Please share (because we care): privacy issues in social networking

Is it risky to ‘be yourself’ online, sharing intimacies you wouldn’t face-to-face? Elisabeth Staksrud and Sonia Livingstone explore the current issues and opportunities facing today’s children and young people in Europe. Elisabeth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo and is part of the Norwegian team of the EU Kids Online project. Her work focusses on children, the internet, risks and opportunities, regulation and rights. Sonia is Professor of Social Psychology at LSE’s Department of Media and Communications and has more than 25 years of experience in media research with a particular focus on children and young people. She directs the EU Kids Online project and is the lead investigator of the Parenting for a Digital Future research project

Policy Implications and Rrecommendations: Now What?

The EU Kids Online survey represents the most substantial knowledge base to date about young people’s online experiences in Europe. Chapters in this volume highlight findings that provide new kinds of evidence of significant interest for policy makers. They address questions which range from how to respond to the fact that the internet is now firmly in children’s lives; how to develop appropriate strategies for internet safety while responding to shifting patterns of access and use; how to manage those enduring risks to children’s welfare that appear to be amplified in the online world, and deal with risks that are genuinely new; how to best mobilise mediation that can be effective; and how, in the context of wide diversity across Europe, to promote equality and inclusiveness? In this chapter, we discuss the principal contours of the policy response to these questions thus far, asking whether current policy is working and what, if any, are the gaps in policy formulations on internet safety? Online safety has been debated in policy circles ever since the World Wide Web was opened for commercial and public participation, often without reliable research on its appropriateness or effectiveness. Responding to demands for greater regulation and control, policy makers have since the mid 1990s sought to support the opportunities of the Information Society, whilst minimizing its apparent downsides and increased risks for children and families brought about by a largely unregulated internet. Responses have included legislative, regulatory, law enforcement, awareness and educational measures involving a diverse number of stakeholders. The European Union has been to the fore in this regard, but so also has the Council of Europe, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), UNICEF, UNESCO, and the Internet Governance Forum, to name but a few of the international actors within the increasingly busy space for policy debate on internet safety

Evaluation of the Implementation of the Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU Part I: General Report

Executive Summary " This report is a part of the European Commission s commitment to and support of the self-regulatory initiative from social networks to implement Safer Social Networking Principles signed by 20 social networking companies in 2009.The report analyzes the 19 self-declarations1 submitted by the signatories of the Principles as well as 25 of the services offered among these companies in order to give an overview of the general level of implementation. All services have been tested in their original language version by a team of 13 national and two lead experts. " The report consists of two parts the first part gives an overall analysis of findings across the services evaluated. The second part consists of individual testing reports for all SNSs that have signed the agreement. " Comparing the compliance between the Principles and what is reported in the selfdeclaration reports excellent compliance is found with eight SNSs, eight services have good compliance, five services have fair compliance, and one service has poor compliance. " On an overall level, the compliance between what is stated in the self-declaration reports against what is found on the services themselves is assessed with the following results: " Excellent compliance is found with two SNSs, ten services have good compliance, ten services have fair compliance, while no service is assessed as having poor compliance between the self-declaration and what was found on the service during testing. " Principle 3 ( empower users ) Principle 6 ( Encourage safe use approach to Privacy ) are the principles best implemented. Also Principle 1 ( Raise awareness ) has a high score on compliance. " Principle 2 ( Age-appropriate services ) and Principle 4 ( Easy to use mechanisms for reporting violations ) are assessed to be the principles where the compliance between what is stated in the self-declaration and what is observed on the service itself is the lowest, as the majority of services are assessed to be partially compliant. " Comparing the self-declaration reports with the services themselves, there is a general under-reporting on measures and tools available on the site. On the negative side this indicates that the self-declaration reports are incomplete; on the positive side more relevant safety measures are available to the ordinary user than stated by the SNSs

Where policy and practice collide: Comparing US,South African and European Union approaches toprotecting children online

That children have a right to protection when they go online is an internationally well-established principle, upheld in laws that seek to safeguard children from online abuse and exploitation. However, children’s own transgressive behaviour can test the boundaries of this protection regime, creating new dilemmas for lawmakers the world over. This article examines the policy response from both the Global North and South to young people’s online behaviour that may challenge adult conceptions of what is acceptable, within existing legal and policy frameworks. It asks whether the ‘childhood innocence’ implied in much protection discourse is a helpful basis for promoting children’s rights in the digital age. Based on a comparative analysis of the emerging policy trends in Europe, South Africa and the United States, the article assesses the implications for policy-makers and child welfare specialists as they attempt to redraw the balance between children’s online safety whilst supporting their agency as digital citizens

The relevance of cross-national and cross-regional contexts to youth' cyber-bullying involvement

The current paper seeks to investigate the role of regional and national level contexts to explain variations in youths’ cyber-bullying involvement. Cross-national evidence suggests that individual level differences are generally larger than the differences across countries. Hence, it has been suggested that analysis of smaller units of more adjacent cultures (i.e., regions) might yield more explanatory power than national contexts. The present study explores whether, complementary to the national level, smaller, regional level contexts might be relevant in explaining youth involvement in cyber-bullying. Leaning on findings for traditional bullying, selected socio-structural factors (i.e., population density, crime rates, GDP and life expectancy) are employed on the national and on the regional level as contextual predictors for variation in cyber-bullying victimisation rates. Furthermore, the relative contribution of cross-national and cross-regional differences to cyber-bullying victimisation is explored. Cyber-bullying victimisation from the cross-national survey data of the EU Kids Online project was linked with contextual variables obtained from data of the European Social Survey (ESS). Contextual variables were obtained on the national level and, in order to reflect regions, levels 1 or 2 of the “European Union’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics” (NUTS). EU Kids Online and ESS data were linked on 18 countries and 179 NUTS regions. Hierarchical multilevel-modelling analyses adding first regional and then national level contextual predictors for cyberbullying victimisation on the individual level were performed. Against expectations, it was shown that differences between regions accounted for a variance of only 4% and cross-national differences accounted for a variance of 7% in cyber-victimisation. Regional level life expectancy and population density showed a negative while GDP showed a positive and crime rates a marginal positive relation with cyber-victimisation. National level predictors ceased to make a significant contribution. Moreover, while regional predictors did not explain any cross-regional variation they showed to explain 36% of the cross-national differences in cyber-victimisation. The unexpected low regional level variance might indicate that the regions as defined in this study were too large or distal to be reflected in the diversity of individuals’ victimisation responses. Smaller more communal regions or neighbourhoods should be considered in further analyses. Furthermore, regional level predictors were connected with national level differences in cyber-victimisation. A finding indicating that higher level national contexts might have an influence on lower level regional contexts, possibly due to joint practices or policies. Future studies might consider investigating specific national and regional level policies as well as differences in political structures concerning the relative power of regions within countries (i.e., federal or unitary state governments). Overall, these findings indicate that while contextual factors at both national and regional levels do not account for the majority of differences in youth’ cyber-bullying involvement, they are relevant to consider in cross-cultural investigations. Authors’ contact information: Anke Görzig (University of West London): [email protected] Tijana Milosevic (University of Oslo): [email protected] Elisabeth Staksrud (University of Oslo): [email protected]

Children as crowbar? Justifying censorship on the grounds of child protection

This article studies how possible it is to use the need to protect vulnerable populations, such as children, as a justification to limit freedom of expression in democratic societies. The research was designed and conducted based on the idea that the regulation of speech and access to content is not only a matter of law and legislative interpretations, but also a question of social norms and values. The study is based on two surveys, one implemented with a representative sample of Norwegians aged 15 and older, the other with a sample of journalists. The results show that for the general population sample, 76% of respondents agreed that the protection of weak groups, such as children, is more important than freedom of expression. The data analysis also shows that gender, education, religious affiliation, trust in media and fear of a terrorist attack are all linked to the likelihood of agreeing with this statement. Women are 66% more likely than men to be in favour of limiting freedom of expression to protect weak groups, such as children. While the numbers of those who agree are lower among journalists, up to 50% of journalists still totally or partially agree that protecting weak groups is more important than freedom of expression. We discuss the policy implications of these results for democratic societies

European research on children’s internet use: assessing the past and anticipating the future

In this article we reflect critically on the research agenda on children’s internet use, framing our analysis using Wellman’s (2004) three ages of internet studies, and taking as our case study the three phases of research by the EU Kids Online network from 2006–14. Following the heyday of moral panics, risk discourses and censorious policy-making that led to the European Commission’s first Internet Action Plan 1999–2002, EU Kids Online focused on conceptual clarification, evidence review and debunking of myths, illustrating the value of systematic documentation and mapping, and grounding academic, public and policy-makers’ understanding of ‘the internet’ in children’s lives. Consonant with Wellman’s third age which emphases analysis and contextualization, the EU Kids Online model of children’s online risks and opportunities helps shift the agenda from how children engage with the internet as a medium to how they engage with the world mediated by the internet

EU Kids Online 2020: technical report

This report describes in detail the methodology used for the EU Kids Online IV project (see the description of the four phases of the project in the next section). Within this project, a large-scale survey of children aged 9–17 from 19 European countries was conducted. The data were collected between autumn 2017 and summer 2019 from 25,101 children by national teams from the EU Kids Online network. This report provides information about the nature of the project, how the questionnaire was developed, sampling and data collection, ethical issues, data management and weighting. The information in this report should enable dataset users to understand the logic and nature of the survey. For dataset users, we also recommend using the ‘Data Dictionary’ (available at eukidsonline.net), a related document that systematically maps all the information related to the data in the dataset. Moreover, Annex 2 of this report provides concise key guidelines for dataset users. We highly recommend using these short guidelines during work with the EU Kids Online 2020 dataset. Annex 3 contains a description of the key variables. Full questionnaires and their national forms are available at eukidsonline.net