News for the Week of June 3, 2007
This week a major kid-tech story across the Pacific (with global implications)...
Extreme cyberbullying: 2 cases
By"extreme," I mean bullying that has led to teen suicide attempts*. Two such cases of three New Zealand girls have come to my attention in the past week — one through the BlogSafety.com forum and the other covered in that country's national media.
The Sunday News in NZ reported this week that two 15-year-old secondary-school students were tricked by another girl into believing two teenage boys whose online profiles she'd created with scanned photos of magazine models had become their online boyfriends. The scam was discovered by the mother of one of the victims, according to the Sunday News, when she"found a scalpel under her daughter's mattress and an email on the teen's computer from her 'boyfriend,' instructing her how to kill herself." The girl had conducted these online"relationships" with her victims for 10 months, the Sunday News reports, even going so far as to send both victims a number of gifts from the"boyfriends,""including flowers, teddy bears and T-shirts." This"grooming" process culminated in an unfulfilled suicide pact between the two victims, the Sunday News reports (see also, in the same issue, another NZ cyberbullying story that did have a tragic end).
My awareness of the second case started with:"Four weeks ago, my daughter, in a weak moment, attempted suicide because she was grieving a boy that she had met and communicated with" online and via phone texting." Another mother in New Zealand posted this in BlogSafety.com. The mother, Karen, later emailed me a copy of her full story, detailed in a letter to New Zealand's Health Ministry. You can read it here, published with her permission. The"boy," she wrote, was - as in the above story — imaginary, created by another teenage girl who enlisted the help of friend teen to create the profile of this imaginary surfer sponsored by Rip Curl and named"Ben."
Take-aways for parents everywhere
- Anything can happen on the social Web, e.g., imposter profiles of real people; real profiles, blogs, etc. of imaginary people; faked fights in Web videos; faked deaths on the Web and via IM or text messages; defamation of peers, parents, teachers, celebrities, anyone
- Almost any abuse report is a"he said/she said" sort of situation — it's impossible for any social site with even hundreds of thousands of users, much less millions, to check a complaint's veracity (such as who the bully actually is) — especially when no law is being broken or physical harm threatened (so police can't help) and the bullying's off school grounds and doesn't involve school personnel or a large number of students.
- It's extremely difficult for the host site or anyone else not immediately involved to verify whatever is portrayed or said or whoever anyone is. It's also extremely difficult if not impossible to verify the identity of a bully, a victim, or a parent without corroborating evidence.
- The ephemeral nature of digital media and the Internet makes it hard to collect evidence unless you're alert and take screenshots or make printouts right when you see it or unless you're in law enforcement and can subpoena evidence that *may* have been retained after a person or service has deleted it from a public profile.
* Footnote on NZ's high youth-suicide rate: The New Zealand government reported last year that,"for many decades, the suicide rate was consistently highest at ages 65 years and over, but this changed in the late 1980s during a steep increase in youth (15—24 year olds) suicide." In comparing New Zealand to other countries in an OECD study of 13 member-countries'"age-standardised suicide rates" for 2001—2003, it reported that"New Zealand had the third-highest male youth suicide rate, after Finland and Ireland, and the highest female youth suicide rate."
In other news...
- MySpace seeks court's guidance. Sometimes states ask MySpace to turn over sex offenders' email addresses, sometimes the content of their emails. Addresses are one thing, but the content of private emails seem to be another."MySpace has provided the profiles of offenders," Reuters reports."However, MySpace has not provided private email correspondence, citing legal restrictions." Federal law (the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986)"prevents Internet service providers such as MySpace from turning over a user's electronic communications without a search warrant." Another problem Reuters cites is the difficulty of obtaining a search warrant for an offender not currently under investigation. The upshot of all this is that MySpace filed a request in a Pennsylvania court that is seeking its guidance on how the site"can legally provide local authorities with the private emails of convicted sex offenders on it." MySpace handed the emails over to the court so it could decide whether or not to share them with law enforcement. What the court decides"is seen as a test case for how local US authorities and MySpace can cooperate in sharing information without violating federal law."
- Catching online parole violations. States are now catching violations of convicts on parole with the information MySpace is supplying attorneys general. USATODAY reports that"many convicted sex offenders who had profiles on the popular MySpace website are on parole, and some may be sent back to prison for emailing minors." Connecticut's attorney general told USATODAY that"more than half of the 210 sex offenders from his state who used the social networking site are on parole. One was returned to state custody last week for using the Internet, a violation of a condition of his release." MySpace has been lobbying for federal legislation requiring convicted sex offenders to register their email addresses and other online contact data (not just street addresses and phone numbers); such legislation, which also attaches penalties for failure to comply, is now working its way through the US Congress.
- Downturn in P2P downloads. Illegal file-sharing by US youth has dropped sharply in the past few years, a new study sponsored by the Business Software Alliance has found — though music remains the biggest reasons for P2P file-sharing. The percentage of US 8-to-18-year-olds"who acknowledged illegal downloads of software, music, movies or games fell from 60% in 2004 to 36% in 2007, Australian IT reports. Last year it was 43%. The reasons? Accidentally downloading a virus (62%), getting into legal trouble (52%), downloading spyware (51%), and getting into trouble with one's parents (48%)."The survey found 66% of young people said their parents set rules on what they could do on the Internet."
- Virtual money to real income. If people doubted — or never thought about - the real-world value of virtual economies (their children probably didn't), the BBC challenges any skepticism."The possibility of making real money from virtual creations is the subject of the latest episode of the BBC show The Money Programme," CNET reports. The show, which aired last Friday and was broadcast on both regular and virtual TV (the latter in the virtual world Second Life), explored the various ways real money is made in online worlds such as Lord of the Rings Online and Second Life, where"$600,000 changes hands every day," according to CNET."Some people, for example, hold down virtual jobs on the site while others sell unique clothing styles [for avatars in these worlds]." Others buy and sell artifacts (such as weapons in World of Warcraft) and advertising."One Second Life virtual-real-estate agent recently claimed to have become the game's first real-life millionaire."
