Just a few days after my rant about online abuse – particularly that directed against women – came this excellent article in Poynter from Jeff Sonderman focusing on the harassment that women journalists face from their social networks when using Twitter and the Facebook subscribe function to engage with their readers. “We’re more accessible to people than ever, which [...]
Half way through Internet Safety Week already, and – having attended the Get Safe Online summit in London on Monday - I’m counting myself lucky that I’ve not yet been the victim of a serious attack. According to Verisign, 19 people in the UK fall for some scam or get suckered by a piece of [...]
Last month, we published a review of COPPA’s proposed changes, which concluded that, whilst the aims are laudable, the proposed changes are unlikely to be effective or workable, and may indeed, result in more harm. And indeed, as it currently stands, COPPA is reported to be seriously flawed and counter-productive. This month, the redoubtable danah [...]
Protecting children from abuse is about the most important thing that our moderation teams do, and we’re very proud of them for their diligence and resilience. But the work they do, and the images they see, pale into insignificance with the work done by the (very few) staff of the Internet Watch Foundation, a charity [...]
In the recently published paper from the American Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), the authors of Increasing Youth Safety and Responsible Behavior Online make some interesting points about the aims and evaluations of internet safety programmes. As with the recent report from EU Kids Online, they distinguish between ‘risk’ and ‘harm’, and also take learnings [...]
In June this year, the UK Department for Education published ‘Letting Children be Children – Report of an Independent Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood’ (aka “The Bailey Review” as it was led by Reg Bailey, Chief Executive of Mothers’ Union). Today, two of its recommendations appear to have made some kind of [...]