, Dr. Megan Moreno at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her co-authors found that "54% of the profiles contained information on risky behaviors" - 24% of them about sexual behaviors, 41% about substance abuse, and 14% about violence, the Washington Post reports, citing a just-released study in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

"The good news," the Post says, citing a second study by the same researchers, "is that a simple intervention - in this case, an email from a physician - made some of the teens change their risky behaviors" - a significant number, in fact. For their second study, described in the same medical journal article, the authors sent emails to half of the owners of 190 randomly selected MySpace profiles of people saying they were 18-20. They were signed by Dr. Moreno. "She called herself 'Dr. Meg,' identified herself as an adolescent medicine doctor and researcher, and urged them to check out her academic Web page," the Boston Globe reports in its coverage of the studies. "'You seemed to be quite open about sexual issues or other behaviors such as drinking or smoking,' the message said. 'Are you sure that's a good idea? After all, if I could see it, nearly anybody could.' The message invited them to consider revising their profiles to protect their privacy. It also raised concerns about sexually transmitted diseases and pointed them to a Web site offering free testing."

And the response was? "Three months later, 42.1% of the ones who received the email had changed their profiles, dropping references to sex and substance use or moving their profiles from public to private," the Globe reports. So does the New York Times in "A Note to the Wise on MySpace Helps."

That's great news. Besides rules and tools, which not all teens respond to positively, other means of changing risky behavior are emerging, such as this kind of targeted, relevant educational messaging and social norming (peers' positive influence, as illustrated in a substance-abuse-prevention program at University of Virginia, Charlottesville). I think, as did Dr. Moreno, we need to get past the surprise adults have at teen risky behavior online. It's not new, it's just more public (which is a problem these studies help address), and it's actually developmental behavior, since neurologists tell us that the part of the brain that understands cause and effect and the implications of actions, the frontal cortex, isn't fully developed till people are in their early-to-mid-20s. Which is why, child development specialists say, risk assessment is a primary task of adolescence (and why adult guidance needs to be in the picture).

There's a lot more good thinking expressed or linked to in the Globe article, including:

The view from Dr. Michael Rich of Children's Hospital Boston that "social-networking sites [are] venues where young people channel their images and ideas, connecting with peers as they try on different identities - the way their parents might have done on the telephone. Where they can get into trouble is believing what they put on their profiles remains anonymous, outside their circle of friends," the Globe paraphrases him as saying. See also related articles in this same (January '09) issue of Archives, including It also links to an editorial in the same issue of Archives by the study's other authors he said.

The view that "using such sites [e.g., MySpace] to promote health messages is promising," in "Social Networking Sites: Finding a Balance Between Their Risks and Benefits," an editorial by Dr. Kimberly J. Mitchell of the Crimes Against Children Research Center and Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids (in this same latest issue of Archives).

More than 90% of US teens have Net access, and about half of those use social-network sites, USATODAY reported in its coverage of the studies. Citing background information in the Archives article, the Post added that "MySpace boasts more than 200 million profiles, according to the studies, and about one-quarter of those belong to teens under 18."

Related links

"Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress," National Institute of Mental Health , and "The Teenage Brain," Frontline, PBS .

The Internet effect: What about the Net is actually changing the equation now, what distinguishes socializing online through sharing comments, photos, and videos about ourselves from the old-fashioned, less public socializing we've done for a long time? Social media researcher danah boyd sums it up in four factors: persistence (it's hard to take down); searchability (people you don't know can find it); replicability (it can be copied and pasted elsewhere, without our knowledge); and invisible audiences (what's most prominent in the above studies) - see this interview with danah in AlterNet.org.

Safe New Year's partying online & off

Here's really good New Year's advice from MySpace's (and its parent Fox Interactive's) chief safety officer Hemu Nigam. I'm biased in saying this - I like what he's posting because it's what we've been saying to parents asking about safety on the social Web for years - in NetFamilyNews.org, ConnectSafely.org, email, speaking engagements, and our book, MySpace Unraveled. Here's the best part: Whether we're talking about MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, YouTube, or any other site, safety on the social Web is not about technology; it's about behavior, human relationships - civility, consideration, and common sense. These are things parents and kids have been talking about since long before the telephone even, long before anything we think of as technology. "Too often it seems too complicated to talk to your teens about online safety," Nigam writes. "After all, it’s the online world and they know it better than you do. But is it? Did you know how a car engine works, what the transmission does, or how an airbag gets deployed when the car bumps something at 30 mph? Yet, you got right in there and taught your teen how to drive. Correction, you taught your teen how to drive safely.... You’ve done it all your life – these lessons on safety.... The world may have changed, but the lessons are still the same. Don’t stop the dialogue."

Online video: More amazing growth data

The growth of US Web video-viewing is pretty phenomenal. We viewed 13.5 billion online videos this past October! Not "million" - "billion"! That's a 45% increase over October 2007, according to comScore's latest figures. ComScore measures by the companies that own the sites - so Google topped the list (its YouTube represented 98% of its video-viewing traffic) at 5.4 billion videos viewed (39.7% share). The rest of the top 10 video sites were more clumped together in traffic numbers, the only surprise being Hulu.com's rapid rise to the No. 6 position. Here are the US's 10 biggest video-viewing providers, going down from Google: Fox Interactive Media (mostly MySpace) at about 520 million (3.8%); Yahoo Sites 363 million (2.7%); Viacom Digital 305 million (2.3%); Microsoft Sites 286 million (2.1%); Hulu 235 million (1.7%); Turner Network 228 million (1.7%); Disney Online 127 million (0.9%); AOL 123 million (0.9%); and ESPN 105 million (0.8%). BTW, amateur video producers with the most viewers at YouTube are now "earning six-figure incomes from the Web site," the New York Times reports, because of the ads YouTube puts with them (it has a revenue-share program). See the Times for examples.

Questions raised by Megan Meier case

Although Lori Drew was convicted only on misdemeanor charges last week and though the case may yet be dismissed, the questions it raises are important ones:

Legal

Although what happened between the Meiers and Drews in the St. Louis area in 2006 was about cyberbullying, the case against Drew wasn't, actually. It was about computer fraud. Ms. Drew's involvement in the creation of a fake profile (or real profile of a fictional teen boy character) was called by the prosecutors "unauthorized access" violating federal computer fraud law, the New York Times reports. According to the Washington Post, the case thus "expands the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 as a tool against hackers, to include social networking Web sites." Even so, the Post cites legal experts as saying, this was "the country's first cyberbullying verdict."

The Times reports that MySpace's terms of service require users to be "truthful and accurate" when they sign up for an account, yet a lot of people of all ages all over the Web fictionalize or veil their identities for many reasons - the way authors with pen names have as long as there have been books. So do cops pretending to be 14-year-old girls as they set up stings to catch online predators. In other words, there are both legitimate (including protective) and ill-intentioned reasons to be pseudonymous or anonymous online. Does this case jeopardize legitimate use of anonymity (see also "Fictionalizing their profiles" and "Online anonymity vs. cyberbullying concerns")?

Another question is about those terms of service. Does this case mean social-networking sites must enforce their terms of use? That could be both good and bad. Terms of use could become more of a mutual contract between site and users whereby users (or their parents) might actually have some sort of recourse if terms are violated by bullies. On the downside, rigid enforcement does not always have good results, where human beings (and adolescent behavior) are concerned. This is a good reminder, though, that parents and kids together check site terms of use for what they say about truthfulness. I think it also suggests that social sites consider putting their terms in plain English! But it's concerning if, as the result of this case, violation of terms could be considered criminal behavior. The proverbial jury's still out on that last point.

Bad for case law: "Let's also make one thing very clear," writes social media researcher danah boyd (who lower-cases her name). "This case is NOT TYPICAL [it's extreme and extremely unusual]. Many are clamoring to make laws based on this case and one thing we know is that bad cases make bad case law. Most of the cases focus on the technology rather than the damage of psychological abuse and the misuse of adult power." I agree. This story, if not the case, is not about computers or social networking or solely online behavior; it's about behavior. Which leads to the parenting set of questions....

Parental

The message that parents need to be involved in right ways - as moderators (in every sense of the word) and not accomplices - is only getting stronger. Though this is a tough message for busy parents to hear, we want to be in the mix. Just as we've always needed to be engaged in our teens' offline social lives - because a primary task of adolescent brain development is risk assessment - we need to be involved in their online lives too.

We also don't want our role to be diminished in favor of "protective" law or policy, because we don't want our children's free speech and privacy rights taken away or in any way diminished ostensibly "for their own protection." Engaged parents are vital supporters of their children's rights.

An important aspect of this for parents to keep in mind is that the high visibility of an extreme case and increasing news coverage of cyberbullying in general do not mean bullying online is on the rise or adolescent behavior has changed. This is important to keep in mind about social networking too. Danah boyd makes the point that the Internet probably hasn't increased the amount of bullying; rather, it has made it and all adolescent behavior more visible - certainly, but naturally, with disturbing effect - to adults. "Now adults can see it. Most adults think that this means that the Internet is the culprit, but this logic is flawed and dangerous. Stifling bullying online won't make bullying go away; it'll just send it back underground. The visibility gives us an advantage. If we see it, we can work with it to stop it." Yes!

Potential positive outcome

Peer support and counseling online - by "digital street workers" - is what danah boyd proposes. When she was in college, danah writes, fellow students volunteered as street workers to help at-risk "teens on the street find resources and help. They directed them to psychologists, doctors, and social workers. We need a program like this for the digital streets. We need college-aged young adults to troll the digital world looking out for teens who are in trouble and helping them seek help. We need online counselors who can work with minors to address their behavioral issues without forcing the minor to contend with parents or bureaucracy. We need online social workers that can connect with kids and help them understand their options."

She's talking about kids whose parents simply aren't there - the young people who are at risk online. "They are the kids who are being beaten at home and blog about it. They are the kids who publicly humiliate other kids to get attention. They are the kids who seek sex with strangers as a form of validation. They are the kids who are lonely, suicidal, and self-destructive.... They are calling out for help. Why aren't we listening? And why are we blaming the technology instead?" When we stop doing that, we can really start helping at-risk youth online and increasing online safety.

I propose that all social sites and services employ...

1. "Digital street workers" (older peers/young adults as online community volunteers) and
2. Paid, trained counselors or social workers on their customer-service staffs - in addition to community moderators for socializing by minors.

Your views on any of this would be most welcome - via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, in this blog, or in our ConnectSafely forum. With your permission, I often publish readers' comments for everybody's benefit.

Related links

"The 'MySpace Suicide' Case, Social Networking, and the Law" in Findlaw

My first post on the Megan Meier case, Nov. '07 "Extreme cyberbullying: US case comes to light." See also "Dismissal urged in Megan Meier case."

Verdict in Megan Meier case

In the cyberbullying case against Lori Drew, the Missouri mother involved in the creation of a fake MySpace profile that led to Megan Meier's suicide, "a federal jury delivered a mixed verdict," the Los Angeles Times reports. She was convicted of misdemeanor charges involving unlawful computer access, but the jury "rejected more serious felony charges." It was also "deadlocked on a conspiracy count." The L.A. Times added that Drew "faces anywhere from probation to three years in prison." For details on what happened, see my first post on the story a little over a year ago.

*Serious* informal learning: Key online youth study

Just picture it: Young people sharing their ideas and productions (videos, poems, commentaries, tunes, podcasts), getting nearly immediate feedback from friends near and far. With quick, always available feedback, they can continuously tweak their compositions and thinking. Doing this authentic, literally peer-reviewed, kind of learning is not only exciting and inspiring to a student, artist, and/or thinker, it can also accelerate the development of a person's body of work at a very young age, preparing that person for a profession in a concentrated, enriching way that's unprecedented for youth.

This is actually what's happening on the social Web - in MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, Facebook, and so many specialty sites and services on the Web, as well as with mobile phones and other connected devices. It's called "self-directed, peer-based learning," and it's part of what's being described in "Living and Learning with New Media," a three-year study by the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth Project.

Parents may appreciate insights from the report into the two approaches youth have to using the social Web: friendship-driven and interest-driven (neither approach necessarily ruling out the other in any one person's online experience, however). Friendship-driven, the more generalized form of teen social networking, focuses on socializing with their friends in Real Life (adults not particularly welcome and - if not invited - largely ignored). Interest-driven social-Web users are more focused in their socializing or collaboration. They may have moved on from "messing around" to "geeking out": "Messing around is an open-ended activity that involves tinkering and exploration that is only loosely goal-directed. Often this can transition to more 'serious' engagement in which a young person is trying to perfect a creative work or become a knowledge expert in the genre of geeking out. It is important to recognize, however, that this more exploratory mode of messing around is an important space of experimental forms of learning that open up new possibilities." Learning that's informal, experimental, yes, but also substantive, focused, authentic.

Tech educators I know will find support in this finding: "Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access 'serious' online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions" more intent on filtering the Web at school. [Educators will not want to miss what the report says about "the growing divide between in-school and out-of-school learning" by today's highly skilled information hunter-gatherers," as MIT professor Henry Jenkins describes young Internet users in his book Convergence Culture.]

Related links

"Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing" in the New York Times

"Online time is good for teens" in the BBC

"Teenagers learn important social, technical skills online: study" from Agence France-Presse

"Internet socialising is good for teens" in India-based IT Examiner

"Kids gain valuable skills from time online" in the San Francisco Chronicle

...and more than 100 other news reports around the world.

Social (networking) scene in Canada

Canadians have definitely taken to social networking. "Some 17 million have a Facebook profile, 4.5 million are on MySpace, 14.5 million visit YouTube every month, and 3.6 million upload photos to the sharing site Flickr.com," the Toronto Globe & Mail reports. It doesn't even mention home-grown Nexopia, based in Edmonton, with about 1.4 million users. The Globe & Mail article (and accompanying Q&A with readers) is about privacy concerns regardless of users' ages ("social networkers shape their identity with these sites, essentially broadcasting their public image around the world"), pointing to a problem social sites are dealing with wherever their users are: "Many social-networking sites have privacy systems in place, but many users ignore them, only to find out - too late - that they shouldn't have left their photos, blog postings and personal information available for anyone to discover." Here are Part 2, "When a widget attacks your profile," and Part 3, "Underage kids flock to social networks." South of the border, an article in the Kansas City Star suggests this "public explosion in self-documentation" is a generational thing. Is it?

'The parents' fault. Not.'

Those are the words of tech educator Will Richardson, who in his blog tells of a conversation with a high school principal. Richardson had said in his presentation that no one was teaching young people how to use social-network sites well. So the principal told Richardson he was teaching them - when he hauls them into his office, shows them the nasty stuff he'd found on their profiles, and watches the "genuine astonishment" on their faces that he'd found their profiles. Clearly that cluelessness was their parents' fault, the principal indicated. Richardson thought not, but the solution is not the one-shot "parent awareness night" or "some type of scary Internet predator presentation by a state policeman." He continued: "For the life of me, I can't understand what is so hard about opening up the first and second and third grade curriculum and finding ways to integrate these skills and literacies in a systemic way. If you want kids to be educated about these tools and environments, then maybe we should, um, educate them." Hear, hear! But here's a literacy we can integrate into our kids' lives too: life literacy, learning how to function in community (online as well as offline), learning treat others as we'd like: Tech-etiquette basics like "no texting or talking during dinner." [See also "Cellphone etiquette."]

M.U.S.I.C. in class

With the US election tomorrow, it seems a fitting time to read Thomas Paine and Jimmy Cliff at the top of a middle-school assignment about social justice and perseverance, followed by 7th-graders' interpretations. New York City teacher John Chase's 8th-graders' even more powerful responses to songs about social responsibility and empathy indicates how much the assignment resonated with them (put this into an anti-cyberbullying lesson, teachers and advocates!). Music - or rather M.U.S.I.C. (Musicians United for Songs in the Classroom), a nonprofit organization Chase formed - is literally bringing history to life, or rather to his students' everyday lives and connections with the people in them (including their teachers!). Here's the Paine-Cliff assignment in Chase's own words in his MySpace blog, where so many musicians and students are: "Last month 7th-grade students studied the American Revolution and learned about the 'power of the pen' and Thomas Paine's essay, 'The American Crisis.' We also listened to and discussed Jimmy Cliff's song, 'The Harder They Come.' I then asked my students to practice being Paine or Cliff, and compose a personal mission statement, poem, or lyric to inspire and motivate people to 'fight on' in our times." Here's the story on Chase and the M.U.S.I.C. program, as well as the past summer's project, with comments from musicians involved. In his bio Chase quotes Maya Angelou as saying, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Teachers in SNS: 'Creepy treehouse' or ok?

My headline's referring to "slang for how students feel creeped out by school teachers and college professors who are using Facebook and MySpace to interact with their students online," the Dallas Morning News reports, adding that "the term derives from urban legends about sexual predators luring children into treehouses." Of course that's not fair to a lot of teachers who are in social-network sites to understand their students' real, outside-of-school lives. In any case, there are now student Facebook groups on both sides of the question: "Teachers ... please stop going on Facebook," "Students should get over Teachers being on Facebook," and "No ... it's not awkward being friends with my teachers on Facebook." Check out the article to see what some principals says, as well as some examples of "Creepy Treehouse." See also "Online student-teacher friendships can be tricky" at CNN.

Euro social networking: Full speed ahead

The social Web has solid support from the European Commission. In fact, the EC's now looking ahead to Web 3.0, which means "seamless, anytime, anywhere business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks" and "the end of the divide between mobile and fixed [phone] lines," said Viviane Reding, EC Commissioner for Information Society & Media, in a September 26 speech in Luxembourg, according to VNUNET. Europe "must lead the next generation of the Internet," she said. The EC is encouraging SN industry self-regulation and has created a task force to that end, PublicTechnology.net reports. Participants include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, Amsterdam-based Hyves, Berlin-based StudiVZ, and Paris-based Skyrock; "a number of researchers and child welfare organisations. The EC reportedly plans to unveil best-practice guidelines for social-network sites on Safer Internet Day next February 10. For context, 7thSpace.com reports, social networking has grown 35% in Europe in the past year. It added that 56% of Europe's online population visited social-network sites last year, and the number of regular users is projected to increase from 41.7 million now to 107.4 million in the next four years.

Turning music biz upside down - again

First there was iTunes selling single tunes at 99 cents a pop; then you could rent digital songs for a monthly subscription; now there's the way of MySpace, with free tunes "brought to you by...." (right, advertising). The new MySpace Music just launched . With it, the Washington Post reports, the free tunes "can be played only on personal computers connected to the Internet.... Anyone who wants to transfer a song to a portable device like Apple Inc.'s iPod will have to buy the music through Amazon.com Inc.'s year-old downloading service, which sells songs for as little as 79 cents apiece." The music sold via MySpace won't contain DRM-style copy protection, which makes it more share-able - as MySpace leverages what the social Web is all about: sharing stuff with your friends. The site lets its users create "an unlimited number of playlists containing up to 100 songs apiece, a sharing concept similar to music services already offered by Imeem and Last.fm," the Post reports. Warner Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and EMI Music are all participating, as are Sony ATV/Music Publishing and The Orchard. Independent labels (representing about 9% of the US digital-recorded music market) want in too, apparently. The Financial Times reports.

The ISTTF: Chicken or egg?

"ISTTF" stands for Internet Safety Technical Task Force, the result of an agreement last January between 49 state attorneys general (minus Texas) and MySpace. The emphasis is on the word "technical," because the attorneys general basically charged the task force, of which I'm a member, with reviewing technical solutions to online youth risk - "age verification" technology being their stated predetermined solution of choice. Why? Because they're law enforcement people. They deal with crime - not all these other subjects that have come up in online-youth and social-media research - so they probably feel that this is all about crime and technology, so some technology that separates adult criminals from online kids, or that somehow identifies every American on the Web, is what will make the Internet safe for youth.

The problem is, we now know - via a growing body of research - that young people's use of technology for socializing is not limited to MySpace, to social networking in general, or even to the Web. Youth don't even focus on what technology or device (phone, chat, blogs, IM, Skype, computer, Xbox Live, Club Penguin, World of Warcraft, etc.) they use when they're socializing. They just communicate, produce, and socialize. So the "problem" is not technology. We're dealing with behavior, learning, adolescent development, social norm development, and identity formation, here. What technology is going to give adults (those who want it) control over that, or somehow sequester American youth into American sites that are compelled to verify ages, or separate adults and children across the entire universe of increasingly mobile, device-agnostic communications, media-sharing, and social activity?

Besides, we also know now that only a tiny percentage - well under 1% - of US youth are at risk of being victimized by the kinds of crimes the attorneys general put the Task Force together for, and this minority is, unfortunately, already at risk in "real life." Technology probably doesn't have much of a chance at curing the age-old struggles of troubled youth - certainly not ID verification technology.

The other thing we know, though we adults don't think about it a whole lot, is that the "problem" is changing - fast (it actually won't be that long before our teenagers are parents!). Because nobody's brains are fully developed till their early 20s, teens need our input, but so do we need theirs. For the most part, youth understand what's happening with tech and the social Web, they're the drivers of it, they're changing (growing up), and technology is changing faster than we can keep up with it, so we don't have anything close to a static "problem" to get a fix on, much less to fix.

Which leads me to the chicken/egg question. The first day we heard at least a dozen presentations by purveyors of various technologies, many of them focused on verifying either ages (very hard with US minors, who under federal privacy law have very little verifiable personal information in public records) or identities. By the end of the day I couldn't shake off the unnerving picture of a roomful of baby boomers (digital non-natives, including me) - many of whom barely understand the "problem," much less the full picture of young social Web participants, and some of whom stand to gain a great deal from selling the Task Force on a particular technology for nationwide adoption - trying to assert control over the unruly social Web. The understanding is growing, not least because the Task Force has a research advisory board as well as a technical one, and the former is right now completing a review of all research on youth online safety to date - the first of its kind. This is brilliant! So what's wrong with this picture? Seems to me the research comes first, then - as we understand the problem - we begin to look at what the solutions should be.

The second day we heard from a Rochester Institute of Technology sociology professor with a background in law enforcement. It's an important study (I'll blog about it more next week) because it looks at Internet use by more than 40,000 Rochester-area students all the way from kindergarten up through 12th grade, and it offered the Task Force insights into the peer-on-peer, noncriminal but negative and sometimes unethical and illegal side of the online-safety question. But youth were referred to in an extremely negative adversarial way, first- and second-graders referred to as "perpetrators" and "offenders." For example, the "four types" of middle-school "online offenders," he said, are "generalists, pirates, academic cheaters, and deceiving bullies." As useful as the data is, I don't feel this is productive language to use when trying to change behavior or inspire children about digital citizenship (see my description of an amazing such project at Bel Aire Elementary School in Tiburon, Calif., here).

So there you have one person's (rambling) perspective. There are others available now - that of Adam Thierer of the Washington, DC-based Progress & Freedom Foundation and a more radical one from CNET blogger and Berkman fellow Chris Soghoian. [The Task Force is hosted and chaired by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.]

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