For a must-read article for anyone interested in safety and free speech online, some of the social media industry's most seasoned content moderators – the apps' and sites' safety managers and free speech decisionmakers – went public for the first time. "Their stories reveal how the boundaries of free speech were drawn during a period of explosive growth for a high-stakes public domain, one … [Read more...] about Behind the scenes of safety & free speech in social media
Search Results for: digital citizenship
Europe’s big step backward for youth rights online, offline
Young people and parents everywhere should know that, where youth rights are concerned, Europe just took a big step backward. Even though every single one of the European Union's 28 countries has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose Article 12 states that "children" (people under 18) have the right to express their views in all matters affecting them, a European agreement … [Read more...] about Europe’s big step backward for youth rights online, offline
Counterspeech: New online safety tool with huge potential
Susan Benesch, founder of The Dangerous Speech project, tells the story of how worried people in Kenya were in the run-up to their national election in 2013. Dangerous, inflammatory speech around the previous election in 2007 had led to widespread violence involving more than 1,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of people being displaced, she said in a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center, where she … [Read more...] about Counterspeech: New online safety tool with huge potential
For kids’ sake, don’t ‘black box’ social media
For our children's sake, it's more important than ever that we not "black box" our media, whether as researchers or as parents and educators. An essay from psychologist and media professor Sonia Livingstone in the new scholarly journal Social Media + Society got me thinking about this. Dr. Livingstone observes that scholars in disciplines other than media and communications are doing that … [Read more...] about For kids’ sake, don’t ‘black box’ social media
Two 2014 anniversaries that say reams about our kids’ futures
We don't want to let 2014 slip away without marking two anniversaries that are very important to our children: those of an invention and a convention. This year was the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's release of his computer code creating the World Wide Web, now with some 3 billion users worldwide, and the 25th anniversary of the UN's adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child … [Read more...] about Two 2014 anniversaries that say reams about our kids’ futures