News for the Week of April 22, 2007

By far the top story in kid-tech news this week is a major study on teen social-networking safety practices from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. You may be surprised at its quite positive findings...

Kudos to online teens

This just in! Good news about teen safety on the social Web from the researchers at Pew Internet & American Life Project. They found that "the majority of teens actively manage their online profiles to keep the information they believe is most sensitive away from the unwanted gaze of strangers" and other adults, including parents, of course.

"Less than 10% of teens say they're actually presenting... their first name and their last name on their profile," Amanda Lenhart, the study's lead author, told Larry Magid in an interview for CBS News. "Add on to that their city or town and the name of their school and the number drops even lower. So it's a very, very, very small number of teens who are actually posting info that can really allow them to be identified online."

Other key findings in the 55-page report: "Some 55% of online teens have profiles... Of those... 66% say their profile is not visible to all Internet users." Of those who do have public profiles, "nearly half (46%) say they give at least some false information. Teens post fake information to protect themselves and also to be playful or silly." The study also reports that 32% of teens receive some kind of online communications from strangers, but not necessarily on a social-networking site. Amanda pointed out that "stranger" can mean a variety of things, from bands to unknown friends of friends to people with bad intentions. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they ignored or deleted those contacts; 21% "responded so they could find out more about the person"; 8% responded to say "leave me alone"; and 3% reported the contact to a trusted adult. There were dozens of news stories covering this around the world by the end of its release day. Here's the Associated Press in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Upside, downside

Worried parents may also find some comfort in seeing the list of teen-safety improvements MySpace has made (see Business Week). The article even moves on to a social-Web risk that will affect a great many more youth: cyberbullying. It's one of the first in the mainstream media I've seen putting predation and peer harassment in perspective. But parents also need to know that there are many sites showing little to no corporate responsibility - if there are even corporations behind these sites.

Take for example EncyclopediaDramatica.com, a public wiki (mocking Wikipedia.org) where public and private individuals are being parodied and bullied. Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use emailed me and other child advocates this week about a person she'd heard from who'd been victimized in this site, which says in its disclaimer, "We take no responsibility for any of this". Not just the parody site it purports to be, it encourages trolling (inciting insults, flaming, bullying, defamation, etc.) and jokes about rape. It's an understatement to say there is no quick fix for bullying on sites that take no responsibility for it. But parents should know that there are responsible and irresponsible social-networking sites (and wikis and discussion boards and IM services and video-sharing sites, etc.) where bullying occurs, and they would probably much rather have their kids spend time on the responsible ones!