News for the Week of September 3, 2008
A growing question concerning youth on the user-driven, or social, Web is how they can protect themselves from defamation and other forms of reputation-jeopardizing peer behavior. Legislation is no easy fix, possibly no fix at all. So let's zoom in on the question a little more closely...
What US law does protect
Social sites seem to have more protection from US law than their users have right now. A little-known section of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) is what protects - rightfully, I think - Internet service providers and social-networking sites from liability for what's posted by users of their services, reports Larry Magid in his column in the San Jose Mercury News. It's a little like the way the phone company is not held liable for the nasty things people sometimes say to each other when using its service. [What's different about the social Web, of course - and what makes it much harder for victims or parents not to blame the service provider - is that what users say to or post about each other is public, so the damage can be amplified, reposted, searched for, and perpetuated.]
What about the social networker?
Anyway, US law so far protects the service provider. The only thing that protects users from each other is the customer service departments of the more responsible social sites, or service providers. For example, MySpace takes down harassing imposter profiles, once it goes through its own internal process of proving that someone's being victimized by someone else who set up a profile impersonating the victim. (It's not always easy to prove what people claim is happening online - sometimes people will say they're being victimized to get someone else kicked off the site, or kids pose as parents to get other kids' profiles taken down.) Not even sites' Terms of Service really protect users, according to a researcher I spoke with recently, who said that sites' Terms are more guidelines than enforced rules. In any case, whether or not Terms of Use are enforced depends on the site.
There are sites like JuicyCampus.com, where victimized users are just out of luck. Larry writes that, when he visited JuicyCampus recently, "the second most prominent post [he found on the home page] read: "paul [his last name, deleted here, was in the post] is a _______ piece of ____ [expletives deleted] who is a closet gay that gets drunk and fools around with other guys secretly." As mean and possibly libelous as that is, Larry writes, the site "can't be touched.... In theory, 'paul' could try to take action against the person who wrote the statement," but JuicyCampus would have to help him find who made the statement. US federal privacy law (different from CDA) prevents any site from revealing the identity of one user to another without a subpoena or other court-issued document. JuicyCampus, though, actually helps people who make such statements stay anonymous, Larry reports, by advising them to use a search engine to find services "that offer free IP-cloaking" (hiding the IP number associated with their computers for anyone trying to find them). Besides, speech like that seen in JuicyCampus, may be hateful and defaming, but it isn't necessarily criminal - it's more along the lines of cyberbullying (not that this doesn't make it less damaging).
What parents and other adults can do
With no real recourse, what are victims and their advocates (e.g., parents) to do? This is a discussion that the industry, consumer advocates, and legal experts need to have (or continue!). But all that's at the macro, societal, level. Obviously, there's much that can be done at the micro – household – level, as well as at school. We all need to be helping young people with whom we have influence to think just as critically, alertly, and ethically about how they behave online as they do offline. Nothing should ever take ethics out of the mix - certainly not the relatively lawless social Web. The message to our children is: Anonymity and disinhibition change nothing. Not being able to see the other person you're talking to or about is all the more reason to think of that person as a fellow human being. I've never liked the term "cyberspace" because "cyber" suggests robotics. The participatory Web is not alien territory populated by robots – it's another place where human beings hang out.
In other news...
- ClubPenguin's new competition. The New York Post calls it competition for Disney's kid virtual world, but it looks a whole lot more like competition for MGA Entertainment's Be-Bratz.com, the online world for Bratz doll fans, and Mattel's BarbieGirls.com (all three so very pink and purple - girls do like other colors!). The new kid on the block is ZwinkyCuties.com, now in beta testing and launching in mid-September the Post reports. Interestingly, founder Barry Diller told the Post that his company, IAC, created ZwinkyCuties after "turning away thousands of users who attempted to register for [its two-year-old teen site] Zwinky.com, but didn't meet the site's age requirement of at least 13 years old." Like ClubPenguin, ZwinkyCuties will be subscription-based, not advertising-based (unlike at Zwinky.com, where teens users "purchase virtual currency on an a la carte basis using credit cards and PayPal accounts").
- 'Law 'n' order' in virtual worlds. It's a fledgling concept, but there are some interesting community-policing efforts afoot in virtual worlds such as Second Life, VZones, World of Warcraft, and mobile-phone-based Cellufun for mobile phone users, the Washington Post reports. For example, "in World of Warcraft, a popular online fantasy game, a character who is acting out runs the risk of being attacked by a group of self-appointed sheriffs. While the avatar doesn't face official penalties, the interference from other players can deter future crimes." In one of Worlds.com's worlds, users created a novel sort of virtual scarlet letter: "an animated bird that drops an unpleasant [virtual] substance on the heads of outlaws, known as 'griefers' in virtual-world lingo."
- GPS-enabled mobile-socializing trend. Interesting to get the Australian perspective on what looks to be a worldwide trend: "Experts say the 'killer application' for mobile social networking - the ability to access social networks such as Facebook and Bebo on mobile phones - will be the ability to use the global positioning software now found in phones to help cyber-buddies meet at-real life locations," Australian IT reports. The tech news site says, though phone-based social networking is very new in Oz, it's "growing at such a rapid rate it has become a key driver of mobile Internet use in the past six months." It cites a mobile marketing executive as saying he spends more than half his cellphone time on social-networking sites, which he thinks will become commonplace for everyone within two years. MySpace says that, worldwide, it "attracts 1.9 million mobile users a day." Meanwhile, Japan is already there. In that country, "the mobile Web is [already] bigger than the PC Web," the Washington Post reports, but home-grown companies may do better in the mobile space than US-based ones, as has been the case with Japanese social networking on the Web.
- Filtering workarounds. In case adults wonder how kids get around filters at home, school, etc. (besides going to the library, friends' houses, etc.), here's an example of how easy it is to find workarounds: "How to Get Around Blocked Web Sites at School or Work: A Newbie's Guide". And here's a teacher's workaround for these workarounds. Note how human-level (or non-digital, social-engineering-type) workarounds can be effective "tools" too.
- West slow to take on 'game addiction'. Nine computer games are purchased every second in the US; two-thirds of Americans, or around 200 million people, play videogames; 2% of US gamers, or about 4 million people, "are heavy users" averaging around 40 hours of play a week; and 66 million (a third) play around 20 hours/week. That's data cited by Jerald Block, an Oregon-based psychiatrist, in British cultural and political magazine The Standpoint. He's writing about Internet addiction, "or the more accurate and general term Pathological Computer Use (PCU)," which he says is "not an established diagnosis but one that might be included in the next version of the mental-health diagnostic guidebook, the DSM-V," which will be out in 2012. A doctor in the US or Europe would probably not know what to do with the information that you're spending 40+ hours a week playing videogames. "Dealing with such matters is not part of our training," Dr. Block writes. "In Asia, however, you would probably get a psychiatric diagnosis. Because doctors in Asia … recognise excessive computer use as a serious issue." Treatment is a very difficult proposition. "The uncomfortable truth is that our treatment strategies [worldwide] for this malady are inadequate and often fail. Until we learn more or have better clinical tools, our best approach may be to work on prevention." [See also "'SIGNS' of Net addiction: Interview".]
