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Facebook deletes ‘thousands of U13 accounts a day’

March 23, 2011 By Anne 1 Comment

This wouldn’t be a bad media literacy lesson! I had to click from CNN to Fast Company to AllFacebook.com to get to the original coverage in Australia’s Daily Telegraph, which reported that “about 20,000 children are kicked off Facebook every day for lying about their age” (language that oddly suggests punishment). The Daily Telegraph was basing its lede on a statement made by Facebook adviser and former US Federal Trade Commissioner Mozelle Thompson on a panel before the Australian Parliament’s Cyber-Safety Committee. What Mr. Thompson actually said, according to both the Daily Telegraph and PC Magazine was that “Facebook removes 20,000 people a day, people who are underage.” The site later clarified that, saying “those 20,000 removals cover a variety of policy violations, including spam, inappropriate content, and underage use,” PC Magazine reports. Facebook’s Terms of Service have a minimum age of 13 for anyone setting up an account, and the site does disable or block thousands of under-age accounts a day, its chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, told the New York Times. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported about a year ago that 82% of US 14-to-17-year-olds use social network sites The percentages for younger users were 62% of US 13-year-olds and 46% of 12-year-olds.

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Filed Under: Law & Policy, Research, Risk & Safety, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, Pew Internet, social media research, social networking, U13, underage users

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  1. Jan Doggen says

    March 24, 2011 at 9:09 am

    “This wouldn’t be a bad media literacy lesson”
    Indeed. This happens so often: a site quotes a site that quotes a site etc. Everybody changes the text a bit, with the best of intentions (they want to add something personal, have a different emphasis, don’t want to ‘just quote’ which would look like lazy work) and in the end the factual content is diluted or distorted.
    Not too bad if you can follow back to the original source (not always possible) and have the tenacity to dig deeper, but only a small percentage of the readers will do that.
    Case in point: how many actual figures/measurements are quoted in posts about the radiation from the Japanese reactors? It’s hard to find these!

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Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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