News for the Week of March 2, 2008
Topping kid-tech news this week is the growing problem of online public humiliation, including a look at what behavior puts kids at greater risk...
Public humiliation on the social Web
Judging from emails to and posts in the ConnectSafely.org forum, not to mention news about social networking, online public humiliation - harassment, cyberbullying, imposter profiles, etc. is a growing problem for adults as well as tweens and teens (see this week's "Window on cyberbullying").
Social stigma has its place in society, but for its role to remain appropriate and useful, we - society wherever people use the social Web - need to keep the Web version from getting completely out of control. Newsweek gives some examples of these online forms of harassment.
What can be done?
Well, first, it's not useful to place all the blame on social sites. Newsweek illustrates right at the top how public humiliation of the "starwars kid" long predated social networking. Even the Internet can't be blamed - most Americans have heard of NBC's "To Catch a Predator" on the old medium of TV. Certainly, social-networking sites need to be responsible and responsive to abuse reports, but a pile-on of public blame (mostly in the news media) in a single place only delays problem-solving.
Public shaming is an element of human nature, not technology, and it's going to take a conscious effort on everybody's part - youth, parents, educators, counselors and responsible Internet companies - to help keep this darkside of human nature under control on the Net as well as in the rest of human life.
Laws: Not effective here
You may've noticed lawmakers weren't on that list in the last paragraph. Certainly as a part of society they can help too, but laws aren't very effective regulators of noncriminal human behavior, and - as Newsweek reports - "laws on free speech and defamation vary widely between countries [social sites in many cases cover multiple countries]. In the United States, proving libel requires the victim to show that his or her persecutor intended malice, while the British system puts the burden on the defense to show that a statement is not libelous (making it much easier to prosecute)." As well, in US courts so far, the 1996 Communications Decency Act has protected social sites and other Internet services from liability for the speech and behavior of their users.
Aggressors at greater risk
Just for starters, we all need to be thinking about and discussing - in homes, classrooms, the media - the impact of exploiting the non-face-to-face disinhibition of Internet communication with cruel or destructive communication - how it affects the perpetrator as well as the victim and society, and how good citizenship is just as important online as off. Recent milestone research at the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that aggressive behavior can put the aggressor himself at greater risk (see this commentary at ConnectSafely.org). There never was an easy way to stop this base human tendency to seek empowerment through the humiliation of others, and online it's even harder to take harmful behavior back. Let's help our children think about how harmful it is to one's own integrity, as well as to others', to cause and perpetuate their humiliation online.
In other news...
- National filtering for Oz may happen. It may still happen after all, I mean. After declaring the Howard government's effort to have the Internet filtered for households nationwide a failure, Australia's new Rudd government will persevere with the program. It's now in a test phase, Australian IT reports. "ISP-based filters will block inappropriate web pages at service provider level and automatically relay a clean feed to households. To be exempted, users will have to individually contact their ISPs." The filtering was the centerpiece of the Howard government's $189 million NetAlert program launched last August," the Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier.
- Trend afoot: Cloud socializing. We all know that kids socialize and share media on computers, phones, Xbox Live, etc. They don't think much about the delivery device. Pretty soon neither will we. The New York Times reports on "pocketable" and "cloud" computing, pointing among other things to Adobe's new AIR software that will help "merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones.... But," it adds, "most people may never know AIR is there. Applications [sub in "socializing"] will look and run the same whether the user is at his desk or his portable computer, and soon when using a mobile device or at an Internet kiosk." I'm subbing in "socializing" because that's how mobile everything teens do online will be. They already make nearly no distinction between devices or online and offline. We're all just going the way of the online teen. The mobile Internet has only begun. Now think about filtering or monitoring software in this context. It can be useful, but how much control does it reliably give parents when online socializing is wherever the Internet is, wherever kids are? I'm not trying to discourage, just offer a reality check. Increasingly, the only safeguard as mobile as online teens, is the software between their ears. But loving, engaged parenting can be very flexible and spontaneous too and (most important for teens - though they'd be reluctant to admit it), parenting is there running in the background when it's most needed.
- Just how risky is the Net for kids? That's the question dad and tech writer David Pogue looks at in a recent column of his at the New York Times. He writes about a past writing assignment on the subject, but now he looks at the kid-danger question in a new light: "As my own children approach middle school, my own fears align with the [PBS "Growing Up Online"] documentary's findings in another way: that cyberbullying is a far more realistic threat. Kids online experiment with different personas, and can be a lot nastier in the anonymous atmosphere of the Internet than they would ever be in person (just like grown-ups). And their mockery can be far more painful when it's public, permanent and written than if they were just muttered in passing in the hallway." Hear, hear!
- Habbo Hotel invader. This alert for Habbo Hotel's young users is actually a heads-up for everyone on the social Web. Users need to be alert about the "tools" they download to enhance their pages. Bloggernews.net mentions an alert from WebSense computer security firm specifically about "Trojan" keylogger software buried in one of those tools for Habbo users and links to a screenshot of the message. The keylogger software gathers Habbo account users' log-in info in order break in and steal the "Coins" stored in those accounts. Habbo Coins are worth real money (see this page at Habbo.com).
