Social Web privacy: A new kind of social contract we're all signed onto

1993: In a famous New Yorker cartoon, a dog at a computer says to his canine buddy looking up from the floor, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Fast-forward 13 years....

2006: "On the Internet, everybody knows you're a dog," declares the subhead to a Michael Kinsley essay in which he wondered at how narcissistic the social Web was (before it became a cliché). Fast-forward only four years this time....

2010: Although Internet industry CEOs have recently declared the death of privacy (see security expert Bruce Schneier's blog), "privacy is not dead," said social media researcher danah boyd in her keynote at the SXSW conference in Austin last month. "People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline.... Wanting privacy is not about needing something to hide. It’s about wanting to maintain control."

Furthermore, boyd said, privacy and publicity are a mashup. Web meets reality. We all intuitively know there are many gradients between totally private and totally public – some people online know you're a dog, some don't; the numbers vary, based on how you use the Web, who you are, and how you live your life. The Web increasingly mirrors all of "real life." Technology didn't just start interacting with user privacy. Remember "Don't tell anyone who calls that your mom and dad aren't home"? "Will I sound too eager if I pick up after one ring?" Or even: "Who will see me reading this radical book?" Buzz, email, Facebook chat, tweets, texts, etc. are used in the contexts of our real-life relationships and situations just as much. Which is why it's absurd to think privacy is dead, or ever will be.

"Think about a cafe that you like to visit," said boyd. Compare your Facebook page to that public space in real life. "There's a possibility that you’ll intersect with all sorts of different people, but there are some people who you believe you are more likely to interact with than others. You have learned that you're more likely to run into your neighbors and you'd be startled if your mother popped in, since she lives 3,000 miles away. You may have even chosen this particular cafe in the hopes of running into that hottie you have a crush on or avoiding your ex who lives in a different part of town. You have also come to understand that physics means that there's a limit on how many people will be in the cafe. Plus, you'd go completely bonkers if, all of a sudden, everyone from your childhood magically appeared at the cafe simultaneously. One coincidence is destabilizing enough; we can't really handle a collapse in the time-space continuum."

The difference between my old landline and book examples and today's media and communications environment is the speed at which we communicate and socialize and the speed at which new technologies and products become available (the latter are digital, so they can be made available to all users simultaneously and globally within seconds). So we need to think carefully and a lot – in proportion to the speed of technological change, I'd say.

Who needs to think carefully and a lot? Everybody involved, together not in silos – users, companies, educators, policymakers. But let's just consider the two most important stakeholders, which – in the current new user-driven media environment – are really parties to a new, global social contract that's emerging right now, one that I think Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke to in her 21st-Century Statecraft" speech early this year. Those two parties are:

1. Internet industry, users are unprecedentedly your bread and butter. They supply all the "content" on your services. You need to bake consideration of the privacy and safety impacts of their doing so into your product development. For example, when you mash services up together, such as email and social-network updates, you need to think about how one tool is very private and the other very public. People use them differently. So combining people's email address books and social-network friends lists instantly without preparing them can create a lot of cognitive dissonance and bad will. "In digital worlds, people need to be eased into a situation, to understand how to make sense of the setting," boyd said. Companies need to poll their users or at least do focus groups before they make significant changes to the user experience, and after product or feature release, do more consumer education.

Users & providers are "dance partners." "When you moved from Web1.0 to Web2.0," boyd said to "the technologists in the room," "you moved from thinking about designing and deploying software to creating living code. You learned to dance with your users, to evolve with them." That's a powerful metaphor: Social-media companies and users are dance partners like never before. Users are much more than mere customers or consumers, and they may increasingly exercise that inherent power.

2. Users, we don't need to become conspiracy theorists, but we need to be serious about paying attention to our privacy settings – and go over them each time our favorite social tools announce a new social feature (such as Facebook's just-announced new Like button and Instant Personalization). Consumer awareness and self-protection are essential to exercising our power in a user-driven or participatory media environment.

Parents and teachers, kids know they don't want others to have power over them. Help them see that that's what privacy settings are about – having control over their own information and public image. When it's put this way, they know they don't want to let peers, companies, or anyone else do whatever they want with their info, reputations, and digital creations. You can help them see a) that it's reciprocal: their friends feel the same way – privacy and safety are necessarily collaborative in this media environment (see this); and b) that honoring this new reality is protective to all concerned – oneself, one's friends, one's community, and ultimately society. It's all interconnected and interdependent now. Mindful, collaborative behavior is baseline online and cellphone safety as well as privacy (see "Social norming: *So* key to online safety" and "From users to citizens").

Other key points in boyd's talk:

PII and PEI are intermeshed. We hear a lot about personally identifiable information (PII) but not as much about personally embarrassing information (PEI), which is every bit as important to users. Boyd said: "Because most people are interacting online with people they know, they expect to make PII available. They do so because they want to be found by friends. But they also want to keep PEI hidden, at least to those that might go out of their way to use it maliciously. Unfortunately, it's hard to be visible to some and invisible to others." The reality online as well as offline, she said, is that "when people make information available, they make themselves vulnerable." Product developers need to think about that as much as users.

It's complicated, like life. "Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean people want it to be publicized," boyd said. Adults, such as Slate's Kinsley, often conflate the two when they talk about the "solipsistic social Web." They're forgetting to ground social-media use in real life, instead somehow thinking technology is layered on top of life as an add-on. For example, you're "publicly accessible" to others when you're at Starbucks, but you're probably not publicizing your presence, though there are times when you might. You might sometimes use Foursquare so that everybody who follows you on Twitter knows you're there. But the reasons for that aren't necessarily narcissism but maybe rather hoping your local friends notice your shoutout and meet you there or, since Foursquare's a game you play, you may be aiming to become "mayor" of that Starbucks. You're probably not thinking that there's a slim chance a burglar is following you on Twitter and – noting that you're at Starbucks – robs your house, which is why social-media companies need to help educate users about that very slim possibility. Digital media use is about as complicated, changeable, and individual as living.

No magic formula. "Unfortunately, online environments are not nearly as stabilized as offline ones. While the walls in the streets may have ears, digital walls almost always do," boyd said. The environments (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) aren't stable, nor is our use of them. There's little common sense around their use yet, like the old "Don't let anybody know Mom and Dad aren't home" – though most youth privacy features in social network sites (see this). "There's no magical formula ... no easy algorithm to implement. Privacy and publicity are living things.... They are fundamentally processes grounded in needs, desires, and goals, situated in contexts and transformed by technology." Of course some needs and rights haven't changed, such as constitutional and legal ones for Internet users and providers in each country, though laws need to embrace and adjust to new-media conditions.

Because privacy's a living thing that's functioning in a new, rapidly evolving media environment, everyone's a stakeholder in supporting it. We need to 1) stay informed and help our children see the importance of doing so and 2) keep revisiting our privacy settings in light of new conditions. Companies need to keep thinking about the impacts on users of the new conditions, bake that thinking into the products they create, and educate users about new conditions. Policymakers need to understand that 1) users want both privacy and publicity as well as the means to calibrate them and 2) need education as much as tools for intelligent privacy management. And we all need to see that – because of the unstable, collaborative nature of everybody's wellbeing in digital media – privacy and safety are an ongoing negotiation, not a one-size-fits-all, once-and-for-all solution.

So I'd like to hear from you: Do you see it this way too, that a new kind of (multi-party) social contract is now in place, not imposed on us by any single power-holder but by changing conditions in which we are all invested (the social Web, or a user-driven, social/behavioral media environment )? If so, it seems to me that, under this contract, it benefits all parties not only to protect their own interests but to understand those of all other parties and protect them too. Otherwise, misguided "solutions," bad laws and lawsuits, and other signs of dysfunction will continue to distract us from hammering out real solutions together. Sorry to end on such a negative note, but that's what I see. Tell me what you see – via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, in this blog, or in the ConnectSafely forum!

Important related links

"Youth, Privacy & Reputation" by Alice E. Marwick, Diego Murgia, Diaz, John Palfrey, and the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative – a thorough review of research on the subject which has been published in the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU (released 4/12/10)

"How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?" (released 4/14/10), by Chris Jan Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow. Their conclusion: "that young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.... Public policy agendas should therefore not start with the proposition that young adults do not care about privacy and thus do not need regulations and other safeguards. Rather, policy discussions should acknowledge that the current business environment along with other factors sometimes encourages young adults to release personal data in order to enjoy social inclusion even while in their most rational moments they may espouse more conservative norms."

Security expert Bruce Schneier blogging about both of the above 2 surveys

Consumer privacy experts: the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Future of Privacy Forum

"Young Adults Do Care About Online Privacy" in the Washington Post

"Keeping Personal Info Private," one of 8 lessons from Cablevision's "Power to Learn" project for grades 4-8 (thanks to educator Anne Bubnic for pointing this out)

NY's e-STOP law: Not sure how much it protects

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo recently announced that his state's new "e-STOP" law has "resulted in the removal of accounts associated with at least 4,336 registered sex offenders" (RSOs, some of whom had more than one account) from such social network sites as MyLife (formerly Reunion.com – 2,100 accounts), Tagged (950), hi5 (575), BlackPlanet (570), Bebo (542), Flixster (508), Flickr (448), Friendster (271), eSpin (120), Orkut (113), Stickam (109), Buzznet (18), and Fotolog (12). Without providing any detail, in his press release, General Cuomo also called on more than a dozen kid sites to screen for RSOs, among them BarbieGirls, Build-a-Bearville, Club Penguin, Girlsense, Neopets, and Webkinz. I think this announcement represents progress in the form of more granular understanding of the social Web as something hugely larger and more diverse than MySpace and Facebook. But it's not a particularly protective state law in that 1) it can only affect offenders in that state; 2) if lots of states adopt such a law with lots of different reporting procedures to social sites, the burden on sites to do anything with that data becomes greater and greater, which makes cooperation less likely (e-STOP requires offender compliance, not site cooperation, partly because the sites aren't based in New York); and 3) this would be more effective as federal law, in which case it would provide some protection to minors, but only from convicted and registered sex offenders in social sites, not from those who prey on children in real life, where the vast majority of such abuses occur, presumably most going unreported (even a law enforcement officer I spoke with recently said scrubbing social sites of predators doesn't go very far in protecting children).

Citizenship & the social Web mirror in our faces 24/7

I think what A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz says about citizenship at the beginning and end of a talk (about the social game Farmville, of all things), nails it: He told his audience at State University of New York, Buffalo, that "...democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master.... Citizenship requires cultivation...." At the end of the talk, he adds, "The central task of citizenship is learning how to be good to one another." Exactly. I do think it's that simple and that hard. For *digital* citizenship, you just add the word "online" to the end of that sentence. That's it. Let's do ourselves and our children a favor and not make it one bit more complicated than that.

The thing about this digital age is that it's holding up a very big, society-wide mirror to our faces nearly 24/7, and what we (meaning all of us) see in that mirror of humanity called the social Web is not always pretty. But it's unavoidably in our faces, so we are in effect being forced to think about citizenship – how we treat one another – in school, on phones, in Facebook, in ClubPenguin or WorldofWarcraft, at work, at home, wherever we commune, more than ever before. Because of this mirror in our faces. There are definitely things that need to be fixed at school, at home, in Facebook, but fixing those procedural, policy, and architectural things won't help much if we don't address the behaviors too. The behaviors, good, bad, and neutral, haven't changed all that much (though school bullying has gone down - see this). What's new is that we are being forced to look at them (and the attitudes behind them) so much, and we are overwhelmed, sometimes traumatized, by what we see. What's bad about this reality is that we think technology – the mirror – is creating the problem and keeping us from solving it; what's good is that the need to be good to one another feels more urgent than ever! [As for what Liszkiewicz says about Farmville (as basically the new chain letter) in the bulk of that talk, don't miss it!]

Once-popular social site may soon go away

Bebo, once one of Britain's top 3 social network sites, is likely either to be shut down or sold by AOL, which acquired it two years ago for $850 million, according to numerous news reports. Citing comScore figures, The Guardian reports that "Bebo's global unique visitors in February totalled 12.8 million," down 45% from the February 2009 figures. That's compared to this past February's traffic for Facebook, at 462 million visitors, MySpace (nearly 110 million), and Twitter (69.5 million). The Guardian quotes unnamed sources as saying Bebo's demise had to do with the acquisition by a large company of a startup that was heading into decline. The Wall Street Journal quotes an AOL memo to employees as saying "AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking."

Haiti: Texting, social Web connecting survivors with help

Struggling earthquake survivors in Haiti can now text for help. "Countless volunteers" receiving the messages, the US State Department, the Pentagon, aid organizations, and Haiti's leading cellphone carrier make up an emergency contact network for Haitians seeking aid, the New York Times reports. The story leads with the experience of Coast Guard volunteer and Chicago tech firm owner Ryan Bank, who told the Times he's received more than 18,000 messages. Some volunteers monitor Facebook and Twitter postings for information indicating where supplies are needed. Messages through the network have "helped identify a tent city that the American military and relief workers were previously unaware of." To get the word out, the mobile carrier in Haiti sent "the distress code number – 4636 – to every cellphone on the Haitian network. Word of the program also went out on local Haitian radio stations." Text messaging was still possible even with damage done from fallen cell towers.

Fresh social-Web & Net numbers

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's third most populous one, after China and India. As for the world's most avid social networkers, Americans are 4th, behind Australians, Britons, and Italians, respectively – The Economist reports in a special report on social networking – followed by users in South Korea, Spain, Brazil, Germany, France, and Japan. The world's most popular social sites are Facebook, Windows Live, MySpace, Chinese portal Baidu, Twitter, Google's social site Orkut (popular in Brazil and India), Hi5, Chinese social site QQ, LinkedIn, and art community site DeviantArt – in that order, based on 10/09 comScore figures and all based in the US unless otherwise indicated. Other big indigenous communities include "Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world's Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers." Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that social network sites are the most popular Web destination worldwide, with FB representing 67% of all social site traffic, Mashable.com reports. As for general Internet numbers for 2009, Pingdom.com has some: e.g., 90 trillion emails went out last year (247 billion a day, on average); there were 234 million Web sites as of this past December; and 1.73 Net users as of last September (see that page for more).

The decade of the social Web (fixed & mobile)

The '00s were when Web 2.0 hit – the increasingly mobile social Web, from desktops to laptops to gameplayers and smartphones, that spelled a media makeover as radical as the printing press did nearly 500 years ago. Why so radical? Well, maybe people felt the realtime one-on-one conversations of the telephone were just as radical in their time, but now we're talking realtime multi-directional, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, multimedia, user-produced and professionally produced, un-regulatable conversations and productions and environments all through the same "pipeline" and appearing on multiple, often mobile devices of all sorts and sizes. Robert Sibley of the Ottawa Citizen asks if what I just described is good, quoting Samuel Morse quoting the Bible when he tapped out the first message by telegraph in 1844, "What hath God wrought?" As radical as this shift we're experiencing is, if God hath wrought it, I think it wasn't the media so much as change itself that He or She wrought, since change is truly the only constant. The current change in media and technology will certainly change us, as media shifts always have, but the changes are always both good and bad, for example the ability to photograph and share with distant grandparents a kid's hockey goal or a brand-new-baby photo in realtime is enabled by the same technology that instantly mass-distributes the nude photo of a minor who could later be prosecuted for producing and distributing child pornography.

This is a scary juncture in media history, as we collectively figure out how to preserve the good and mitigate the bad things about it, but it also presents – impels, really – a tremendous opportunity for us to pool all our forms of expertise and find solutions in the collaborative way these complex problems call for. It's also calling upon us to develop unprecedented critical thinking skills, the kind that grasp the implications of behavior (ours and others') as much as content, because media are social, or behavioral, now. If we can answer that call and collaborate in a more multi-disciplinary way then ever before, civilization might actually advance because of new media.

Some people, however, seem to think this juncture is just unprecedentedly bad – especially where youth are concerned. In his long, reflective essay, Sibley cites the view of Emory University Prof. Mark Bauerlein that social networking teens "never grow up," remaining "narcissistically embedded in 'gossip and social banter' instead of attending to the knowledge they need to be mature and responsible adults." There is actually a lot of opposing evidence that social media are not just about "gossip and social banter" to youth - see this three-part interview with Stanford University cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito by author Howard Rheingold.

But if you feel youth indeed are growing up more slowly, author Po Bronson agrees. In a Newsweek blog post, he suggests, however, that the fault lies in our over-protectiveness, not in social media. He cites the view of author Joe Allen that "our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time." Bronson's referring to Escaping the Endless Adolescence, by Drs. Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen.

Hey, you can see from my essay yesterday that I worry, too, about the impact on youth of portable, 24/7 exposure to the drama of adolescent social lives, but I think it's way too easy to blame the technology and I also worry – a lot – that all this fearing of or, at best, adjusting to, the new media environment by us adults is causing this regrettable over-protectiveness of our kids and distracting us from doing our job, parenting, which includes helping our children develop the most protective filter they'll ever have, the one that'll be with them wherever they go for the rest of their lives and improves with age: the software between their ears!

Related links

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant?"

"'Continuous partial attention...'"

"School libraries: Vital filter developers"

8-year-old's new media-style 15 min. of fame

YouTube and an 8-year-old boy have gotten a whole lot of citizen marketing in the past few days – plus coverage in big-name sites like The Guardian, NPR, and the Washington Post. Salon.com called "Lukeywes1234" (the boy's YouTube screenname) "The littlest YouTube sensation." Though nothing like the Susan Boyle story (but this is just a kid who never appeared on US or UK national television), it's still about the tao of fame and sometimes power on the social Web, and its particulars are that a boy below the minimum age in YouTube's terms of service established an account; posted some goofy vlog (video blog) videos of himself; had a handful of subscribers that grew quickly, with the help of either 4chan (as cited in all mainstream media reports) or eBaum's World (explained here and mentioned in comments under The Guardian's story); ended up with some 15,000 subscribers before YouTube deleted his account; and is written up in major news outlets in several countries. The deletion of his account reportedly angered Europe-based online underground troll or prankster group 4chan, which in protest declared yesterday (1/6) YouTube Porn Day, threatening to embed porn into family-friendly videos on YouTube, as it did last spring (see this, but don't worry: Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams trawled YouTube "all day for examples [of 4chan's porn], and it's a lot easier to find real porn just about anywhere else").

Now there are nearly 250 tribute videos to Lukeywes1234 on YouTube, which has made little of all of this (but gotten lots of publicity). A YouTube spokesperson told Andy Carvin at NPR that this was just another day in the life of YouTube.

As Salon's Williams, concludes, "A boy puts up videos of himself, shot by his grandma, posturing as hero, and in the process actually becomes something of an unlikely hero. Why? Probably because, along with laughing at the amateurishness of the whole enterprise, people feel a real sense of fondness for a sweet kid goofing around with his computer." Hope so. If it's not about a bunch of juvenile adults and/or idealogues creating a lot of drama at the expense of a sweet kid. None of the coverage says how the kid has handled insta-fame (which is probably good, they're leaving him alone!) or whether the adults in his life are offering some love and perspective on all this. The online safety issue most on my mind these days is how we help all kids – not just famous ones – find time for reflection and independent thought amid the increasingly 24/7, reality-TV drama of schoolkid life (MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle writes compellingly about “the tethered self” here).

2010 social Web snapshot: Nielsen & Pew

Last year, the time Americans spent social networking grew 277%, Twitter grew 500%, and the average US worker spends five hours a moth visiting social network sites at the office. Oh yeah, and Facebook is the No. 3 site for Americans 65 and older (smart grandparents). All this is according to Nielsen's Fact Sheet 2010. As for general Internet use (not just the social part), Nielsen says there are about 195 million active users in the US, 160.3 million of them broadband users. It says broadband penetration was 93.3% at the end of last year, up 16% from 2008. Pew/Internet, however, just released some more conservative numbers showing that "74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the Internet – a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. The breakdowns for Net use by age and ethnicity, respectively, are: 18-29 (93%); 30-49 (81%); 50-64 (70%); and 65+ (38%); and white, non-Hispanic (76%); black, non-Hispanic (59%); and Hispanic, English- and Spanish-speaking (55%). Pew also found that household broadband penetration is at 60%, "a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% in April 2009," and that "55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through their handheld device like a smart phone."

FTC's milestone report on virtual worlds

This is pioneering stuff on the part of the US government. The Federal Trade Commission today sent to Congress its close study of 27 online virtual worlds – 14 for children under 13 and 13 aimed at teens and adults – looking at the level of sexually explicit and violent content and what the VWs were doing to protect children from it. I think it's important for parents to keep in mind when reading the study or just the highlights here that "content" in virtual worlds means user-generated content (which is why, in "Online Safety 3.0," we put so much stress on viewing children as stakeholders in their own well-being online and teaching them to be good citizens in their online and offline communities). Here are some key findings:

The FTC found at least one instance of either sexually or violently explicit content in 19 of the 27 worlds – heavy (sex or violence) in five of them, moderate in four, and "only a low amount in the remaining 10 worlds in which explicit content was found."

Of the 14 VWs for kids under 13, 7 contained no explicit content, 1 had a moderate amount, and 6 had a low amount.

Nearly all the explicit content found in the kids' VWs "appeared in the form of text posted in chat rooms, on message boards, or in discussion forums."

The Commission found more explicit content in VWs aimed at teens or adults, finding it in 12 of the 13 in this category, with a heavy amount in 5 of them, moderate in 3, and a low amount in 4 of the 13.

Not just text: Half the explicit content found in the teen- and adult-oriented virtual worlds was text-based, while the other half appeared as graphics, occasionally with accompanying audio.

The report goes into measures these 27 VWs surveyed take to keep minors away from explicit content, including "age screens" designed to keep minors from registering below a site's minimum age (what the FTC calls "only a threshold measure"); "adults only" sections requiring subscriptions or age verifications (see "'Red-light district' makes virtual world safer"); abuse reporting and other flagging of inappropriate content; human moderation; and some filtering technology. "The report recommends that parents and children become better educated about online virtual worlds" and that virtual-world "operators should ensure that they have mechanisms in place to limit youth exposure to explicit content in their online virtual worlds." In the two pages of Appendix A (of the full, 23-page report + appendices), you'll find a chart of all the virtual worlds the FTC reviewed. [See also my VW news roundup last week and "200 virtual worlds for kids."]

This is a great start. As purely user-driven media, virtual worlds are a frontier for research on online behavior. The FTC was charged by Congress "merely" with determining the level of harmful content, not behavior – I really think because adults continue to think in a binary, either-or way about extremely fluid environments that are mashups of content and behavior. Where is it really just one or the other, what is "content" in social media, and how do we define "harmful"? We also need to define "virtual worlds." Some of these properties are largely avatar chat, some are games (with quests), some are worlds with games but not quests in them. Still, we've got some great talking points and very useful data to build on.

Web community moderator to the rescue

There's help on the social Web. Lloyd Mann, a volunteer moderator for DiabetesDaily.com, a support community on the Web, appears to have saved the life of one of the site's users, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Another user noticed some disturbing posts and contacted the moderator. "Mann communicated with the troubled poster and said the messages were enough to convince him that [the poster] was serious." He and the man who got him involved worked together to figure out the poster's location and contacted the police. For privacy reasons, the police told Mann they couldn't confirm attempted suicide but said the person was ok and Mann had had reason to be worried. See also "Facebook friend saves suicidal teen," "The social Web's 'Lifeline'" about MySpace's role, and last spring's "Summit for saving lives."

Why technopanics are bad

Remember the predator panic? It's not over, of course - presentations with titles like "Facebook, the Sex Offenders' Catalog" and "MySpace the Predator's New Playground" (actual titles) are still being given at a time when we need to empower young social media users and their parents, not scare them to death (for more on this, see "A new online safety: The means, not the end").

Now we really need to prevent a sexting panic from developing. I really believe teens themselves will help us end the trend if they're given the facts about current child-porn laws (see "Tips to Prevent Sexting"), which hopefully will undergo revisions, where minors and adolescent behavior are concerned and criminal intent is not (see what's happening in Vermont along these lines).

"But why are technopanics bad, if there's a chance they'll scare people into safe behavior?" you might ask. For one thing because the Internet is ubiquitous, here to stay, a tool of participatory culture and democracy, and youth are its most active, fluent users - its drivers, in many ways. Young people aren't scared of technology. They know all the workarounds if we get scared and try to ban the Net from their lives. They can easily go "underground" (away from home, at friends' houses, public hot spots, using friends' very mobile connected devices, from smartphones to music and game players), which can actually put them at greater risk, because when they're in stealth mode, we're no longer in the equation, and they need us as backup in their online as well as offline lives.

And there are macro-level, national and global, reasons why panics are bad. Here's a list, a draft for which your comments and additions are welcome. Technopanics are bad because they...

Cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.

Cause schools to fear and block digital media when they need to be teaching constructive use, employing social-technology devices and teaching new media literacy and citizenship throughout the curriculum.

Turn schools into barriers rather than contributors to young people's constructive use.

Increase the irrelevancy of school to active young social-technology users via the sequestering or banning of educational technology and hamstringing some of the most spirited and innovative educators.

Distract parents, educators, policymakers from real risks - including, for example, child-pornography laws that do not cover situations where minors can simultaneously be victim and "perpetrator" and, tragically, become registered sex offenders in cases where there was no criminal intent (e.g., see this).

Reduce the competitiveness of US education among developed countries already effectively employing educational technology and social media in schools (for an international view, see Joan Ganz Cooney Center/Sesame Workshop's "Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning").

Reduce the competitiveness of US technology and media businesses practicing good corporate citizenship where youth online safety is concerned.

Lead to bad legislation, which aggravates above outcomes and takes the focus off areas where good laws on the books can be made relevant to current technology use.

Widen the participation gap for youth - technopanics are barriers for children and teens to full, constructive participation in participatory culture and democracy.

What am I missing? Please add to or comment the list - via the ConnectSafely forum, commenting here, or email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org. We are literally all in this together, don't you think?!

Related links

Prof. Henry Jenkins: "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," Fall 2006

"Living and Learning with New Media," a summary of findings (qualitative and quantitative) form the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth Project, by Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson, Fall 2008.

"Critical Information Studies for a Participatory Culture," Dr. Jenkins's list of factors that block the full achievement of a more participatory society, 4/10/09 post on his blog

The skills of new media literacy

For a bit of history, see my first item on this, "'Predator panic'," in 2006 and "The latest technopanic" last August (before "sexting" was a word), linking to Alice Marwick's definitive paper on moral panics.

"Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies," the 12/31/08 report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and my post about it

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"

Watchdog's study on YouTube

The Parents Television Council recently did its first study of online media, logically deciding to focus on YouTube - I guess the Web site closest to replicating the broadcast medium, though far from the only video-sharing site youth use. "While we applaud YouTube for its commitment to gating procedures and its recently announced plans to curb inappropriate content [the PTC's research was done before YouTube's announcement this month], the core implication of our analysis is that the site isn't doing enough to protect kids," the PTC press release states (the release links to the full study). One of the "major findings" it highlighted was: "Children entering such 'child-friendly' search terms as 'Miley Cyrus,' 'Jonas Brothers,' 'High School Musical' and 'Hannah Montana' were confronted with highly offensive content in the accompanying text commentary posted by other site users." "Posted by other site users" is a key qualifier.

What's difficult, here, is that an organization focused on conventional mass media (providing regulated content produced by the broadcasters) is critiquing a social media provider (hosting media produced largely by its users). There is no denying the problems that arise when people of all ages use a huge general site and when some of the content users produce and share in the site is inappropriate for youth. The problems are not unique to any single site, not even to media-sharing sites or the Web itself (they're also found on wireless networks - see this on cellphone "sexting"). Yes, parents need to know that a site popular among kids has a whole lot of profanity and sexual innuendo in user comments associated with videos, but let's not compare apples to oranges - a user-driven medium to conventional media - and let's not get distracted from an important collective effort to educate parents and youth about the spectrum of youth risk online (including youth-generated online risk) by looking too much through the lenses of our own experience with media or thinking that adolescent behavior has changed a great deal when one of the realities we're dealing with is that age-old, sometimes shocking adolescent behavior is now a great deal more visible to parents. [Here's more on the PTC study, as well a FilteringFacts.org blogger David Burt's own experience with YouTube search.]

Internet = 'giant popularity contest'

The social Web is, in essence, a huge popularity context, Digital Natives blogger Sarah Zhang points out, with even Google search rankings based on how many people visit and link to the sites in your search results. We can't afford to assume "that what is popular is also most worthy" or we stand to miss a whole lot of quality material that hasn't yet hit the public radar. Sarah writes about how people and organizations try to game the system to appear to have widespread grassroots popularity ("astroturfing") - and also how Web users can often tell and be put off by said. But how can we and our children assess the quality of the information we're seeking? That's where media literacy comes in - why it's so important and why its top practitioners, librarians, are so important in the current and enduring information glut. But media literacy is not only about content we consume. It's also about intelligently handling communication and behavior via email, IM, phone texts, or one's profile) - what's going out as well as what's coming in. Constantly reworking the algorithms is great, but critical thinking is essential.

Microblogging: Heads up

It might be interesting to ask your kids if they're Twittering these days ("microblogging" is the generic term if they're using a service other than early entrant Twitter). Microblogging is basically a blow-by-blow account of one's life, sent via phone or Web site. Kind of hard for some non-digital natives to imagine doing ("so very narcissistic" is the dismissal I've heard, or "why would my friends care if I'm at such-and-such a conference or the grocery store?"). Well, some adults and a lot more young people do want to know and share up-to-the-minute activities and thoughts. It's a form of intimacy and presence that express highly connected friendship, manifest in Facebook newsfeeds and prolific phone texting (for a bit more on intimacy, see "Fictionalizing their profiles"). However, as with all technologies, there's a potential downside along with the upsides, and youth don't always think about the former. "There is the risk that teens could use microblogs to reveal personal information or engage in a relationship with someone whose intentions are less than honorable," writes my co-director at ConnectSafely, Larry Magid in Yahoo!Parents. "By default, Twitter messages can be seen by anyone, so if you want privacy you need to go into Settings and click 'Protect my updates' to make sure only people you approve can see what you type. Otherwise anyone can 'follow' you and see what you enter." Please see his piece for more on this. See also "The text version of hanging out" and "Do you Twitter?"

Social Web & business

I'm including this in a family-tech blog because kids just could some day be businesspeople! Aspects of social networking are really making inroads into the business world. One bit of evidence this week is the finding that "more than 50% of German companies use the means of communication provided by web 2.0, i.e. blogs, wikis and social networking." That's from Just4business.eu, citing a study by BITKOM and Oracle. Wikis (the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia being an example) in particular are used to help match people with creative solutions to "particular tasks and problems." Other benefits cited: increased productivity, more cooperation between departments and company locations, transparency, increased productivity, and accessible documentation of work processes. Meanwhile, two US-based businesses, the New York Times and the professional social site LinkedIn, just struck a deal that allows the Times "to draw on all the personal profile data that users have entered on LinkedIn, such as the profession or industry they work in, as well as their job title, age, sex and location, the better to target advertising at NYTimes.com," the Financial Times reports. And Visa and Facebook have teamed up to bring "almost half a million small-business owners" to Facebook in an area of the service called The Visa Business Network, BankTech.com reports.

The text version of hanging out

There is a place for micro-blogging (such as with Twitter), and not just for hyper-communicative youth or parents on business trips who use it to keep in constant, drive-by touch with their kids. Fascinatingly,
Clive Thompson at Wired calls it "social proprioception" - the social version of the hand knowing what the foot's doing. He writes that Twitter "gives a group of people a sense of itself.... It's almost like ESP.... You know who's overloaded ... and who's on a roll.... Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees." This is in contrast to past claims that the Net isolates us from one another, and it's where the social Web is heading, Clive suggests. He also offers a good reason for why it's widely misunderstood: It's "experiential" - you can't just view it to understand, you have to do it with a group of friends or colleagues, people with shared lives or interests. Dipping into it from the outside is like walking in on the hanging-out banter of a group of close teenaged friends - you not only need to know a bit about what they're talking about, you need to know them to understand what's going on.

Online safety as we know it: Becoming obsolete?

The headline may seem a bit inflammatory, but it's a sincere suggestion coming from 10+ years of observing and participating in the online-safety field. What we all know about online youth now from a substantial and growing body of research suggests it's time to reassess. We know, for example, that...

Young people make little distinction between online and offline and move constantly and fluidly between the two, with the focus more on the activity (socializing, schoolwork, listening to music, or all the above) than on the device or "place" where it's occurring.

The Internet has increasingly become a mirror of "real life" - what kids do online is not about technology, it's about life, child and adolescent development, functioning in community, at-risk behavior, critical thinking, and media literacy.

It's the young people at risk offline who are most at risk online, so expertise in adolescent at-risk behavior is necessary to the discussion.

Consider the first of nine myths about "digital natives" (online youth, basically, people who've never known life without the Internet) put forth by Profs. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser at a conference at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center: "Myth #1 - The online world presents a wholly new and completely different set of issues for youth we must address" (the ninth complements it: the myth that digital natives are a homogeneous group). [Even homogeneously speaking, research shows that young people themselves are getting smarter all by themselves about privacy and reputation management online (Pew/Internet data summarized in "Teens rule the Web").]

So, we might ask, should online safety be a separate field or discipline with unique safety expertise concerning some monolithic group called online youth? Certainly the Internet can augment and perpetuate problems in young people's lives in unprecedented ways, but research is showing that the substance of the problems is rooted in those real lives, not in a specific technology. It has to do with adolescent development and behavior much more than with technology. In fact, a great many types of expertise are becoming essential to the discussion - from neurologists on the teenage brain to psychologists on adolescent risk assessment to school counselors and administrators right in the trenches of gossip-cum-bullying blogs and cellphone photo-sharing. Sometimes we need to consult experts in constitutional law and computer forensics too (a dean of students once wisely had a computer forensics cop show students in a school-wide assembly how they're not as anonymous online as they think).

Where people with experience in online safety can help (in this transition time before the "digital natives" are parents and professionals themselves) is by...

Educating the public that online safety and well-being is not separate from "real life" and needs the same accountability.

Educating the public about how the Internet affects real-world actions or comments: how it can perpetuate them, reproduce or compound them, make them searchable, and bring unknown, unexpected audiences to them (see social media researcher danah boyd on this in an interview at AlterNet.org).

Serving as information clearinghouses and connectors to the right kind of expertise for predation, bullying, eating disorders, substance abuse, etc. The help we could point teens and parents to might be at customer service departments of Web sites, virtual worlds, or mobile phone companies; school administrators; certain specialists in law enforcement; legal advisers; social workers; psychologists; and so on.

My model for the clearinghouse approach is Netsafe in New Zealand. Providing online-safety education for all New Zealanders (youth, parents, schools, community organizations, companies, policymakers), Netsafe is an independent nonprofit organization with an active board membership representing New Zealand's Education Ministry, educators themselves, judges, corporations, parents, students, social workers, police, and New Zealand's Police Youth Education Service, Internal Affairs Dept., and Customs Service. Yes, Netsafe's an online-safety education organization working hard at the preventive end like many organizations in the US, but it also works at the remedial end, getting problems that come up to the right kind of help. An example of its clearinghouse role is in its direct relationship with New Zealand's two main mobile carriers' customer service departments, helping them get abuse calls about phone-based bullying and other problems to the right experts - sometimes parents, social workers, counselors, and school officials, not just law enforcement.

Probably no single organization in the US, with its population of 300 million (vs. New Zealand's 4 million), can handle all that Netsafe does nationwide in its country. The US's National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) - with its CyberTipline working at the remedial end and NetSmartz working up front at education and prevention (intelligently focusing more and more on safety in general, not just the online kind) - is certainly going for this more holistic approach. But our society is still too focused on the crime and law enforcement part of the "problem," and our online-safety field is still dominated by lawyers and law enforcement. Certainly society needs to keep addressing crime online, but the online-safety field - though maybe not quite obsolete - needs to reflect the breadth of young people's use of the Internet and all related devices and technologies, positive as well as a negative.

Comments, arguments, and other views on this from parents, educators, counselors, and other adults working with online youth would be most welcome in our ConnectSafely forum or via anne@netfamilynews.org.

Related links

Myths about "digital natives" from Profs. John Palfrey, director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Urs Gasser at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland

Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer at Northwestern University's Center for Technology and Social Behavior write in an executive summary: "We argue that the current moral outrage and national panic over the risks of victimization faced by girls on the Internet has nothing to do with risks faced by girls on the Internet" in their essay "High Tech or High Risk: Moral Panics about Girls Online."

Here's what John Palfrey blogs about the Cassell/Cramer and other essays in the new book Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (MIT Press).

More findings in researchers' "Stories from the Field" at the Digital Youth Research project at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

2 key US court actions involving MySpace

Two recent federal court actions are signs of growing recognition in US society that social-networking sites are not the cause of behavior in them which sometimes leads to tragic results. They're just another "place" where the behavior occurs. Where the confusion lies is in the role that the social Web does play. It can have the effect of amplifying and perpetuating the impact of content and speech on it, so responsible social-networking companies (and mobile carriers, virtual worlds, multiplayer games and communities) have the responsibility to help mitigate that behavior by 1) educating the public at the preventive end and 2) supporting parents, schools, and law enforcement at the remedial end, after things happen.

In the first case, existing law is being unprecedentedly applied in a way that puts the public focus on sites' terms of service as, basically, a set of user safety regs that need to be observed by all as a protection to all. In the second case, the decision by a federal appeals court to reaffirm a law that puts social-networking sites in the same category as telephone companies, as communication pipelines or venues, reaffirms the concept that on Web sites, too, people, not so much the places where people interact, are accountable for people's interactions. Given the age of the child involved, this case too puts the spotlight on site terms of service. Here are the cases:

1. Indictment in Megan Meier case

Lori Drew, the mother who allegedly helped create a fictitious MySpace profile that led to 13-year-old Megan Meier's suicide has been indicted. She has been "charged with conspiracy and fraudulently gaining access to someone else's computer" by a federal grand jury. Drew and some of Megan's peers had set up the profile of a fictitious 16-year-old boy and, through it, developed a relationship between the "boy" and Megan, who her family said had been treated for attention deficit disorder and depression. The profile's creators carried on the "relationship" for months, then faked the "boy's" breakup with Megan, leading to her suicide. Investigators in Missouri, where all this occurred, couldn't find a state law to apply to the case. Later, "federal prosecutors in Los Angeles launched a grand jury investigation ... to determine whether Ms. Drew or others defrauded Beverly Hills-based MySpace by providing false information to the site," the Associated Press reports, describing an unprecedented way of applying the law ("both Megan and MySpace are named as victims in the case, US Attorney Thomas O'Brien" told the AP).

This is a case and an approach to watch going forward, because in effect it adds "teeth" to social-networking sites' terms of service, which both parents and teens need to be aware of and which sites need to enforce. [Earlier coverage: "Extreme cyberbullying: US case comes to light" and "Missouri cyberbullying: Case not closed."]

2. Court rejects family’s suit against MySpace

A federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of a Texas family's $30 million sexual-assault case against MySpace. The court ruled that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 "bars such lawsuits against Web-based services like MySpace," the Associated Press reports. The case was dismissed by a federal court in Austin last year (see this item). The girl had created a profile on MySpace when she was below the site's minimum age of 14 but characterized herself as 18 and - after meeting a 19-year-old man who apparently got her phone number by claiming he was a high school football player - said she was assaulted by him after she went out on a date with him in 2006 (my original item on this was "Teen sues MySpace").

The social Web & 2007-'08

This past year was "when the Internet's potential as a transformative force expanded. This was the year we understood that the Internet is more than just another medium. It is an emerging society," reported the Times of India in an editorial, "The Year of Facebook." I agree that 2007 was the year we all saw the social Web take off, we began to see its potential for good, and we heard a whole lot about its downside. But the editorial seems to contradict itself where it says the Internet is "an emerging society" while earlier saying that "it's an extension of the physical world." Maybe it's both, but I think - for youth - it's more the latter, and adults can learn a lot from watching how young people "live" online (see "Oral culture online" and "The social Web Petri dish"). Australian IT looked at Google's Zeitgeist 2007 (the search engine's survey of billions of Web searches to determine "what's been on our collective consciousness") and reports that "7 out of the 10 hottest topics which triggered Internet queries during the year involved social networking" (the Zeitgeist is here). "A Top 10 list compiled by the world's most-used search engine includes British website Badoo, San Francisco-based Hi5, and Facebook." Also in the Top 10 were video-sharing sites YouTube and Dailymotion, Disney's ClubPenguin.com, and virtual world Second Life. As for MySpace, Australian IT adds, "one in every four US residents uses MySpace, while in Britain it is as common to have a profile page on the Web site as it is to own a dog." As for 2008, there's good and bad ahead too - see "Tech trends in 2008" from San Jose Mercury News columnist Dean Takahashi.