Writer and youth advocate Anne Collier has been chronicling the public discussion about youth and digital media since 1997. She is founder and executive director of national nonprofit organization The Net Safety Collaborative (TNSC), creators of a social media helpline for U.S. schools. Piloted in California during the 2015-’16 school year, in 2016 the helpline was recognized by the National School Boards Association as one of 6 startups in its Education Technology Innovation Showcase. That year Anne also gave her TEDx talk, “The Heart of Digital Citizenship,” in Geneva, Switzerland, at the ITU’s World Summit on Information Technology. She has served on Facebook’s Safety Advisory Board since its inception in 2009 and continues to serve on those of Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube and Paris-based Yubo. Over a period of years she has also worked with Google on its “Be Internet Awesome” safety and citizenship curriculum for elementary students worldwide.
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 national Internet Safety Technical Task Force of 2008 at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. In 2013-’14 she served on the Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning & the Internet.
In 2011 and ’12, she was a member of the curriculum working group that helped launch Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation at Harvard University. For the Foundation’s launch, Anne collaborated on several papers for the Foundation and Berkman Klein Center’s Kinder & Braver World Project. She also helped develop the foundation’s inaugural Youth Advisory Board.
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 University 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, which she founded and co-directed with Magid for nearly a decade. In 2009, they co-authored and published “Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth.”
Anne has spoken widely on Internet safety myth-busting and the literacies that afford true safety online as well as offline in a digital age. Between 2011 and ’14, she helped spearhead and facilitate workshops on digital-age citizenship for young people from many countries at Internet Governance Forums in Vilnius, Nairobi, Baku and Istanbul. She 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 industry advisory work, she works closely with fellow youth advocates in the nonprofit world, including #ICANHELP in the San Francisco area, Washington, D.C.-based Family Online Safety Institute, Seattle-based Committee for Children , the New York-based National Association for Media Literacy Education, the International Bullying Prevention Association and the University of New Hampshire’s Family Research Lab. Prior to working in the Internet safety field, Anne worked on print, radio, TV, and Web editions 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 Salt Lake City.
