Anne Collier’s Bio
Journalist and youth advocate Anne Collier has been chronicling the public discourse about youth and digital media since 1997. She is executive director of national nonprofit organization The Net Safety Collaborative and founder of its iCanHelpline.org, the U.S.’s social media helpline for schools. During the 2015-’16 school year, she piloted the helpline in collaboration with school-serving nonprofit organization #ICANHELP in California, Georgia and Washington State. She founded The Net Safety Collaborative, iCanHelpline.org’s parent, in 2016 after directing its predecessor, Net Family News Inc., since 1999. With technology journalist Larry Magid, she founded ConnectSafely.org in 2005, co-directing it with him for nearly a decade.
Having spoken widely on the subject, Anne gave her most recent talk, “The Heart of Digital Citizenship,” at TEDxGeneva during the ITU’s World Summit on Information Technology, May 2016.
Anne has served on three national task forces on youth and Internet safety, including as co-chair of the Obama administration’s Online Safety & Technology Working Group, which delivered its report to Congress, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet,” in June 2010, and the Harvard Berkman Center’s national Internet Safety Technical Task Force of 2008. Most recently she served on the Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning & the Internet of 2013-’14.
In 2011 and ’12, she was a member of the curriculum working group supporting the launch of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation at Harvard University’s Berkman Center (now Berkman Klein Center), and helped form its inaugural Youth Advisory Board. For the Foundation’s launch, she collaborated on several papers for the Foundation and the Berkman Center’s Kinder & Braver World Project. Between 2011 and ’14, she helped spearhead and facilitate workshops on digital citizenship for young people from many countries at Internet Governance Forums in Vilnius, Nairobi, Baku and Istanbul.
Books Anne has contributed to include Bullying: Perspectives, Practice and Insights (Council of Europe Publishing, 2017), Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents (Oxford Press, 2014) and Cyberbullying Prevention and Response: Expert Perspectives (Routledge, 2011). With Larry Magid, she co-authored MySpace Unraveled (Peachpit Press, 2006), the first parents’ guide to teen social networking, and a number of guides for parents published by ConnectSafely. In 2009, they co-authored and published “Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth.”
Anne has spoken widely on Internet safety myth-busting, the literacies of the digital age and digital citizenship; appeared on PBS Frontline’s “Growing Up Online” (2008); has been heard on public radio and nationally syndicated commercial radio in many states; and has been quoted in the New York Times, Business Week, the Associated Press, and many other publications.
In addition to her other work, she serves on the Safety Advisory Boards of Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Ask.fm and the advisory board of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Online Safety Institute. Prior to working in the Internet safety field, Anne worked on print, radio, TV, and Web versions of the Christian Science Monitor, having served as editor of its first Web site in the mid-’90s.
A Massachusetts native, Anne holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Principia College and the University of Chicago and lives with her family in the Seattle area.
