ChatRoulette: Heads up, parents!

"If I were still an unpopular 12-year-old, my first ChatRoulette session might have crushed me for a year instead of just an hour," writes Sam Anderson in New York magazine in the mildest possible description of a site that Brad Stone of the New York Times just discovered was created by a 17-year-old in Moscow. It's a video site that "brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world," Anderson writes. Comments from email correspondents of mine confirm what he writes that about 10% of the videos that stream past are of naked males not just sitting in front of their Webcams. Stone writes, "Parents, keep your children far, far away." Anderson adds, "There's no way to manage the experience.... It’s the Wild West: a stupid, profound, thrilling, disgusting, totally lawless boom" with a powerful curiosity factor. And there are serious privacy issues, he adds. Because once you click "Play" on the home page, your computer's Webcam is activated, and you are among those streaming across other ChatRoulette players' screens, with any one of them able to grab a shot of your face and whatever else is within the frame of your Webcam.

Another heads-up: ChatRoulette's not only going viral (300 users in December, 10,000 by end of January, now 20,000 any given night), it's a group thing (hopefully not the new "Truth or Dare" or "Spin the Bottle"). When a friend came over to experience it with him, Anderson reports "the experience was different ... easier to laugh off. We ended up staying on, talking and dancing, connecting and disconnecting, for four hours." As voyeuristic as it might've felt, it wasn't all "shock porn," he writes. "We chatted with Pratt students in Bed-Stuy, with a man inexplicably sitting on his toilet, with a kid waving a gun and a knife, and with a guy who went to my wife’s old high school in California. We saw Chinese kids in computer cafés and English kids drinking beer.... We talked for half an hour with a 28-year-old tech writer from San Francisco." And another email correspondent of mine just heard over the weekend that ChatRoulette is being played by "some of our middle schoolers in [the US state of] Georgia." There may shortly be a spike in Web-filtering sales!

YouTube's new tool for kid-safe viewing

More than 33 billion online videos were watched during December and about a third of the them were on YouTube, according to comScore's latest figures. A 2008 study by Nielsen found that YouTube was 2-to-11-year-olds' No. 1 video viewing site (see this). So parents will probably be happy to know that YouTube now has its own filter for sexually explicit or violent content. "While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site," says the YouTube blog. As their video demo shows, it's easy to activate: Just go to any YouTube page, scroll to the bottom, and click "Safety Mode is off." After clicking On or Off, you can choose either to "Save" or "Save and lock." With the former, Safety Mode is on whenever anybody's uses that browser on that computer until they change that setting (works with a rule that settings don't get changed and obedient kids). "Save and lock" allows you to log into your Google or YouTube account and lock the setting so that it can't be changed in that browser by anyone who doesn't know your password – just as with Google's SafeSearch lock (see this). [See also "Help with cyberbullying on YouTube."]

Major buzz about Buzz, but not about its safety

Google's Buzz, which it unveiled today, means to make Gmail much more social – adding updates and photo- and video-sharing; turning emailers into Twitter-like "followers"; and making all of that local to you (and you to it) via your cellphone, according to hundreds of news articles including PCWorld's. That last bit concerning geolocation raises some safety concerns, writes ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in CNET, where he posted an audio interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Writing also in the Huffington Post, he says "Mobile Buzz, which will work initially on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phones," taking advantage of their GPS tech "so that users will not only be able to update their status but their location as well." Of course Buzz will work with Google maps. Will that social pinpointing capability be something people have to consciously turn on? I hope so, because young people don't always stop for safety or privacy reality checks in the rapid-fire back-'n'-forth of teen texting and socializing. But how much will that help even so? These products like Buzz are all just social convenience tools to teens. Teens don't think as much as we do about separate stand-alone products, services, or devices, each with its own privacy policy, set of terms of service. It's all much more of a means to the much more important end of staying connected and maintaining mindshare with peers. That's a challenge when companies just want to throw these various tasks at the lawyers and be done with it. The good news is, Google's integrating all of its Buzz-related products for fixed and mobile use; maybe they'll have integrated safety and privacy too.

Social norming: *So* key to online safety

I doubt the term "social norming" means much to most people, but it's actually common practice in family life, at school, and on sports teams. It's the culture or behavioral norms we create to teach and model values and ethics for our children – showing up in statements like "we don't say 'hate' in this family" or "we respect the other team." Maybe because it's so second-nature, we don't often think about how powerful social norming can be on the online-safety front. But when the research shows that aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized, we need to take this point very seriously. In fact, we need to move past expecting adults to do the modeling to expecting all community members to do so, especially children – help them see that they are key to their own well-being as well as their community's. Professor and cyberbullying researcher Sameer Hinduja puts this in the school context: "How does this relate to reducing online harassment among elementary, middle, and high school students? Social norming has to do with modifying the environment, or culture within a school, so that appropriate behaviors are not only encouraged, but perceived widely to be the norm," he writes in his blog. The same goes for online community. Virtual worlds, multiplayer online games, and social network sites need to foster a culture of civil behavior and citizenship as a vital Net-safety feature of their communities. There has been discussion about the importance of "neighborhood policing" or community self-policing online as well as offline, and I agree. It's vital, and many responsible sites and worlds act quickly on abuse reports. But they need to pair that with social norming to be both preventive and reactive, to provide more complete protection (I call this "the guild effect").

However, as much as we may like it to be, changing the culture is not just up to sites and virtual worlds or schools. It can't be. Because this is a user-driven media environment we're all experiencing now, by definition it's up to all of us, especially the users of a particular virtual world or social site (or classroom, family or neighborhood). So how do we start? As Hinduja puts it, "by focusing attention on the majority of youth who do utilize computers and cellphones in acceptable ways. If I told you that one in five teenagers are cyberbullied, you wouldn’t focus on spreading that fact around your student body. Rather, you would reframe and reconceptualize that research finding, and then create cool and relevant messaging strategies emphasizing that the vast majority of your students [and our children] are using Internet technologies with integrity, discretion, and wisdom, which would hopefully motivate or induce the remainder to get 'on board.' Ideally, the remainder would desire to fit in, would desire to be like everyone else, and would feel an informal compulsion to stop cyberbullying others and start doing the right thing." If we're worried about cyberbullying as a society, we need to get going on this! As Hinduja writes, "Spending too much time painting cyberbullying in alarmist colors may encourage more youth to act in similar ways, since those youth will perceive the act as 'normal' and that 'everyone is doing it'.”

Related links

"Claiming & social norming in social sites"

"Toward fixing teen risky behavior in social sites: Study"

"'21st-century statecraft' at home & school"

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant"

"Social norming & digital citizenship"

"Social norming for risk prevention"

'21st-century statecraft' at home & school

Live on the Web, I was just listening to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton's call for 21st-century statecraft (as well as the need to protect free expression online) and couldn't help but think about how much we need to respect, teach, and model good citizenship at home and school (here and in every country) – using the media kids use and love – in order to realize Secretary Clinton's vision for Internet freedom. She spoke of the need to "create norms of behavior among states." Absolutely, but we need to start here at home, promoting and modeling norms of good behavior online and in homes and classrooms using the social (behavioral) media and technologies where so much kid behavior occurs now. I just reviewed a major study, the Kaiser Family Foundation's, about how much youth are using media, and while some are appalled at the time spent with media, are they thinking about how so much of that usage is outside of school, because we block social media and cellphones from school – leaving young people completely on their own to work out social norms? What a missed opportunity! Secretary Clinton also called on us to focus on the needs of youth. Doing so must include understanding how they use media, not just how much. Let's begin now consciously to model and teach the good digital as well as real-world citizenship and "statecraft" that will be protections to free speech, our countries, and most especially our children – at school, in virtual worlds, and all the other places where they spend time. [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship" and "From users to citizens."]

Moderator wisdom: Virtual worlds' youth-safety experts

Virtual worlds are a red-hot topic these days, probably because of their rapid growth and the US Federal Trade Commission's report on their content (see "Related links" below). I can think of two more reasons to add: ConnectSafely's brand-new safety tips for parents (shameless plug, links below) and insights from master virtual-world moderators in a recent 3-part series on the subject at ShapingYouth.org and in a white paper, "How to Moderate Teens and Tweens," at eModeration, London-based provider of community management in 31 languages.

Three points – one each about moderating kids, tweens, and teens – really leaped out at me as I read these contributions (just a sampler of the insights in them), and I think parents will find them helpful:

1. Two types of virtual-world moderators: In Part 3 of Shaping Youth's series, eModeration describes how virtual worlds are evolving, as illustrated by moderation techniques: The more traditional silent moderator "stays in the background, blocking offensive material from participants, warning users, defusing confrontation and reacting to abusive or illegal behavior. The second and increasingly popular type is the in-game moderator, who actively participates as a character or avatar ... encouraging children to explore and try new things and have as positive experience as possible, but stay safe and secure while doing so.” Gazillion Entertainment's director of user engagement Izzy Neis describes the former as the "elephant in the corner"; eModeration compares the latter to the fun, engaging host of a kids' birthday party. I think the latter type – because kid users tend to look up to this cool, fun "older avatar" – presents a tremendous opportunity for modeling civil behavior and good in-world citizenship.

2. Tween VW behavior is as dynamic as the real-world kind. Moderators are finding that, just as tweens move back and forth between children's play and playing at being adults in the real world, they do the same in virtual worlds. EModeration's Littleton quotes Neis as saying, "It's not always one or the other – often tween users balances between the two, depending on how their day went, or what escapism they need, or what reinforcement/acknowledgement they crave. They're taking the experiences they've had, applying imagination and exploring new territory (mainly adult situations)." She says virtual worlds see "the same playground problems kids have every day: bullying, heartache, betrayal, etc." That's why it's just as important, as we say in our VW safety tips, for parents to talk with their kids about what's going in their virtual worlds as what's going on at school. But moderation in all things (no pun intended). Kids also need some space. Virtual worlds, Neis says, "provide an outlet and a chance to develop other aspects of their personalities [which] they feel unable to explore during real life for fear of rejection, or sometimes they're just trying something to try it - an opportunity to fail without physical consequence.”

3. The delicate balance between over- and under-moderating teens: An experienced moderator in the UK, Amy Rountree, told Littleton that “moderating [youth] 16+ communities is about balance." She says that, if virtual world rules and moderators are too heavy-handed, users go elsewhere. If the moderation's too easygoing, both the company and its users are at risk. This echoes what we say at ConnectSafely.org about safety on the social Web: If parents are too controlling, kids – who have many workarounds and access points – tend to go "underground" to sites parents may've never heard of, to friends' houses where rules are more lax, to establish alternate "stealth" profiles and accounts parents aren't aware of, etc., etc., all of which spells even less parental input and guidance. Kids are safer when parents, like moderators, find the balance between "over- and under-moderating" and keep the communication lines open (see also "'Soft power' parenting works better").

Note Tamara Littleton's bottom line in her white paper: "Our view is that if you [a virtual world company] are inviting teens or tweens into your online space, you are in effect throwing a huge round-the-clock party for them. And what parent in their right mind would send out invitations worldwide, then leave the keys to the liquor cabinet with their 15-year-old and go away for the weekend?"

Related links

ConnectSafely.org's virtual world safety tips for parents of kids and teens, and tech policy expert Adam Thierer's review of them

"Virtual Parentalism," by Washington & Lee University law professor and dad Joshua Fairfield – the first of three parts at the Tech Liberation Front blog

Crisp Thinking's thinking on VW safety: SocialMediaPortal.com's interview on "detection and analysis of inappropriate online behavior" with Rebecca Newton, head of safety at Crisp Thinking, a provider of moderation technology for virtual-world companies

Shaping Youth series on moderating kids, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

"How to Moderate Teens and Tweens" by Tamara Littleton, CEO of eModeration

The FTC's "Virtual Worlds & Kids: Mapping the Risks"

My virtual world news roundup last month last month

Virtual world numbers

"Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world Users"

State senator wants to criminalize teen sexting

US states are all over the map where sexting legislation is concerned. While Vermont decriminalized sexting by minors, Indiana is considering a law that makes it a juvenile crime. WTHR TV in Indianapolis reports that, in order to send Indiana children the message, "Do not sext," state Sen. Jim Merritt (R) is working on a law that would make texting sexually explicit messages and photos a juvenile violation." "Senator Merritt says other similar sexting bills will likely be filed as well and he would like to eventually see adults included under the law too." Texas A&M psychology professor Christopher Ferguson sent a great response to the Indianapolis Star in a Letter to the Editor: "I share Merritt's concerns about responsible teen behavior and the potential risks of sexting. However, criminalizing sexting is the wrong response as it only harms teenagers who engage in this behavior more rather than teaching them responsible behavior." The real solution, Ferguson writes, is "increased education," including adding the subject of sexting to sex-education classes in schools. I agree. Or at least health class – not some sort of non-contextual, government-imposed add-on to the curriculum called "Internet safety" aimed at covering the whole gamut of risks online. That's almost like trying to teach a course on all the risks of life, since the Internet increasingly mirrors it, and have we thought about how well students will respond to a class focused on all the negative consequences of using the media and technologies they find so compelling?!

Let's teach constructive use of media and technology in context. When children learn history or social studies, they learn about community, citizenship, social justice – a natural place to include online community and digital citizenship. When learning
writing and composition, classes discuss plagiarism and academic ethics, the place where online-style, copy-and-paste plagiarism needs to be covered too. Sexting has its right place largely in discussions about adolescent sexual development. If malicious intent is involved, then sexting needs to be discussed in the context of bullying, including cyberbullying, for which many schools have programs. In any case, education is the key. I was encouraged to see that the Associated Press led its coverage of a recent sexting survey with a quote from a 16-year-old saying he probably wouldn't send a sext message again, knowing that sexting could bring felony charges (see this). [Here's earlier coverage on what other states have considered.]

The decade of the social Web (fixed & mobile)

The '00s were when Web 2.0 hit – the increasingly mobile social Web, from desktops to laptops to gameplayers and smartphones, that spelled a media makeover as radical as the printing press did nearly 500 years ago. Why so radical? Well, maybe people felt the realtime one-on-one conversations of the telephone were just as radical in their time, but now we're talking realtime multi-directional, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, multimedia, user-produced and professionally produced, un-regulatable conversations and productions and environments all through the same "pipeline" and appearing on multiple, often mobile devices of all sorts and sizes. Robert Sibley of the Ottawa Citizen asks if what I just described is good, quoting Samuel Morse quoting the Bible when he tapped out the first message by telegraph in 1844, "What hath God wrought?" As radical as this shift we're experiencing is, if God hath wrought it, I think it wasn't the media so much as change itself that He or She wrought, since change is truly the only constant. The current change in media and technology will certainly change us, as media shifts always have, but the changes are always both good and bad, for example the ability to photograph and share with distant grandparents a kid's hockey goal or a brand-new-baby photo in realtime is enabled by the same technology that instantly mass-distributes the nude photo of a minor who could later be prosecuted for producing and distributing child pornography.

This is a scary juncture in media history, as we collectively figure out how to preserve the good and mitigate the bad things about it, but it also presents – impels, really – a tremendous opportunity for us to pool all our forms of expertise and find solutions in the collaborative way these complex problems call for. It's also calling upon us to develop unprecedented critical thinking skills, the kind that grasp the implications of behavior (ours and others') as much as content, because media are social, or behavioral, now. If we can answer that call and collaborate in a more multi-disciplinary way then ever before, civilization might actually advance because of new media.

Some people, however, seem to think this juncture is just unprecedentedly bad – especially where youth are concerned. In his long, reflective essay, Sibley cites the view of Emory University Prof. Mark Bauerlein that social networking teens "never grow up," remaining "narcissistically embedded in 'gossip and social banter' instead of attending to the knowledge they need to be mature and responsible adults." There is actually a lot of opposing evidence that social media are not just about "gossip and social banter" to youth - see this three-part interview with Stanford University cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito by author Howard Rheingold.

But if you feel youth indeed are growing up more slowly, author Po Bronson agrees. In a Newsweek blog post, he suggests, however, that the fault lies in our over-protectiveness, not in social media. He cites the view of author Joe Allen that "our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time." Bronson's referring to Escaping the Endless Adolescence, by Drs. Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen.

Hey, you can see from my essay yesterday that I worry, too, about the impact on youth of portable, 24/7 exposure to the drama of adolescent social lives, but I think it's way too easy to blame the technology and I also worry – a lot – that all this fearing of or, at best, adjusting to, the new media environment by us adults is causing this regrettable over-protectiveness of our kids and distracting us from doing our job, parenting, which includes helping our children develop the most protective filter they'll ever have, the one that'll be with them wherever they go for the rest of their lives and improves with age: the software between their ears!

Related links

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant?"

"'Continuous partial attention...'"

"School libraries: Vital filter developers"

'Soft power' works better: Parenting social Web users

We're in quite a fix, we parents, over this "sexting" phenomenon. On the one hand, sexting "is causing growing concern among parents," HealthDay cites a University of Michigan survey as finding. On the other, "the real problem sets in when grownups get involved," writes DailyBeast.com columnist Conor Friedersdorf, pointing to the evidence: "In most cases, teens who conceal their sexting from authority figures suffer negligible adverse consequences.... Perversely, however, tragic stories that begin with 'sexting' are all too frequent when principals, police officers, or district attorneys get involved. The two known suicides attributed to 'sexting' actually resulted from adults who exacerbated, rather than stopped, the abhorrent 'slut-shaming' that peers callously directed at girls whose naked photos were spread around school; and authority figures in at least six states charge less troubled teens who send naked pictures of themselves with distributing child pornography!" [And I can't resist quoting where Friedersdorf goes with this child-porn-law point: "Should technology ever permit humans to download our brains' mental images to a hard drive, every last teenager in America will wind up prohibited from living within 10,000 feet of themselves" – but maybe quite a few adults too, no?]

I think he's right. Whether or not you agree that sexting is digitally exacerbated normative adolescent behavior, I hope you agree that adults need to tread very lightly or at least carefully in these situations, with child-pornography law a factor (see ConnectSafely's tips). But forget about school policy and law enforcement for a second and just think about parenting: Certainly we need to apply our values to our parenting and, if those values call for it, try to mitigate the sexualized media environment surrounding us all, but it's best to spread that teaching and parenting out over time and not allow ourselves to be so shocked by what we're seeing as to react in ways that send kids into determined resistance, "underground" online, where our values probably don't have much influence at all.

Cornell University assistant professor Sahara Byrne, while presenting a survey of parents and kids about online-safety strategies at the Harvard Berkman Center last week, found all kinds of evidence that "the more angry kids are, the more they're going to try to restore their freedom" – or assert it. That's why sudden changes in parenting style like overreaction or anger, banning technology (which to a teen can be like banning a whole social life), or suddenly installing monitoring software can have unintended, sometimes risky effects and workarounds.

So we're not really in such a fix, fellow parents. We just need to mindful of the concerns we have and channel them wisely. Trying to make our children avoid risk altogether can be riskier than being consistent about "our family's values," letting them do developmentally appropriate adolescent risk assessment, and being there for them when stuff comes up. I love how parent and media professor Henry Jenkins says it – that we need to "watch their backs rather than snoop over their shoulders."

Related links

Latest data (from Pew/Internet last week): "Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario"

Prof. Sahara Byrne's presentation on parenting & online safety (I'll be posting more on this)

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth"

ConnectSafely's tips to prevent bad effects from teens sexting

FTC's milestone report on virtual worlds

This is pioneering stuff on the part of the US government. The Federal Trade Commission today sent to Congress its close study of 27 online virtual worlds – 14 for children under 13 and 13 aimed at teens and adults – looking at the level of sexually explicit and violent content and what the VWs were doing to protect children from it. I think it's important for parents to keep in mind when reading the study or just the highlights here that "content" in virtual worlds means user-generated content (which is why, in "Online Safety 3.0," we put so much stress on viewing children as stakeholders in their own well-being online and teaching them to be good citizens in their online and offline communities). Here are some key findings:

The FTC found at least one instance of either sexually or violently explicit content in 19 of the 27 worlds – heavy (sex or violence) in five of them, moderate in four, and "only a low amount in the remaining 10 worlds in which explicit content was found."

Of the 14 VWs for kids under 13, 7 contained no explicit content, 1 had a moderate amount, and 6 had a low amount.

Nearly all the explicit content found in the kids' VWs "appeared in the form of text posted in chat rooms, on message boards, or in discussion forums."

The Commission found more explicit content in VWs aimed at teens or adults, finding it in 12 of the 13 in this category, with a heavy amount in 5 of them, moderate in 3, and a low amount in 4 of the 13.

Not just text: Half the explicit content found in the teen- and adult-oriented virtual worlds was text-based, while the other half appeared as graphics, occasionally with accompanying audio.

The report goes into measures these 27 VWs surveyed take to keep minors away from explicit content, including "age screens" designed to keep minors from registering below a site's minimum age (what the FTC calls "only a threshold measure"); "adults only" sections requiring subscriptions or age verifications (see "'Red-light district' makes virtual world safer"); abuse reporting and other flagging of inappropriate content; human moderation; and some filtering technology. "The report recommends that parents and children become better educated about online virtual worlds" and that virtual-world "operators should ensure that they have mechanisms in place to limit youth exposure to explicit content in their online virtual worlds." In the two pages of Appendix A (of the full, 23-page report + appendices), you'll find a chart of all the virtual worlds the FTC reviewed. [See also my VW news roundup last week and "200 virtual worlds for kids."]

This is a great start. As purely user-driven media, virtual worlds are a frontier for research on online behavior. The FTC was charged by Congress "merely" with determining the level of harmful content, not behavior – I really think because adults continue to think in a binary, either-or way about extremely fluid environments that are mashups of content and behavior. Where is it really just one or the other, what is "content" in social media, and how do we define "harmful"? We also need to define "virtual worlds." Some of these properties are largely avatar chat, some are games (with quests), some are worlds with games but not quests in them. Still, we've got some great talking points and very useful data to build on.

Virtual-world news update

A lot of news about virtual worlds has crossed my laptop lately, so – since this is a big growth sector of cyberspace (with the global VW population growing from 186.5 million now to 638 million by 2015, according to Strategy Analytics) – I thought I'd package it up for you....

1. Avatar PR

Now (if not yesterday or last year) is a good time to fold avatars into family discussion about reputations and self-representation online. Even if your child's favorite avatar is waddling around in Club Penguin, it would be good to ask to see the penguin, if you haven't already, talk about that penguin's favorite activities in-world, how many friends it has, and what sorts of things they do together. Why am I telling you all this? Early lessons in social Web spin control – not to mention early prep for the business world.

By the end of 2013, 70% of businesses will have behavior and dress code policies for employees whose online avatars represent their organization," Virtual World News reports. Gartner recently published "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success," CNET reports.

As for the littlest VW citizens, Virtual Worlds News recently reported that, at 27% growth between now and 2015, children aged 5-9 are the biggest growth sector of a global virtual world population (which itself will grow from 186 million to 640 million by 2015). VW News was citing Strategy Analytics figures. For insights into day-to-day life in a teen virtual world, check out this YPulse interview with Gaia Online's Joe Hyrkin.

2. Two new arrivals

Israel-based Shidonni.com where kids 4-10 draw and animate their own animal avatars, which can then be turned into real stuffed animals! There's a bit of a Webkinz model, but this is much more appealing to kids because they're the producers. Here's coverage at Virtual Worlds News.

Omaha, Nebraska-based KidCommand.com for 7-to-12-year-olds is a virtual world that aims to teach kids and tweens about the real world so they can help make it better. The company, Green Bein' Productions, Inc., wants to team up with other organizations that work to empower kids (e.g., schools, after-school programs, scouting). Here's Virtual Worlds News.

3. Second Life's booming economy

On average, users of virtual world Second Life spend 100 minutes in-world per visit, adding up to more than 1 billion hours so far, PC World reports. Even more interesting, though, is the virtual world's very real economy. "The equivalent of more than US$1 billion has been transacted between residents in Second Life, who purchase virtual goods and services from one another." The in-world economy grew 54% year-over-year (between third quarter 2008 and third quarter this year), Virtual Worlds News reported more recently. This is a multinational economy: "Users from the United States accounted for 37% of the economy, followed by Germany and Italy at 8% each, France at 7%, and the UK at 5%." Here's a list of dozens of businesses that have a presence in Second Life – in retail, manufacturing, technology, travel, real estate, finance, communications, etc. (I couldn't find anything more recent than this, but I doubt the number has gone down.)

4. Avatars in MySpace

MySpace, which has always been as much a self-expression tool as a social utility is expanding those self-expression features. In an arrangement with the newly profitable teen virtual world Meez Nation, MySpace users can now create avatars, Ad Week reports (CNET mentioned Meez's profitable status).

Meez and MySpace have music and other media sharing in common, Meez CEO John Cahill said in an interview with YPulse. "Our users watch popular videos together, listen and dance to music together, and we're always offering new virtual goods and "Roomz" tied to events like Halloween, for example. See YPulse for more.

5. Virtual worlds in the movies

Hollywood's all over it – not so much making money in virtual worlds as telling stories about them, the San Jose Mercury News reports. There's Second Skin (which I blogged about here), recently released Gamer and Surrogate, James Cameron's Avatar in December, and next year's Tron Legacy from Disney and Christopher Nolan's Inception. [See also "'Red-light district' makes virtual world safer."]

Related link

KZERO, a virtual worlds research and consulting firm in the UK, has a slide show showing more than 10 dozen companies marketing in virtual worlds (with screen shots of their locations) here. [They put out great resources but are not great at returning press calls.]

Privacy on the social Web: Varying views

Our kids - the people who've never known life without the Internet - do think about their online privacy, and social technologies are actually giving them "greater control over their information," writes Heather West at the Center for Democracy and Technology in a Wired blog. She makes an important point about privacy in the new media environment that I think those of us who grew up in the mass-media era need to think about: We think of privacy in a binary way, as "the ability to conceal information from others" – public or private. Period. Internet natives think of privacy as the ability to control how they share information, and to do so in a nuanced way.

West cites two studies showing this, then writes, more anecdotally (and interestingly): "Gone are the days where my friends could see everything I posted on my Facebook page. Now, I am given the opportunity to choose not only what content is public, but who has access to that content. This includes privacy control for photo albums, status updates, and personal information. Truth be told, I am much less comfortable with social sites that do not give me this level of freedom."

[In this context, it's probably worth mentioning the finding that – despite all the online-safety warnings not to share personal info online – "sharing personal information, either by posting or actively sending it to someone online, is not by itself significantly associated with increased odds of online interpersonal victimization," published in the February 2007 issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Rather, the researchers found, it's aggressive behavior online that significantly increases risk.]

Privacy in 6 social sitess

In other important privacy news, Canada's Office of the Privacy Commissioner recently unveiled a study that looks into privacy protections in six social network sites: Facebook, Hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Skyrock.

"These sites were selected based on popularity, but also to facilitate the efficacy of the final product by providing an appropriate breadth and diversity to the analysis," the report said. Aimed at user education more than industry regulation, it does a "comparative analysis" in each of these categories: registration information (e.g., here), real identities vs. pseudonyms, privacy controls, photo tagging, accessibility of user info to others, advertising, data retention, account deletion, third-party applications, and collection of non-user personal information.

The report refers often to the March '08 "Report and Guidance on Privacy in Social Network Services – Rome Memorandum," building on the work of the International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications (see this PDF file) spearheaded by data-protection commissioners in a number of countries.

Related links

A fascinating project at MIT bears out how the societal discussion about privacy needs to get more granular and social-media specific. "Project Gaydar" found that "who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are.... The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t," the Boston Globe reports. There's a lot in the article, too, about the state of research being done in social network sites.

A view from another generation - that of Andrea DiMaio in the Gartner Blog Network. Note the interesting comment below it about how, "in a world awash in information," as it is now, "a paradoxical effect is that many people know far less than they did before."

The Pew/Internet Project's December 2007 teen-online-privacy findings (the latest available).

Net safety: How social networks can be protective

Hmm. It's arresting to think about what Stewart Wolf, M.D. – discovered and presented at medical conferences, as told by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – in the context of social media and online safety today. Back in the 1950s, he found a community in Pennsylvania statistically very free of the No. 1 medical concern of the time, heart disease, and looked into what was going on there. When Wolf presented his research, he found that his skeptical colleagues "weren't thinking about health in terms of community [emphasis Gladwell's]." Now sub in (online) "safety" for "health": "Wolf and [his co-researcher, sociologist John] Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were...."

Now add the online piece
A child's (anybody's) safety and wellbeing have a lot to do with his community offline and online, since the research shows that our online social networks are largely our offline ones.

Almost echoing Dr. Wolf, USATODAY reports that, "for the most part, being part of a social network is good for you.... For example, a study in this month's Scientific American Mind finds that social support and social networking offer benefits, from additional resilience to greater life satisfaction to reducing the risk of health problems. Other studies in the past two years have found that feeling like a part of a larger group helps in stroke recovery and memory retention and boosts overall well-being." And the co-authors of a new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, report that so much of what we think of as individual, e.g., body shape, politics, happiness, are really "collective phenomena."

About peer groups, not technology
The USATODAY piece is balanced, pointing to author and Iowa State University prof. Michael Bugeja's concern that we're not looking at online social networks enough from a computer-science perspective. But what we're addressing in the field of youth online safety is much more about young people's interests, social groups, and home and school environments than about computer science – as pointed out in last year's Internet Safety Technical Task Force review of Net-safety research through last year.

The studies in the USATODAY article that look at community are more helpful to moving the youth-risk discussion forward, suggesting that we consider three things: the impact of an individual's community (online and offline) on his or her well-being; how the individual affects the community; and how the community functions and addresses problems for its members (as a group of people, not a site or technology).

The guild effect
On that third item, author and USC media professor Henry Jenkins made the point at our Online Safety & Technology Task Force meeting in Washington this month that online communities themselves tend to shape members' behavior to protective effect, e.g., through social norming or influencing, behavior modeling, and peer pressure or ostracism. Educators who play World of Warcraft tell me this community self-regulation certainly happens in the "guilds" of that massively multiplayer online game.

So when we work in the field of youth online safety, it might be helpful to think about young people, its intended beneficiaries, in context – as participants in their online/offline communities rather than potential victims, as we have so much in the past. As for those communities: there may be times when outside intervention (from, say, friends, parents, or Customer Service) is necessary but other times when a little time is needed to allow the community itself to sort out how to deal with antisocial behavior. The other piece that needs more consideration is how to encourage youth to develop a "guild effect" in their online environments, so they're invested in the wellbeing of the community and fellow members, as well as themselves.

From interest-driven to friendship-driven
Not that they aren't already doing this. "Kids play socially.... We're growing a bunch of people who see what they do as social and collaborative and as part of joining communities," said author and Arizona State University literacy studies professor James Paul Gee in an interview with PBS Frontline for "Digital Nation." He talks about how young people quite naturally function in "teams," where "everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's; they know how to understand the other person's expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world."

What this suggests to me is that "the guild effect" (safe, civil behavior as a social norm) kicks in quite naturally in "interest-driven" social networking, one of the two forms of social networking described in last year's study from the Digital Youth Project (see "*Serious* informal learning"). The question is, how can the guild effect be just as effective in "friendship-driven" social networking and across the entire social Web, fixed and mobile? I think this may be the central question for online safety going forward.

Social-networking-style problem solving (& policymaking)

I think, or at least hope, online safety (the whole world, actually) is going in the direction of what New York Times columnist Tom Friedman prescribes for solving most global problems: toward using the social-networking model. "Huh?" you might ask. Right, Friedman didn't call it that. But I see a lot of similarity between his prescription for solution development to the collective way young people increasingly do everything from socializing to producing to problem solving. And their collaborative, inclusive approach as well as participation are definitely needed in the Net-safety mix (see "Online Safety 3.0" for more on this). Think "social producing," "creative networking," or interest-driven, social civic engagement (see also the report of the Digital Youth Project). Friedman wrote: "We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems – climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet – separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together," he said, writing from Botswana's Okavango Delta. "We need to make sure that our policy solutions are as integrated as nature itself." Exactly. In other words, not just integration of skill sets within a field by "experts," but collaboration among fields and disciplines, incorporating all skill sets, including the participants or beneficiaries of policymaking and education.

US sex-offender laws, registries not conducive to child safety

The US's burgeoning sex-offender registries are becoming more of a problem than a solution. "Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded," The Economist reports in a thorough look at the subject. "As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders."

The problem is when people "assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes.... No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers." Only a small minority of registered offenders are the "predators" so widely referred to in the news media. Take Georgia, for example. That state "has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders," according to The Economist. "Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other." The state's Sex Offender Registration Review Board found that “just over 100” of the 17,000 could be classified as “predators,” "which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences."

Disinformation and fear are not conducive to calm, constructive discussion about young people's online activities - in families or in policymaking circles. Overreaction by parents causes kids to go into online stealth mode (which gets easier and easier with proliferating access points and connected devices) at a time when child-parent communication is very much needed. Focusing too much on registered sex offenders causes people to forget that most child sexual exploitation is perpetrated by people the victims are related to or know in their everyday lives, most likely people who haven't been arrested, much less convicted, and therefore not people in sex-offender registries (see "Why technopanics are bad").

But the trend is bigger and bigger registries. "Sex-offender registries are popular," the Economist reports. "Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders."

Writes parent and public-policy analyst Adam Thierer, "If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap our current sex-offender registries and completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country." For example, a case I mentioned last April: 18-year-old Phillip Alpert will be in his state's sex-offender registry until he's 43, CNN reported. He is no predator, the way CNN tells the story. He had just turned 18 when he made what turned out to be probably the biggest mistake of his life. He and his 16-year-old girlfriend of two and a half years had had an argument. He told CNN he was tired, and it was the middle of the night when he sent a nude photo of her (a photo she had taken of herself and sent to him) to "dozens of her friends and family." Under current child-pornography and sex-offender laws, this scenario could be repeated in many other states. "Thirty-eight states include juvenile sex offenders in their sex-offender registries," according to CNN. "Alaska, Florida and Maine will register juveniles only if they are tried as adults. Indiana registers juveniles age 14 and older. South Dakota registers juveniles age 15 and older."

Great social-media resource in Oz

Looking for nice, clear definitions of social-media tools like blogs and wikis? Check out a new resource in Australia recommended in an educators' bookmarking group I subscribe to: the Technology Guide in the Australian government's Cybersmart site. That's just one piece of a very comprehensive resource that includes online-safety advice and curricula as well. What I like about it is that it also gets at how youth use technology (it doesn't present technology as a problem). There's a "Cybersafety Help" button for Australians in the upper-right-hand corner of every page. Americans seeking such help can go to CyberTipline.com, Canadians to Cybertip.ca, and Britons to CEOP.

Filtering critics, issues in 3 countries

Teachers, not students, are the people most affected by school filters, according to a commentary in the Washington Post - even though the US federal law requiring filtering by schools receiving federal connectivity funding (the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA) is aimed at protecting students from inappropriate content. "Walk the halls of a public school, and students will readily share tips for evading filters, some of which would be good work-arounds for the Great Firewall of China," writes Justin Reich, a former high school teacher working on his PhD in education at Harvard. He tells of a high school student who recent showed him a Facebook group called "How to access Facebook from school" that has 187,000 members and offers simple methods for filter-free surfing and profile updating. A teacher told me once that, when she needs to get to a site that her school filter blocks, she just asks one of her students to help her.

So one question is, if this view of filtering as blunt-instrument solution is or becomes widespread, what replaces it? One idea might be school-network monitoring. More than 1,000 UK schools have monitoring software running on their networks (probably mostly alongside filtering software). Are US schools using this technology as much? Should monitoring become more of a focus in schools - to allow administrators to identify problem spots, have the "evidence" they need to work through cases of cyberbullying and harassment? What do you think? Is the choice blanket filtering (that's less than effective as a student-protection measure) or dealing with situations as they come up? See my slightly related post, "Zero tolerance = zero intelligence: Juvenile judge." (Post comments here or in the ConnectSafely.org forum, or you can always email me at anne (at) netfamilynews.org.)

And questions about filtering aren't being aired in the US only, of course. The BBC reports that, over in the UK, school regulatory body Becta just released a report which found that Net technology and devices is getting more sophisticated than the filters UK schools use, which often filter what's being downloaded only to computers (rather than mobile phones, iPod Touches, and other portable devices) and based solely on keyword, not image, detection. The report also pointed out that filters just block - they don't alert anybody to efforts to bypass the filtering. And in Australia, children's advocacy groups are criticizing the government for spending $33 million on mandatory nationwide household filtering, Australian IT reports. "Both Save the Children Australia and the National Children's & Youth Law Centre believe the resources could be better spent on law enforcement agencies battling to eradicate child pornography on the Internet."

Online 'walled garden' aimed at tween girls

Here's an innovative idea for parents (of girls 8-12) who are concerned about predators: My Secret Circle. It gives new meaning to the safe playground or walled garden idea, because - with this hardware product, the My Secret Circle Access Key (pictured here), which plugs into a computer USB port - groups of real-life friends can socialize online while being completely closed off from the Internet and vice versa. As the site explains it, "My Secret Circle Friend Code Generator generates a unique 12 digit number" that can only be exchanged through an "invitation system," which allows the user to trade her code with a friend in person. "In order to become 'friends,' each girl must own an Access Key" and go through the code-exchange process herself. John Biggs at the CrunchGear blog seems to like it. The only problem is, the whole concept is based on the premise that the most common risk to online kids is adult predators. Research shows, however, that the most salient risk is cyberbullying and harassment - mean things peers say to each other; friends becoming ex-friends and violating trust; sharing passwords and impersonating peers; etc. Keeping adults out of girls' "secret circles" could actually have the opposite effect to what its creators intended: completely safe socializing. Here's the report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which contains the cyberbullying finding among others in a full review of online-safety research thru 2008.

2 more sites sign on to Euro safe social networking

Popular social sites Rate.ee and Tuenti.com, based in Estonia and Spain, respectively, have just signed on to the European Union's "Safe Social Networking Principles," the European Commission reported. They join earlier signatories Arto (Denmark), Bebo (UK/US), Dailymotion (France), Facebook, Google, Hyves (Netherlands), Microsoft Europe, MySpace, nasza-klasa.pl (Poland), Netlog (Belgium), One.lt (Italy), Piczo, Skyrock (France), StudiVZ.de (Germany), Sulake/Habbo (Finland), Yahoo! Europe, Zap.lu (Luxembourg). The seven principles are in this PDF document (p. 6), which states that "these Principles are aspirational and not prescriptive or legally binding, but are offered to service providers with a strong recommendation for their use."

COPPA 2.0 isn't kids' privacy 2.0

Remember COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998? It was designed to protect the privacy of children under 13. According to Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer, who just completed a paper for policymakers on current efforts to change COPPA, "the law was intended primarily to 'enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities' as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children." What's happening is, lawmakers in five or six states are considering extending COPPA's requirement for obtaining verifiable consent from parents of under-13s to parents of all minors, as Thierer explained in an audio interview at CNET with ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid. There are significant potential problems with that, Thierer suggests, not least of which is that a law intended to protect children's privacy could, with such revision, actually put it at greater risk. Under-13s and people 13-17 are very different developmentally, so there is also the important question of whether it's appropriate or even constitutionally sound to require verifiable parental consent from everyone up to the age of 18 to be allowed to register in any site with social-networking functionality? Do check out the CNET interview for more on this.

Criticism of, changes at Craigslist

Apparently responding to criticism that it was facilitating prostitution, online classified ads giant Craigslist is making some changes. It "will replace its 'erotic services' section with a new adult category that will be more closely monitored, the Washington Post reports. Craigslist, which gets "an estimated 20 billion page views worldwide a month" for a huge variety of ads, says every ad in the new category will be reviewed by a person, and there will be no sex-for-money ads or pornographic images. On the one hand, that doesn't stop people from placing inappropriate ads in other categories; on the other hand that would make such ads harder to find in a medium where there are many sites dedicated to adult content and services. Police cited in a separate article in the Post caution against (anyone) using the Web to arrange in-person meetings and going alone without notifying anyone. Later this week Craigslist sued South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, "asking a judge to stop him from threatening to prosecute [the company's] executives ... on prostitution or obscenity charges," the Boston Herald reports. CEO Jim Buckmaster wrote in the Craigslist blog that "many prominent companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Village Voice Media, not to mention major newspapers and other upstanding South Carolina businesses feature more 'adult services' ads than does Craigslist, some of a very graphic nature," according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News.

Being up front about monitoring online kids

I see no point in parents secretly monitoring kids' online activities - except if a parent feels a child is in danger and the child is unwilling to communicate or make a change in those activities and is being secretive him or herself. If those exceptional criteria are met and a child is at risk, surreptitious use of monitor software is very probably necessary. Otherwise, the only kind of monitoring I'd recommend - for the average kid who's not at risk offline and is lucky enough to have engaged parents (the vast majority of online kids) - is open monitoring involving lots of communication and maybe technology. Which is why I like the whole concept of Norton OnlineFamily: It's not just about technology. I'm not aware of any other online-safety or parental-control product or service designed from the ground up around in-person parent-child communication. "OnlineFamily is meant to be completely transparent between parent and child," writes USATODAY's Ed Baig in his review of the product. Also good: It's free till next January. "Symantec isn't committing to a price after that but says a one-year subscription is valued at $60," Baig adds. For video on the product, see Good Morning America.

A new online safety: The means, not the end

We really need to rethink online safety. When you talk with teens in your family or classroom, do you see what I'm seeing: that, because of the predator panic US society has been experiencing and widespread school policy to block social media, they have practically tuned out the term "online safety"? Because it has for so long been equated with "deleting predators" and it can't really help them deal with the complexities of their online/offline social lives, it's in danger of becoming irrelevant to them.

That puts "online safety" in danger of becoming a barrier rather than a support to young people's constructive, enriching use of social media and technologies. If that happens, it also becomes a barrier to their full participation in participatory culture and democracy.

Certainly the social Web itself isn't participatory democracy 2.0; however - witness the prominent role of social network sites in the US's latest presidential election (see just-released Pew/Internet research) - it has clearly become an important tool of participatory democracy and, as such, needs to be part of citizenship and media literacy education in school (to remain relevant to social media's most fluent practitioners - teens - schools cannot afford to discourage or block social media's use). Online and offline citizenship and social media literacy are themselves the lionshare of online-safety education for youth who are not at risk in offline life (more on this below and in "Social media literacy: The new Internet safety").

To help keep school relevant to students, make online safety meaningful to them, make their use of social media more constructive, and close what author and media professor Henry Jenkins calls the participation gap, we need to: 1) put online safety into the context of full, healthy participation and 2) redefine it as freedom from a set of risks that restrict youth from free expression and civic engagement through social technologies and media.

The three forms of safety that enable full participation are:

Physical safety - the one we have focused on the most, freedom from physical harm by predators and bullies

Psychological safety - freedom from cruelty, flaming, and other forms of harassment and cyberbullying involving ex-friends, mean kids, bullies, colleagues, etc. (picture a wise drama teacher whose rule it is that students check all personal judgment/criticism at the door before they engage worry-free in otherwise compromising, goofy warm-up exercises).

Reputational and legal safety - these can overlap with the psychological kind, where, for example, online defamation can harm someone's reputation; they provide for freedom from restriction or repercussion as a result of online communication or production by one's self or others (repercussions ranging from school discipline to loss of employment to criminal charges for sexting).

All of those freedoms - including from physical harm - are fostered when youth receive training in citizenship, ethics, empathy, new media literacy (employing the critical-thinking filter to what one "says," uploads, or produces as much as reads, downloads or consumes). Such training couldn't remove all online risk any more than it could remove all danger from offline life - particularly for at-risk youth. It can't speed up teenage brain development, which necessarily involves risk taking and assessment and continues until their early-to-mid-20s. But it would go way beyond legislation, stranger-danger messages, parental-control technology, or any other-imposed safety measure, because it develops the internal "filter" that is always with them.

These freedoms are not the goal; they are means to achieving it. We need to shift the public discussion from the more negative safety from to the much more positive safety for or toward active civic engagement online and offline as an essential goal of education in a free society (see the impressive array of skills involved in new media literacy at NewMediaLiteracies.org).

Educator and author Will Richardson says it better. Referring to social Web technologies, he recently wrote in ASCD's Educational Leadership magazine that, "for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely." Safe, ethical, full participation is also one of the biggest opportunities, as well as challenges, we all - students, educators, parents, policymakers, society itself - face right now.

Readers, please jump in - agree, disagree, edit, augment, or comment here, in our ConnectSafely.org forum, or via email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org!

Related links

As the goal, safety sells youth short. How? Consider the playground metaphor, described by Barry Joseph of Global Kids, a youth-education nonprofit organization in New York asked if safety is all we want from playgrounds for our kids. "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?"

Prof. Henry Jenkins's list of factors that block "full achievement" of a participatory society, a "partial agenda for media reform from the perspective of participatory culture"

The skills of new media literacy - learn more at the "Learning in a Participatory Culture" conference at MIT on May 2

"Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project," fall 2008

"Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies," the final report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, January 2009

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety" at NFN

Major update on Net predators: CACRC study

As scary as some of the reports covering it may make it look, there's a lot of good news for online youth in the much-anticipated new study from UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center, "Trends in Arrests of Online Predators." I hope the news coverage doesn't focus solely on the nearly five-fold increase in online predator arrests since the CACRC's last such study in 2000, but even if it does, that finding points to great preventive police work throughout the US (in 2006, 87% of those arrests involved police posing as teens, not real young people, the study found). Those arrests likely prevented crimes against children, and they're sending the message that cops are out there patrolling "the neighborhood."

But there's a lot of other positive news in the report. For example...

Between the CACRC's last study of Net-related predation arrests and this one, there was only a "modest" increase - 21% - of arrests of offenders soliciting young people, its authors report, "from an estimated 508 arrests in 2000 to an estimated 615 in 2006," at a time when the number of US 12-to-17-year-olds online went from 73% to 93%, or more than 25 million, in 2006, and when their Internet use was getting a lot more social.

Overall sex offenses against youth declined during this period, and Internet-initiated child sexual exploitation constituted only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation.

Despite all the hype about registered sex offenders, only a tiny percentage of the arrests surveyed were of registered sex offenders, which indicates that, while blocking them from sites may reduce, it by no means stops sexual solicitation (and we already knew that a significant percentage of the solicitations come from peers).

Not good news, but a notable finding in the study is that there has been "a significant increase in arrests of young adult offenders, ages 18 to 25," which also challenges the image of "predators" presented in the news media.

What about social networking?

Now let's zoom in on what the authors say about online social networking - not just because it's so important to our kids (and statistically of growing use to us too), but also because of all the hype and news coverage about predators in social network sites since 2005:

"There was no evidence that online predators were stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted at social networking sites.

"The nature of crimes in which online predators used the Internet to meet and victimize youth changed little between 2000 and 2006, despite the advent of social networking sites."

Going even further, USATODAY later cited the view of study lead author David Finkelhor that "ongoing studies show that being on a social networking site doesn't create risk for sexual victimization."

Where the risk is

The key to cutting through all the hype and really protecting kids from online predators is in understanding where the risk really lies. Since social networking hit the public radar screen in late 2005, the misconception has grown that the problem lies in a particular technology or "place" online. Dr. Finkelhor put it this way in an email the day the study was released: "The SNS [social-network sites] issue like the age authentication solution is all about mistaking the problem as one of 'access'," he told me. "It’s not about access. It’s about what kids do when interacting online: behaviors."

As for what those behaviors are, Dr. Finkelhor spelled some of them out in a CBS/CNET interview for Larry Magid, my ConnectSafely.org co-director: talking about sex with strangers in a lot of different places online, especially chatrooms about sex and romance, and getting into sexual relationships with people met online (see also "Profile of a teen online victim" from a talk Finkelhor gave in 2007).

"I think the messages [about online safety] need to warn kids about the very risky things they can do in their adolescent naivete and interest in exploring the world," he told Larry. Finkelhor added a risk-prevention behavior that both the Internet industry and all child safety advocates can help promote: "We also need to encourage other people online, the bystanders, people who know these young people or see these interactions on various sites, to report it, to caution the kids about what they're doing, to intervene, to begin to feel they need to take some action to short-circuit what they're seeing might happen." Watching each other's backs, I'm hearing Finkelhor suggest. One of the country's top experts on online safety is pointing to the need to foster digital citizenship.

Related links

"Social norming for risk prevention"

MySpace's PR problem

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety"

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"

My avatar's talk: Online safety 2.0

I - or I should say my avatar Anny Khandr - recently gave some talks about safety on the social Web in the virtual world Second Life. The experiences were great fun and kind of magical on many levels. First, I'm giving my PowerPoint-enabled talk from an easy chair in my family room, using a mic plugged into my laptop. I'm watching myself (or the Anny Khandr cartoon version of me) standing next to my slides before an audience of amazing tech educators around the country, who are all probably listening from easy chairs in their houses too, but at the same time gathered in one place: a beautiful "outdoor" virtual lecture space, complete with stage, screen, benches, and ambient birdsong. We were "gathered" on one of ISTE's islands in Second Life (ISTE for the International Society for Technology in Education, of which both my audience and I are all members).

My, er, Anny's first talk - kindly arranged for by New Jersey tech educator Kevin Jarrett (aka "KJ Hax," who gives teacher tours: see this) - was in a bigger venue and had a substantial audience, but there were problems in the recording process. So the "machinima" you'll see is a more intimate talk I later gave to a small group of avatars/educators, some of whom amazingly came back for seconds! [A machinima is a kind of animated video, or moving screenshots - video recorded within virtual worlds - and can range in subject from "action" videos like what you see in videogames to videos of professionals' avatars giving PowerPoint presentations. Quite the range!] The recording of my talks was done by Marianne Malmstrom, aka the extremely clue-filled "Knowclue Kidd," another great teacher in New Jersey. The whole idea, I think, was Peggy Sheehy's. Peggy, literally a rockstar tech educator (a former rock vocalist), teaches in Suffern, N.Y., and on several islands in Second Life, where she/her avatar is known as Maggie Marat. These educators are the real magic of Second Life to me. If you opened your own account at SecondLife.com, created an avatar, and teleported to ISTE Island, you'd experience what I have: the members' seemingly bottomless kindness and patience and what the tech education part of it has to teach about the gift economy (see this entry in Wikipedia).

The talk is best viewed here, but if anyone would like to download this animated 40-min. talk to their laptop as a better way to show it to fellow parents or educators, please feel free to download it here (it's a huge file, so it can be downloaded either in two parts or in full). Email me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org. if you'd like my PPT notes, with links to all sources. If it's a cartoon, it's a serious one - maybe a little boring too, but also a snapshot of the latest research on social Web safety.

Undercover Mom in ClubPenguin, Part 4: The 'dating' game

by Sharon Duke Estroff

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that at any given moment in any given corner of any given chatroom on ClubPenguin.com, there is someone saying something to the effect of “boys say i” or “beautiful girls come over here” or “are you single?” or “will u be with me?” - which is exactly what Cowboy217 asked me one moonlit night in his igloo.

We’d met earlier that evening at the pizza parlor when I’d heeded Cowboy’s open call for available girls. By the time we got to Cowboy’s crib (which, I might add, was the Taj Mahal of igloos), we’d already swapped at least a dozen heart emoticons. We played a few rounds of “Spin the Lava”, a popular CP party game involving a lava lamp, some truth or dare, and tons of Eskimo kissing, (I’m not kidding with screenshots to prove it) before he popped the question, and I (trying not to think about how appalled Cowboy217 would be if he knew he’d just asked a married, mother of four to go steady) accepted.

Mom Break: I want to start out by recognizing that Club Penguin has excellent safety measures in place to prevent predators from tracking down children via their website. But keeping our kids safe online doesn't simply mean keeping them away from cyber-predators. It means ensuring their social, emotional, intellectual, moral, and physical well-being in both the real and virtual realms. Which is why, of all my undercover mom surprises to date, I found Club Penguin’s sexual undercurrent by far the most unsettling. It's not that every penguin I encountered on CP was engaged in some kind of flirting or dating behavior, but many were. Many, many, many were. It all makes sense if you think about it. The anonymity and lack of adult supervision in children’s virtual social worlds like Club Penguin make them natural spaces for curious kids to act out sexual themes they see in the media, even before they're ready in real life. There's no doubt that pretend romantic play is part of the course and magic of childhood, but Club Penguin is not a kindergarten dress up corner. It is a vastly populous virtual playground where digital natives of all ages and maturity levels share the same turf...and grow up faster together. (I continue to grapple with scope, implications, and complexity of this issue and welcome your insight on the screenshots that follow.)

"Come here all beautiful girls"

"Where the boyz are"

"Spin the lava at my iggy"

"Me playing spin the lava"

"Looking for the ladies"

"Are u takin?"

"One of many prom invites I received"

At the nightclub: "Who is single?" (we're talking 9-to-12-year-olds!)

Invitation to a "Boys Meet Girls Party" at someone's igloo

Dating drama at the pizza parlor - Sharon explained, "The pizza parlor is one of the most popular destinations in ClubPenguin - there's one in every chatroom, so technically there are hundreds, and there always seems to be lots of dating-related talk in them."

Note from editor Anne Collier: One thing I hope this installment illustrates is why we as a society - as we address child online safety together - can't afford to be focused on fear- instead of research-based messaging about predation online. Predatory behavior, power abuse, and bullying occur at all ages (but so does developmentally appropriate sexual exploration). We also can't afford to focus only on the negative behaviors and experiences in virtual worlds because - though clearly they are not the new Saturday-morning cartoons - there are so many good things occurring in them, including informal learning (see "Serious informal learning: Key online youth study). Sharon's reporting is important - I have seen nothing like it as I survey youth-tech and online-safety news each day. But my other hope is that readers who find this report disturbing will consider the context Sharon's expertise in child development gives it and help channel concerns into a renewed societal effort to teach ethics and citizenship - offline as well as online. Because civil, mindful behavior is protective (see "Social media literacy: The new Internet safety").

For an index of the Undercover Mom series, click here. Next week: Cyberbullying penguins?

Growing civility on the Web?

That's what Lee Rainie, director of the Washington-based Pew Internet & American Life Project, is seeing on the Web, he told the Boston Globe: Social norms that mitigate offensive behavior are developing. "There is a quiet but growing movement to forge a truce in what [Rainie] calls 'an arms race of name-calling' on the Web." Despite "the buckets of venom [that] still flow across the Web every day," as the Globe put it, and "whereas a few years ago online insults would lead to an escalation in a war of words, the evolution of the Web has led to an informal code of conduct in online communities such as livejournal.com or in social-networking sites like Facebook. People who sling invective online are dubbed 'trolls'," the Globe quotes one online communications specialist as saying, "and are either ignored or told to get lost," according to Simmons College's Amanda Voodre. She told the Globe that younger Net users are seeing through those stabs at provocation, which defeats the whole purpose of a whole range of juvenile behaviors, from flaming to harassing to bullying. It's partly a matter of just "getting it" - digital natives being seasoned enough in online communications that they just roll their eyeballs at comments from predators and jerks - and partly good media-literacy education, which teaches critical thinking about what's uploaded as well as downloaded (for example, see "How social influencing works").

Google-brand social mapping

Google just launched its version of social-mapping called "Latitude." It reportedly works on a lot of phones, not just Google's own Android, and people get the little app by going to Google's page on the subject, typing their mobile numbers into the box and getting a text message from Google with a download link in it, ComputerWorld reports. "The idea is you install Latitude on your cell phone and invite your geeky friends to do the same. Then they can see exactly where you are on a Google Map on their phone or the Web, and you can see them. Feel like hiding from the world? Tweak the privacy settings and you disappear. Or you can just X out certain friends when you're no longer feeling so friendly toward them." So if it sounds a little invasive, good, that means you'll work through the privacy features (and help your kids do the same). In fact, it's so easy to get that you might want to talk with your early adopters right up front about privacy features and why they're important. Latitude is not new, though. Three-year-old Loopt, also in Mountainview, Calif., is a pioneer in the social-mapping space, and particularly in user safety and privacy. Coverage in Forbes and CNET too.

Watchdog's study on YouTube

The Parents Television Council recently did its first study of online media, logically deciding to focus on YouTube - I guess the Web site closest to replicating the broadcast medium, though far from the only video-sharing site youth use. "While we applaud YouTube for its commitment to gating procedures and its recently announced plans to curb inappropriate content [the PTC's research was done before YouTube's announcement this month], the core implication of our analysis is that the site isn't doing enough to protect kids," the PTC press release states (the release links to the full study). One of the "major findings" it highlighted was: "Children entering such 'child-friendly' search terms as 'Miley Cyrus,' 'Jonas Brothers,' 'High School Musical' and 'Hannah Montana' were confronted with highly offensive content in the accompanying text commentary posted by other site users." "Posted by other site users" is a key qualifier.

What's difficult, here, is that an organization focused on conventional mass media (providing regulated content produced by the broadcasters) is critiquing a social media provider (hosting media produced largely by its users). There is no denying the problems that arise when people of all ages use a huge general site and when some of the content users produce and share in the site is inappropriate for youth. The problems are not unique to any single site, not even to media-sharing sites or the Web itself (they're also found on wireless networks - see this on cellphone "sexting"). Yes, parents need to know that a site popular among kids has a whole lot of profanity and sexual innuendo in user comments associated with videos, but let's not compare apples to oranges - a user-driven medium to conventional media - and let's not get distracted from an important collective effort to educate parents and youth about the spectrum of youth risk online (including youth-generated online risk) by looking too much through the lenses of our own experience with media or thinking that adolescent behavior has changed a great deal when one of the realities we're dealing with is that age-old, sometimes shocking adolescent behavior is now a great deal more visible to parents. [Here's more on the PTC study, as well a FilteringFacts.org blogger David Burt's own experience with YouTube search.]