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Restricting teen access: Unintended consequences

January 23, 2009 By Anne Leave a Comment

Age verification has been the potential online-safety solution of choice for state attorneys general. I know I’ve written about this plenty, but I have to add something that really struck me in reading all the technology submissions to the Internet Safety Technical Task Force: that the only way any of these technologies would really work for children is if their parents chose to use them. Only bottom-up, not top-down, adoption can really work. In other words, no government can effectively mandate their use because no government can control the global Internet or its global population of users. For example, if a government were somehow to restrict social networking only to adults, its restrictions could only affect social sites based in its country; its teens could simply go to social sites based in another country (there are so many English-language ones outside the US). This was a key factor cited in a recent European Commission report. But back to opt-in parental controls. There are many kinds – from filtering to monitoring to site moderation to ID-verification in specific sites for which parents sign up their kids. All of these can work for children with engaged, informed parents who know what’s age-appropriate for each of their kids. They don’t work very well for kids who aren’t fortunate enough to have that kind of attentive parental support, kids who – for good or bad – find more support online than at home, if they even call it “home.” Those are the youth recognized in the research summarized in the Task Force report as most at risk online as well as offline. Those are also the young people for whom age verification could have very negative unintended consequences. It’s those possible consequences which have barely begun to be considered and about which my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid and I are concerned. We sent a memo about them to our fellow Task Force members (summarized on p. 262 of the full report, which can be downloaded at the site of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society) and which Larry delineated in his CNET blog.

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Filed Under: Law & Policy, Risk & Safety Tagged With: unintended consequences

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2016 TEDx Talk on
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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

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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