Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative Newsfeed

Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

syoung — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:00:00 -0500

Abstract

Building upon a process- and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality—primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies— reveals patterns in youth’s information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure.

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danah boyd: "Combating Sexual Exploitation Online: Focus on the Networks of People, not the Technology” (testimony)

syoung — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:17:56 -0400

Youth and media research update

syoung — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 11:00:00 -0400

The Berkman Center is pleased to announce that it has recently organized all of its research efforts relating to young people and technology – including new work on youth in developing countries – under a single project umbrella, led by Urs Gasser and John Palfrey.

The new Youth and Media project embraces:

the work that grounded John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (which the Berkman Center 2010 summer interns transmuted into a set of short videos!);
our ongoing Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, supported by the MacArthur Foundation and led by danah boyd, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey, which aims to bring the best research on youth and media into policy-making debates – with a growing number of papers and resources; and
a research project, now in its beginning phases, concerning online safety risks to children in developing countries, which builds upon an exploratory study undertaken in collaboration with UNICEF (Working Towards a Deeper Understanding of Digital Safety for Children and Young People in Developing Nations).

To advance this third project, the Berkman Center is housing a Digital Media and Learning (DML) Research Hub Working Group to explore safety issues related to the use of digital technologies (including mobile phones) in the developing world. (For more about the MacArthur Foundation-supported DML Hub, visit dmlcentral.net.) Participants have gathered at the Center today to begin tackling this under-researched area in a two-day, interdisciplinary workshop. Developments will be documented via Youth in Developing Countries.

Many people at Berkman have contributed formally and informally to the Center’s work on youth and technology over the last few years: danah boyd, Sandra Cortesi, Judith Donath, Corinna di Gennaro, Eszter Hargittai, Gene Koo, Dena Sacco, Toshie Takahashi, Shenja van der Graaf, Rosalie Fay Barnes, Erin Mishkin, Miriam Simun, and many others. We’re grateful for their contributions and look forward to future collaborations.

Last but not least – thanks to the efforts of a terrific current project team – Youth and Media is now in the process of moving into spiffy new headquarters at http://youthandmedia.org.

We hope you will visit the Youth and Media project and stay tuned for new, outgoing research from all of our activities in this area. As always, we welcome your feedback.

Call for Papers: Digital Media & Learning Conference 2011: Designing Learning Futures

syoung — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:00:00 -0400

Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: draft literature review

syoung — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0400

From danah boyd's blog:

I’m pleased to announce a rough draft of Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review [PDF] for public feedback. This Literature Review was produced for Harvard Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, co-directed by John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and myself and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This Literature Review builds on the 2008 LitReview that Andrew Schrock and I crafted for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. This document is not finalized, but we want to make our draft available broadly so that scholars working in this area can inform us of anything that we might be missing.

Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review [PDF]

It’s been almost two years since the Internet Safety Technical Task Force completed its work. As a co-director of that project, I coordinated the Research Advisory Board to make certain that we included all of the different research that addressed online safety. When we shared our report, we were heavily criticized as being naive and clueless (or worse). Much of the criticism was directed at me and the researchers. We were regularly told that social network sites would radically change the picture of online safety and that we simply didn’t have new enough data to understand how different things would be in a few years. Those critiques continue. As researchers who were actively collecting data and in the field, many of us are frustrated because what we see doesn’t match what the politicians believe. It’s been two years since we put out that first Lit Review and I’m glad to be able to share an updated one with all sorts of new data. Not surprisingly (to us at least), not much has changed.

What you’ll find is that researchers have gone deeper, getting a better picture of some of the dynamics and implications. You’ll also find that the overarching picture has not changed much. Many of the core messages that we shared in the ISTTF report continue to hold. In this updated Lit Review, we interrogate the core issues raised in the ISTTF report and introduce new literature that complements, conflicts, or clarifies what was previously said. We bring in international data to provide a powerful comparison, most notably from the reports that came out in the EU and Australia. And we highlight areas where new research is currently underway and where more research is necessary.

This Literature Review does not include information on sexting, which can be found in Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications. It also does not include some of the material on self-harm because we are working on a separate review of that material (to be released soon).

As I said, this is a draft version that we’re putting out for public commentary and critique. We will continue to modify this in the upcoming months. If you think we’re missing anything, please let us know!!

"Sexting": legal and practical issues

syoung — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:30:00 -0400

The Berkman Center is pleased to share our Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative's latest document, which addresses legal and practical issues related to the practice colloquially known as sexting:

Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications (PDF)

The document was prepared by Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center, for the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety cluster of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative. It is intended to provide background for discussion of interventions related to sexting. It begins with a definition of sexting, and continues with overviews of research and media stories related to sexting. It then discusses the statutory and constitutional framework for child pornography and obscenity. It concludes with a description of current and pending legislation meant to address sexting.

The Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative aims to bring the best research on youth and media into policy-making debates and to propose practical, relevant, situated solutions based upon that research. The Initiative is exploring policy issues that fall within three substantive clusters emerging from youth’s information and communications technology practices: Risky Behaviors and Online Safety; Privacy, Publicity and Reputation; and Youth Created Content and Information Quality. The Initiative is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is co-directed by danah boyd, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey. For more information, including a list of publications to date, please visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/digitalnatives/policy.

As part of the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety cluster, we also recently released the following four essays:

Moving Beyond One Size Fits All With Digital Citizenship by Matt Levinson and Deb Socia
Evaluating Online Safety Programs by Tobit Emmens and Andy Phippen
The Future of Internet Safety Education: Critical Lessons from Four Decades of Youth Drug Abuse Prevention by Lisa M. Jones
Online Safety: Why Research is Important by David Finkelhor, Janis Wolak, and Kimberly J. Mitchell

We look forward to sharing more work from the Initiative as it becomes available.

Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications

syoung — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:00:00 -0400

Introduction

This document addresses legal and practical issues related to the practice colloquially known as sexting. It was created by Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, for the Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative. The Initiative is exploring policy issues that fall within three substantive clusters emerging from youth’s information and communications technology practices: Risky Behaviors and Online Safety; Privacy, Publicity and Reputation; and Youth Created Content and Information Quality. The Initiative is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is co-directed by danah boyd, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey. This document was created for the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety cluster, which is focused on four core issues: (1) sexual solicitation and problematic sexual encounters; (2) Internet-related bullying and harassment; (3) access to problematic content, including pornography and self-harm content; and (4) youth-generated problematic content, including sexting. The Initiative’s goal is to bring the best research on youth and media into the policy-making debate and to propose practical interventions based upon that research.

This document is intended to provide background for discussion of interventions related to sexting. It begins with a definition of sexting, and continues with overviews of research and media stories related to sexting. It then discusses the statutory and constitutional framework for child pornography and obscenity. It concludes with a description of current and pending legislation meant to address sexting.

Four Essays Addressing Risky Behaviors and Online Safety

syoung — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0400

From danah boyd's blog:

At Harvard’s Berkman Center, John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and I have been co-directing the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative to investigate the role that policy can play in addressing core issues involving youth and media. John has been leading up the Privacy, Publicity, and Reputation track; Urs has been managing Youth Created Content and Information Quality track; and I have been coordinating the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track. We’ll have a lot of different pieces coming out over the next few months that stem from this work. Today, I’m pleased to share four important essays that emerged from the work we’ve been doing in the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track:

“Moving Beyond One Size Fits All With Digital Citizenship” by Matt Levinson and Deb Socia

This essay addresses some of the challenges that educators face when trying to address online safety and digital citizenship in the classroom.

“Evaluating Online Safety Programs” by Tobit Emmens and Andy Phippen

This essay talks about the importance of evaluating interventions that are implemented so as to not face dangerous unintended consequences, using work in suicide prevention as a backdrop.

“The Future of Internet Safety Education: Critical Lessons from Four Decades of Youth Drug Abuse Prevention” by Lisa M. Jones

This essay contextualizes contemporary internet safety programs in light of work done in the drug abuse prevention domain to highlight best practices to implementing interventions.

“Online Safety: Why Research is Important” by David Finkelhor, Janis Wolak, and Kimberly J. Mitchell

This essay examines the role that research can and should play in shaping policy.

These four essays provide crucial background information for understanding the challenges of implementing education and public health interventions in the area of online safety. I hope you will read them because they are truly mind-expanding pieces.

Working Towards a Deeper Understanding of Digital Safety for Children and Young People in Developing Nations

syoung — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:00:00 -0400

This exploratory study is intended as a contribution towards building a deeper understanding of children’s safety in a digital context in developing nations.

The paper's three main objectives are:

"to raise awareness about issues related to digital safety for youth in developing nations";
"to provide a tentative map of these issues and give insights into the current state of the respective research based on an exploratory literature review"; and
"to outline the contours of a research framework through a series of working hypotheses that might inform subsequent research efforts on these issues by connecting efforts in developing and industrialized nations."

Researchers, scholars, and activists engaged with questions of youth and technology in developing countries are encouraged to utilize this study as a building block for future work.

The report was authored by Urs Gasser, Colin Maclay, and John Palfrey, with assistance from Sandra Cortesi, Lauren Dyson, and Rachel Miller-Ziegler, and in collaboration with UNICEF’s Gerrit Beger, Katherine Maher, and Merrick Schaefer.

How the COPPA, as Implemented, Is Misinterpreted by the Public: A Research Perspective

syoung — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:00:00 -0400

opening
How the Public Interprets COPPA-Prompted Age Restrictions
Going Forward
Conclusion
About the Authors

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Senate Subcommittee, and Commissioners of the United States Federal Trade Commission: Thank you for focusing attention on the important issues of youth privacy and safety online. As researchers, we welcome the opportunity to provide input into these hearings regarding the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). We write as individuals, but we work together as the principal investigators of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The goal of our working group is to explore policy issues that fall into three substantive categories that emerge from youth media practices: 1) Risky Behaviors and Online Safety; 2) Privacy, Publicity, and Reputation; and 3) Information Dissemination, Youth-Created Content and Information Quality. Our work is intended to consider how research on the intersection of youth and technology can and should be used to inform policy. We seek to translate research from those who study youth media practices into terms responsive to the children’s privacy hearings.

There is no doubt that protecting children’s privacy and safety is of utmost importance in our society. These issues are growing in importance with every passing year. We commend the authors of COPPA for being so deeply concerned about privacy and safety. As you consider the future of legislation and rule-making in this area, we urge you to consider the gap between the intentions of COPPA and how children and their parents perceive the implementation. It is this gap that we’d like to address in our submission. And it is our proposal that this Subcommittee consider how COPPA’s two P’s – of Privacy Protection – might be worked more effectively back into any revision of COPPA.

How the Public Interprets COPPA-Prompted Age Restrictions

In order to understand how American youth use social media as a part of their daily practices, Dr. boyd spent the last five years doing ethnographic studies across 17 U.S. states, interviewing parents, teachers, and youth. One of her goals was to understand how youth managed privacy and navigated safety concerns. What she learned through her fieldwork sheds light on how COPPA is interpreted and experienced by average citizens. The findings in her work are consistent with research findings by other researchers in our network using different methodologies.

We would like to focus on four core findings:

     1. Parents and youth believe that age requirements are designed to protect their safety, rather than their privacy.
     2. Parents want their children to have access to social tools to communicate with extended family members.
     3. Parents teach youth to lie about their age to circumvent age limitations.
     4. Parents believe that age restrictions take away their parental choice.

Functionally, COPPA has been implemented by websites through an age requirement. To avoid collecting data about children under 13, many social websites require participants to be at least 13 years of age to join. The reasons behind this requirement are never explained during the sign-up process and, thus, most consumers are unaware of the privacy intentions that frame this requirement.

Across all socio-economic and educational levels, parents and youth who are not actively engaged in privacy conversations believe that the age requirements that they encounter when signing up to various websites are equivalent to a safety warning. They interpret this limitation as: “This site is not suitable for children under the age of 13.” While this is sometimes true, the safety message conveyed by the age limitation completely obscures any effort to help consumers understand privacy issues, let alone make wise choices about how to navigate issues related to collection of data about them by commercial actors.

While many parents do not believe that social network sites like Facebook and MySpace are suitable for young children, they often want their children to have access to other services that have age restrictions. Many parents want their children to have access to free email accounts, like those provided by Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail. Instant messaging access is often important to parents and video and voice chat services like Skype are especially important to immigrant parents who have extended family outside of the U.S. When Dr. boyd asked parents why they wanted their children to have access to email, IM, and other chat services at a young age, the explanation was consistent: to keep in touch with family. Grandparents were most frequently cited as the reason why parents created accounts for their young children. Many parents will create accounts for children even before they are literate. One parent explained that “giggle vision” was an extremely important way for his daughter to communicate with her grandparents. Although some parents create accounts for children as young as 6 or 8, these parents are very involved in when and how these accounts are used.

By middle school, communication tools like email and IM are quite popular among tweens (ages 10-12). Tweens pressure their parents for permission to get access to accounts on these services because they want to communicate with their classmates, church friends, and friends who have moved away. Although parents in the wealthiest and most educated segments of society often forbid their children from signing up to social network sites until they turn 13, most parents support their children’s desires to acquire email and IM. To join, tweens consistently lie about their age when asked to provide it. When Dr. boyd interviewed youth about who taught them to lie, the overwhelming answer was parents. Dr. boyd interviewed parents who consistently admitted to helping their children circumvent the age restriction by teaching them that they needed to choose a birth year that would make them over 13. Even in households where an older sibling or friend was the educator, parents knew their children had email and IM accounts.

When Dr. boyd asked parents about how they felt about the age restrictions presented by social websites, parents had one of two responses. When referencing social network sites, parents stated that they felt that the restrictions were justified because younger children were too immature to handle the challenges of social network sites. Yet, when discussing sites and services that they did not believe were risky environments or that they felt were important for family communication, parents often felt as though the limitations were unnecessarily restrictive. Those who interpreted the restriction as a maturity rating did not understand why the sites required age confirmation. Some other parents felt as though the websites were trying to tell them how to parent. Some were particularly outraged by what they felt was a paternal attitude by websites, making statements like: “Who are they to tell me how to be a good parent?”

Across the board, parents and youth misinterpret the age requirements that emerged from the implementation of COPPA. Except for the most educated and technologically savvy, they are completely unaware that these restrictions have anything to do with privacy. This is quite unfortunate.

Going Forward

Though the statute is well-intentioned and better than having no such protections in place for children, COPPA as implemented has not effectively protected children’s privacy online. Websites continue to collect data about children under the age of 13, notably those who lie about their age to gain access to the websites. We do not believe that the solution lies in better age detection. We think that efforts in this direction run counter to parental goals and will be met with new forms of resistance.

While gaining parental consent is clearly desirable and crucial for small children on websites where they are sharing information about themselves, it is also important to highlight the ways in which this backfires. Parents who are already engaged know what services their children are using online and are contributing to their efforts to circumvent restrictions. Parents who are not already engaged will not become so if forced to confirm participation, and children in such households will find other ways of circumventing restrictions. Forcing parental involvement through website-initiated confirmation is ineffective, both because data show that these restrictions are circumvented and because it doesn’t actually engage unengaged parents.

We should also highlight that age restrictions without parental consent are doing serious damage to efforts intended to help youth. Any social service – suicide hotlines, eating disorder clinics, or mental health services – that seeks to provide online services must also abide by COPPA. This means that they cannot begin communication with children under the age of 13 without parental consent. In many critical situations, parents are a part of the problem. Tying the hands of those with the professional expertise to help youth can be deadly.

Given this, our recommendation would be to amend COPPA to ensure that it meets five requirements that address the underlying goals:

     1) Limit how data about minors can be shared with third parties;
     2) Limit how commercial interests can target minors;
     3) Require that minors opt in to changes to privacy policies and sharing policies;
     4) Consider requirements to allow minors to prompt deletion of information about them; and,
     5) Provide mechanisms to allow users (and their parents, in the case of children) to know when their data is being shared and with whom, if they care to know.

To the extent that they serve children, websites should know how old their participants are. Participants should be encouraged to be honest about their age and not penalized for being truthful. But data use limitations are likely more important and more effective than “notice and consent” systems. Websites should be limited in what data they can make available to third parties and under what conditions. Websites should not be able to provide aggregate or individual data about minors to third parties, including commercial advertisers and marketing research firms, without an express opt-in that focuses clearly on explaining what the data will be used for.

As behavioral advertising has become increasingly common, it is crucial to better understand how advertisers can directly target participants on these websites. Although there should probably be limits on when and how behavioral advertising can target minors, this topic needs to be interrogated more deeply before a concrete recommendation is made.

As our research and the work of many others shows, websites continue to change their privacy policies and trick users into exposing more data than even users realize. Many websites feel as though they can opt users into the changes, either without seeking their permission or by tricking them into clicking through in a way that permission is granted unintentionally. Websites should be required to project minors from unintended exposures of data. To do so, minors’ data should never be made more public than it initially is without explicit opt-in.

Finally, websites should provide a mechanism where minors and their parents can obtain a report of who can access which protected data and which data is publicly accessible to third parties through search, APIs, or browsing.

Conclusion

The intentions behind COPPA are commendable, but the implementation has not been effective as the primary means to protect the privacy of children. The mechanisms set in place by COPPA do not help the public to understand the importance of privacy. Because implementations of COPPA are interpreted through the lens of safety, parents and children are unaware of how their decisions affect the use or misuse of their data. We believe that the Congress and the US FTC have an opportunity to amend COPPA so as to do much more to protect the privacy of our children in an online era in ways that will be effective. Data about children’s online data usage, and the practices of their parents, can point the way.

We appreciate the Subcommittee’s willingness to accept feedback from researchers and hope that our short statement sheds light on how the current implementation of COPPA is interpreted by the public.

About the Authors

Dr. danah boyd is a Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an Associate Fellow at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society. She received her PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 2008. She is most well known for her groundbreaking ethnographic analysis of how American youth adopted and leveraged social network sites and other social media. From 2008-2009, Dr. boyd co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force with Dena Sacco and Professor John Palfrey. In that role, she coordinated scholars working on online safety issues to catalogue and review research addressing safety concerns so that policy recommendations would be grounded in research. Currently, she is co-directing the Youth and Media Policy Working Group with Professors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser to dive deeper into the role that policy can play in shaping youth engagement with media. Dr. boyd is leading the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track where she is coordinating both researchers and practitioners to develop a coherent set of interventions that address online safety issues. She publishes widely on topics related to youth and online practices, most notably co-authoring Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. This work came out of the Digital Kids project, a $3.5 million dollar research endeavor funded by the MacArthur Foundation that bridged University of California-Berkeley and University of Southern California. Dr. boyd regularly speaks about and writes on topics related to online safety and privacy, addressing large public audiences ranging from parents and teachers to teenagers to social workers and youth ministers. For more information on Dr. boyd, visit http://www.danah.org/

Dr. Urs Gasser is the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is the co-author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Books, 2008), among other books. His research and teaching focuses on information law and policy and the interaction between law and innovation. Current research projects – several of them in collaboration with leading research institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia – explore policy and educational challenges for young Internet users, the regulation of digital media and technology (with emphasis on IP law), ICT interoperability, the institutional settings for fostering entrepreneurship, and the law’s impact on innovation and risk in the ICT space. Before joining Harvard, Dr. Gasser was Professor of Law at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, where he served as Faculty Director of the Research Center for Information Law.

John Palfrey is the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. He is the co-author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Books, 2008) and Access Denied: The Practice and Politics of Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008), among other books. His research and teaching is focused on Internet law, intellectual property, and international law. He practiced intellectual property and corporate law at the law firm of Ropes & Gray. He is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Outside of Harvard Law School, he is a Venture Executive at Highland Capital Partners and serves on the board of several technology non-profits. John served as a special assistant at the US EPA during the Clinton Administration. He is a graduate of Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard Law School. He writes a blog at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/.