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How ‘crowdreporting’ could actually be a bad thing

26-Apr-13

It could help increase the visibility of the very content people want deleted. Here, in a guest post for NetFamilyNews, is an account by Maureen Kochan, our director of community at ConnectSafely.org, of how that happens:

By Maureen Kochan

Many users of Facebook have come across questionable content on the site on occasion. Chances are they reported it and moved on. But sometimes pages or groups are so offensive that organized campaigns spring up to get the page or group taken down. But when it comes to reporting bad content on Facebook, more reports might not be better.

Take one example that came to our attention recently. A user contacted us about a Facebook page that she and many others wanted removed. In her message the user acknowledged that the campaign against the page was probably making it all the more visible due to their engagement with the page (a lot of people were visiting the page to view and discuss the content, and to report it).

Facebook ultimately took the page down, though it had 227,000 “likes.” Of course no one can know how much the “anti” campaign increased the page’s reach, but the saying “any press is good press” came to mind as I followed what happened with the offending page, and there is no question that public outrage over a piece of content in social media only increases the attention it gets.

A similar situation came up several days later. An acquaintance sent us an online petition aimed at getting Facebook to remove a pro-dog-fighting group. By the time the petition, which contained a disturbing picture of an injured dog, got to me, Facebook had already removed the group. But the name of the group – and the disturbing image – lived on through the petition, which wasn’t hosted on Facebook. By the time I saw it, the petition had been signed 134,000 times with 334,000 shares. (The petition closed several days later with 259,000 signatures and 589,000 shares.)

So the people behind this group and page got even more mileage from the reactions to their exploits – in the case of the pro-dog-fighting group, long after their stuff was removed from Facebook. And it’s worth noting that, while Facebook removed the content in both cases, that doesn’t always happen. A Facebook page or group can be offensive without violating the site’s terms of use (e.g., when Facebook considers the content free speech). So piling on reports may not get the page or group removed and instead may help it reach a wider audience.

Certainly using social media to stage a public protest against something in social media seems logical, but we might think about whether the outcome will be different from the way things worked in the past, when public protests typically were staged about something that happened in the past – something that couldn’t be instantly clicked to or conveniently viewed on the very same page. Being able to see what’s being protested about can be informative, but it also means the viewer is giving attention to – essentially giving power to – the offending content. That may’ve been partly true in the past, but not to the same degree as now.

And then there’s the view of people who grew up with social media. Here’s what an Australian high school student recently told ConnectSafely co-director Anne Collier when asked about whether pages depicting violence, hate, misogyny, etc. should be taken down: “Nobody’s forcing you to look at or like that page. You can block it too, so that you never have to look at it if you don’t want to.” Another student told her, “Free speech is important,” adding that it’s better to allow people to “express their displeasure” with and on an offensive page than to require a service to delete it. A third said that, if it promotes violence, it should be taken down, but cautioned adults to remember that it isn’t just a social-media thing: “People say awful things to each other in person, and [online] is just another place where that happens.” Helpful perspective from the people who know social media well.

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Computer-based socializing likely to have peaked

25-Apr-13

It looks like social networking on desktops and laptops peaked in 2011 at 30% of Americans’ time online – another sign of how mobile socializing’s getting. Computer-based socializing decreased 3% last year for the first time, CNET reports, citing Experian market research. Social networking went down in the UK and Australia during the same period too – declining 3% in both countries. “If the time spent on the Internet on personal computers was distilled into an hour, then 27% of it – 16 minutes – would be spent on social networking,” the biggest category except for “Other.” Behind online socializing were entertainment (9 min.), shopping (5 min.), and then business and email tied (3 min.). Shopping and news consumption on computers both grew the same year.

Meanwhile Americans spent 15% of their time on mobile phones socializing. That’s all US consumers, but it trends with what Pew Internet found about the teenage demographic, only it’s more pronounced for teens: “The nature of teens’ Internet use has transformed dramatically,” Pew reported, so that now a quarter of US 12-to-17-year-olds are “cell-mostly” Internet users (compared to 15% of adults). It was probably no surprise to parents when Pew reported last year that texting is the dominant use of cellphones for teens. Here’s a great infographic (using Pew data) that illustrates the mobile life of teens.

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‘Less is more’ for mobile teens

24-Apr-13

Wired speculates that, because some Asian texting apps – such as LINE, WeChat, Gangnam Style and Kakaotalk – have “slick user interfaces that focus on simplicity and visually pleasing graphics,” these fast-growing apps will soon cross the Pacific, and at least one of them will take off in the US too. “Today, less is more.” But Wired seems to contradict itself a bit, saying they’re also adding features rather than staying spare: “Although they started as pure messaging apps, they’ve increasingly added features to become full social networks.”

I buy the “less is more” speculation, where teens are concerned, but it’s a blend of less-is-more (social-networking-LITE) and diversification. I think more and more people, led by younger people, are using a passel of simple apps for simple use cases – e.g., perishable photo-sharing (as in Snapchat, which is the very definition of social networking LITE) and photo-socializing (as in Instagram, illustrating the new meaning of “a picture’s worth a thousand words”). Apps need to stay spare and utilitarian because that makes them more versatile and adaptable. There are other uses for Instagram, for example, such as marketing or displaying a collective of favorite things or creations (and those are well-established uses now). Teens, whether as individuals or groups, like to make apps and services their own. Simplicity and utility help them do that. It’ll be fun to see, not what the next hot app will be, but what the next teen-developed use case will be. It won’t necessarily be the use case envisioned by an app’s developers or a service’s founders, and it’s getting harder for adult analysts to predict! [BTW, Kik Messenger is No. 1 with teen in Australia, I learned when in Sydney last month, and WhatsApp seems to be No. 1 in the world, at least according to the Android app store download numbers at Google play.]

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

22-Apr-13

Remember Formspring.me? Three years ago some terrible trolling that reportedly involved teens in New Jersey made the site, which announced it was shutting down* last month, a national news story in the US. Teens’ viral adoption of Formspring and its format (ask a question, get an anonymous answer) reportedly took the site by surprise. Disturbing news coverage and letters sent home by school principals did so even more, and Formspring doubled down on safety measures. There’s no way to know for sure if the site shut down because everybody moved on, but its numbers did dwindle and it did shut down. A lot of people forget that that’s how social media works. People can simply move on (more on this in a minute).

Now, Ask.fm, a site based in Latvia, is getting similar media attention in the UK (though a search for “ask.fm” in Google News turns up plenty of negative reactions to Ask.fm in news outlets throughout the US). “Schools across the country are sending out letters advising pupils not to use Ask.fm, which has more than 30 million users around the world and has been linked to suicides and serious bullying,” the London Daily Mail reported recently. Ask.fm’s founder Mark Terebin did not help his site’s image when he said on Irish television last fall that “we only have this situation in Ireland and the UK most of all. It seems that children are more cruel in these countries.” [It was noteworthy to see the Daily Mail say something positive about Twitter and Facebook: "Unlike other services such as Facebook and Twitter, there is no way to report offensive comments, increase privacy settings or find out who is behind anonymous bullying." But it should be noted that US federal privacy law prohibits online service providers from disclosing a user's identity to another user without a court order – at least in the US.]

Whack-a-mole not the solution

So there’s always going to be a site that everybody’s going to love to hate, and we’re not helping children develop the self-respect, empathy and resilience that will truly protect them by getting caught up in an endless frustrating game of whack-a-mole. It also doesn’t help our credibility with our kids and – even when sites show little or no corporate responsibility – the sites aren’t the root problem.

Remember the “Am I Pretty?” videos on YouTube that were in the news last fall? They’re not in the headlines anymore, but we know they still get posted. [Two years before that story, Formspring contacted social media researcher danah boyd about a subtle kind of self-harm the staff had detected, and the site and the researcher started an important discussion about teens' cries for help through staging anonymous bullying behavior against themselves.]

New site, same issues

And now we see this story in, for example, The Independent in Dublin: “Last fall, a girl told us she had put a question about herself on the ask.fm site and was waiting for the anonymous answers. She said while they might be mean, at least she would know what people think about her.” This is exactly what teens were doing in Formspring (I wrote two posts about it three years ago in “Formspring: What’s really going on” and “Formspring: What’s going on around it”).

[Here's the part about how social media works (mentioned in the first paragraph): If sites put so many safety measures in place that users feel their expression's being restricted, the users can simply move on, possibly to a site, app or service in some country with no protective laws in place (or just a less reputable one). There's essentially an infinite number of "places" where users can go. It's too easy for young people to find workarounds, which is why it's better to keep communications lines open than to ban things and send kids "underground."]

It’s good to draw attention to irresponsible or anti-social media companies and sites – public opinion is powerful, or at least over time gathers power, in a user-driven media environment (see this and this). But it’s even better to think out loud with children in our care about compassion and respect for self and others, beauty and body image, how to be a friend and choose our friends. Instead of banning devices or sites, wouldn’t it yield more to talk about what pro- and anti-social behavior looks and feels like on them? In a way, we can thank the advent of social media for making it more crucial than ever to have these conversations with our children and students. Those heart-to-hearts plus the life lessons that come from working through things with peers build resilience, the internal protection that will always be with them, online and offline. But just as was true long before there was social media, letting them know we have their backs and they’re loved and respected is huge.

*Formspring announced it would be closing March 31, but on that day added an announcement to its site that “a last-minute deal in the works … will help keep Formspring up. More details to follow in the coming week.” The details haven’t been posted.

Related links

  • Ask.fm’s very one-sided Terms of Use (note whose rights are foremost – not users’)
  • But nothing’s black & white (or either all bad or all good) in life and social media. To illustrate, there are perfectly legitimate and, arguably, silly things going on in the site, such as the Ask.fm page of Texas nonprofit organization Children at Risk, and then the page featuring Rutgers University students’ crushes, as described in the 144-year-old student newspaper The Targum: “People submit confessions about their crush anonymously to an ask.fm account and @RU_crushes [in Twitter] publishes them for all to see.” The reporter goes on to write, “To be fair, the ask.fm page chides users for being too vulgar, warning that, ‘if you think the ones posted now are bad, you’d be surprised.’ I’m not surprised. People are weird. People are sexual. People want to share. People think weird and sexual things and then they share them. I am perplexed, though. Can’t we share on a higher level?”
  • I really like the closing line of the commentary in The Independent I mentioned above: “iTrust is an application parents need to develop.” I was thinking similar thoughts when I wrote “Does tracking our kids’ every move make them safer?” and “The trust factor in parenting online kids.”
  • More about the self-respect imperative: “Teens, social media & trolls: Toxic mix,” but keeping in mind the research which shows that, in digital media as well as in life, learning and resilience don’t happen without exposure to risk (not harm but risk – there’s a difference).
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Bullying: How an ‘authoritative’ parenting style can help

19-Apr-13

When my friend and colleague Jason Brand, a Berkeley, Calif.-based family therapist, points an article out to me, I pay attention. He and I were discussing resilience as a protective factor in children’s use of social media, and Jason pointed out an article in Scientific American by psychologist Abigail Baird at Vassar College. She wrote it in 2010, when emotions around the tragic case of Phoebe Prince’s suicide were running high, so I needed to get past the first part to see what Jason found useful, and – whether or not you’re a psychologist – I think you will find this informative too. He zoomed in on what fosters in kids the resilience that reduces the impact bullying and cyberbullying can have on them: “authoritative parenting.”

Pointing to a study in the Journal of Youth & Adolescence that looked at what connections teens around age 15 made between bullying and self-harm or suicide, Baird writes, “The authors found that ‘authoritative parents’ … can make a difference.

“Authoritative parents are good listeners,” she continues. “They are able to provide comfort and guidance when their children encounter stress, and help them forge appropriate responses. Adolescents of authoritative parents feel respected by their parents, and in turn respect the limits set on them. Their parents are involved in their lives to the extent that they know who their friends are and where they hang out, but are not overly enmeshed in the adolescent’s life. Among the participants in this study, this parenting style significantly reduced the negative impact of bullying.”

Baird points out another key part of resilience: self-control. Young people who have learned how to give themselves time to control their emotions and reactions rather than act on impulse are less affected by the meanness or bullying of others (please see the article for more on that).

If parents wonder what all this looks like “on the ground,” at home dealing with everyday life, among the Comments below Baird’s piece, a self-professed authoritative parent took the time to describe her experience with “a gifted child who was painfully shy when he was younger. He got bullied pretty badly at a few points, and together we solved the problems as they arose.”

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A techie dad’s perspective on school

17-Apr-13

The subhead of this post might be: “Writing code as an extracurricular activity” or Venturebeat‘s headline, “Why your 8-year-old should be coding,” or just “Let them learn code!” Another article about Harvard undergrads’ extracurricular code-writing activity shows how that activity can enrich a whole lot of lives as well as open up careers for young code writers, but I’ll get to that in a minute. First the dad’s perspective:

The parent in question, Krishna Vedati, who came to the US to get a degree in computer science and became a tech entrepreneur, now has kids aged 6 and 9. Like most American kids, they’re exposed to all kinds of technology outside of school while “their schools haven’t changed in 50 years,” Vedati told Venturebeat. So he helped create a free Web-based service called Tynker.com specifically for elementary-school-aged kids. It teaches them the basics – the logic – of software programming (“code writing”) while they do fun things like create their own digital games. It sounds a little like MIT-based Scratch (for creating and sharing games, animations, music, and visual art) aimed at 8-to-16-year-olds, and then there’s Treehouse for older kids. Vedati’s not alone in his view – see Code.org and a piece about “Why every single one of you should learn a little code,” which is probably where things are headed, actually. Learning code will be a bit like learning another language.

So here’s what can happen with an extracurricular activity (this one in college): A group of Harvard undergrads are developing technology that, in effect, turns paintings into bas reliefs so the blind can “see” them, FastCompany.com reports. One of the students, Constantine Tarabanis, got the idea because he’d volunteered at a school for the blind back home in Thessaloniki, Greece. “Using a combination of computer-aided design software and 3-D printing technology, Tarabanis and his partners believe it should be relatively easy to create what he calls ‘two-and-a-half-D models’ of paintings,” according to FastCompany. His co-developers are Vaios Triantafyllou, also from Greece, Rishav Mukherji and Aaron Perez. They’re all sophomores, and they call their project “Midas Touch.” [See also this 3-part series on Minecraft in school, starting here.]

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Snapchat: Privacy as perishable as the photos

17-Apr-13

Users of the popular, fairly new Snapchat app tend to like it because a photo vanishes within 10 seconds or less of being viewed by its recipient. That adds something fun, spontaneous and just “real” to photo-sharing that’s pretty unprecedented in social media.

New parents’ guide

snapchat logoHere’s why: Typically in social networking, “users tend to feel pressure 
to curate the perfect representation of [themselves and] their lives for their friends, coworkers, and relatives,” as the people at Snapchat put it in their new “Guide for Parents.” With ephemeral photo-sharing (Facebook has a similar product called Poke), the pressure’s off. “It’s sharing that lives in the moment, and stays in the moment,” Snapchat says, and users seem to agree. They can really be themselves (e.g., see “A user’s perspective” in my last post on this phenomenon).

And there’s nothing disingenuous about that – I’m sure you’ve heard critics and even your kids talk about how people are “always on” in social media, as in “on stage,” that it’s about posing or self-presentation. That gives us pause, right? We want our kids (or anyone) to find freedom from that pressure, if they feel it – and many have the good sense to opt out or find workarounds such as this phenomenon called ephemeral photo-sharing.

Beware a false sense of security

But that shouldn’t give anyone – whether a user or the parent of one – a false sense of security about photos that disappear fast and that aren’t stored on corporate servers. I’ve mentioned before that parents might want to ask their kids if they’ve noticed friends capturing screenshots of photos they’ve shared. If it’d help, Mashable has a video that explains not only that (Snapchat users at your house know about it, I’m sure), but also about a workaround to Snapchat’s notification that a photo has been grabbed.

The workaround has 3 simple steps: keep one thumb on the photo on the phone’s screen, take the screenshot with the other thumb, then immediately double-tap the app’s home button, as demo’d in the video.

About workarounds

Snapchat’s parents’ guide doesn’t mention this, but that’s probably because Snapchat doesn’t even know about it. Half the fun of the *social* part of social media is sharing workarounds, mods, cheats, whatever. It’s not just a rules-are-made-to-be-broken thing (though that’s part of it, of course), but also a test-the-limits or look-at-this-cool-thing-I’ve-created or -discovered kind of thing. And there’s something wonderful about that. It’s white hat hacking that makes things better, more secure or more fun. It can be a creative or productive kind of leveling up that’s fun for the hacker and benefits both the system and others who use it. Playful and creative “hacking” like this, whether single-player or collaborative, is happening all the time in Minecraft, Roblox and other games and digital environments where kids are allowed to create and build things (“user-generated content,” or UGC for short). Most of us know this, but how much do we think about how it’s happening in or with what we think of as purely social apps?

Anyway, someday, somebody’s going to come out with an perishable-photo-sharing app that doesn’t allow screenshots. It’ll be to see what workarounds users come up with then!

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Law enforcement & social media now working together

16-Apr-13

This is a significant sign of progress: The National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) is working with Facebook on consumer privacy education. We’re still only in the first half of this decade, and in the second half of the last one, the state attorneys general were threatening legal action against a social media service – MySpace, the most popular one of that time. Now NAAG is actually co-branding a consumer-ed campaign with this decade’s biggest social media service. Today NAAG and Facebook launched “Safety and Privacy on Facebook.” On the page, parents will find privacy tips, videos from Facebook’s “Ask the Safety Team,” and a public service announcement from FB CEO Sheryl Sandberg and Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler, president of NAAG. [For more, see our Parents' Guide to Facebook.]

There was progress in the last decade too, because of the task force that resulted from an agreement between MySpace and 49 attorneys general (see this account by Adam Thierer at George Mason University): the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard’s Berkman Center (for disclosure, I served on this task force, as did Thierer). “This was a task force that primarily came about after state attorneys general (AGs) had been incessantly pressuring social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to adopt age verification technologies as a solution to online child safety concerns. Specifically, fears about online predators – driven largely by the moral panic whipped up by shows like NBC’s ‘To Catch a Predator’ – prompted calls for mandatory age verification for social networking sites.” They were prescribing a solution before there was a diagnosis. So the task force got all of us closer to a diagnosis with an unprecedented review of the youth online risk research through the work of our Research Advisory Board. Its key findings were not what some of the attorneys general, including NAAG leaders of that time, seemed to want to hear (see this) despite the fact that they were the findings of peer-reviewed research:

  • that harassment and cyberbullying, not “predators,” are the most salient risk youth face online (though, in more recent research, at least 70% of US teens have not experienced cyberbullying, and 88% of 12-to-16-year-olds in 25 countries said “no” in a survey asking them if they’ve been upset by anything they’ve experienced online in the past year);
  • that not all youth are equally at risk (those most at risk online are the young people at risk offline);
  • that a child’s psychosocial makeup and home and school environments are better predictors of online risk than any technology he or she uses;
  • that no single technological development can solve youth online risk.

These findings are bedrock on which evidence-based “consumer education” can now be based. What danah boyd, who led the lit review and co-directed the Berkman task force, wrote after our report’s release is still true: “We need to stop talking about the Internet as the cause and talking about it as the megaphone. The Internet makes visible how many kids are not ok. We desperately need an integrated set of compassionate solutions…. The kids need our support, our attention, and our love. They need us to move away from our fears and address the very real dangers and issues that they face. This isn’t a black and white story. This is a very complex set of issues that require people to get informed.”

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Companies competing to protect our privacy?

12-Apr-13

It’d be an exaggeration to say that tech companies are falling over themselves to protect our privacy, but you might say that it’s becoming a “social norm” for US businesses. At least, that’s what the New York Times reports, and that must be at least a sign that it’s true because it’s far from normative for newspapers to report good news. As evidence, the Times cites a Microsoft executive saying on a conference panel that there are “market forces at play with privacy”; “Mozilla, an underdog in the browser market, [suggesting] … that it would allow its users to disable third-party tracking software altogether”; Facebook requiring apps “to offer customers a privacy policy”; and Apple requiring iPhone apps “to get permission from users before tracking their location or peering into calendars and contacts stored on an iPhone.” And the Times cites a law professor as saying more and more companies are “emphasizing consumer data protection” and an industry analyst as saying that “consumer trust is an increasingly vital commodity for Web companies.” Whether it’s to stave off regulation or not, this is good news for Internet users.

Social norms, wherever we see them developing, are good; they’re protective, an increasingly important form of protection in a world where regulation is getting more and more distributed, from individual self-regulation to corporate self-regulation to the regulation that comes from government enforcing laws. [See also "What the Net privacy big picture has to do with parenting."]

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Definitely not just because of Windows 8

12-Apr-13

It’s not a PC, a laptop, a tablet or phone; it’s an “ultramobile.” That’s what tech research firm Gartner Group calls what’s replacing desktops. USATODAY says it’s “a fully functional personal computer that is light enough to tote around,” which sounds like a smartphone. You can read more about how it’s different at USATODAY. The point is, we’re just getting a whole lot more mobile now, and parents don’t even need to hear that the evidence of that is mounting. But the latest evidence is that PC sales were down 13.9% for the first quarter of this year, compared to January through March 2012, my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid reported in Forbes.com. Sure, Windows 8 might have “slowed the market,” as IDC told Larry, but neither that nor the tough economy is the real explanation. “It is a reflection of a long-term change in user behavior,” Gartner reported.

We’re turned a corner on several levels. It’s not just that we (regardless of age) want all that a connected computer is capable of with us wherever we are, we want different tools or capabilities on it for different contexts and circumstances, whether it’s reading in bed, conducting a meeting, disputing a bill, shooting a film, leveling up in a game, skyping grandkids, hanging out with friends, or whatever. We like having a world of possibilities at our fingertips. “Screen time” is not only increasingly mobile, it’s highly differentiated now and forever – don’t try to extrapolate anything about your kids from “studies” that generalize about it or suggest it’s just entertainment. It’s a highly individual experience not only from family to family but also from person to person within a family. In fact, it’s situational and contextual for each individual.

Which means that parenting has turned a corner too. As I mentioned in response to educator Will Richardson’s comment in my blog this week, going forward, working through things “out loud” (transparently) with our kids rather than applying predetermined responses may work better. To borrow John Seely Brown’s metaphor), parenting, just like learning, is now more like whitewater kayaking than piloting a steamship. Though a lot of the wisdom, values, etc. we got from our parents is the same, we now need to work more from tacit knowledge we gain/act on as we go rather than from the explicit knowledge of “this is the way we’ve always done it.”

As for the tech trend, it’s by no means defined by “decline.” That’s only for PCs and laptops, Gartner says, but with an overall 9% increase in sales of devices worldwide projected for this year (to 2.4 billion units), USATODAY reports. “Gartner expects mobile phones to continue to dominate … and tablet sales [to] increase sharply. But in the same period, its analysis sees sales in the ultramobile category growing exponentially, from fewer than 10 million in 2012 to more than 23 million this year, and 96 million by 2017.”

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