I’ve been floating around in conservative policy circles for 30 years and I have spent much of that time covering media policy and child safety issues. My time in conservative circles began in 1992 with a 9-year stint at the Heritage Foundation, where I launched the organization’s policy efforts on media regulation, the Internet, and digital technology. Meanwhile, my work on child safety has spanned 4 think tanks, multiple blue ribbon child safety commissions, countless essays, dozens of filings and testimonies, and even a multi-edition book.

During this three-decade run, I’ve tried my hardest to find balanced ways of addressing some of the legitimate concerns that many conservatives have about kids, media content, and online safety issues. Raising kids is the hardest job in the world. My daughter and son are now off at college, but the last twenty years of helping them figure out how to navigate the world and all the challenges it poses was filled with difficulties. This was especially true because my daughter and son faced completely different challenges when it came to media content and online interactions. Simply put, there is no one-size-fits-all playbook when it comes to raising kids or addressing concerns about healthy media interactions.

Something Must Be Done!

My personal approach, as I summarized in my book on these issues, was to first and foremost do everything in my power to (a) keep an open mind about new media content and platforms, and (b) ensure an open line of ongoing communication with my kids about the issues they might be facing. Shutting down conversation or calling for others to come in and save the day were the worst two options, in my opinion. As I summarized in my book, “At the end of the day, there is simply no substitute for talking to our children in an open, loving, and understanding fashion about the realities of-this world, including the more distasteful bits.” This was my Parental Prime Directive, if you will. I just always wanted to make sure that my kids felt like they could talk to me about their issues, no matter how varied, horrible, or heart-breaking those problems might be.

When talking with other parents through the years, I’ve heard about their own unique concerns and struggles. Every family faces different challenges because no two kids or situations are alike. Moreover, the challenges can feel overwhelming in our modern world of information abundance, which is flush with ubiquitous communications and media options. Sometimes these parental frustrations can fester and grow into a sort of rage until you finally hear folks utter that famous phrase: Something must be done! And that “something” is often some sort of government regulation “for the children.”

Again, I get it. When all your best efforts to help or protect your kids don’t seem to work according to plan, it’s only natural to call for help. But there are very serious problems associated with calling on government for that help. When legislators and regulators are asked to play the role of National Nanny, it comes with all the same baggage that accompanies many other efforts by the government to intervene in our lives or control what people or organizations can say or do.

Conservative Contradictions

These are particularly sensitive issues for many conservatives, both because conservatives tend to have more heightened concerns about media content and online safety issues, and also because the steps they often recommend to address these issues can quickly come into conflict with their own first principles.

Let me run through six ways that support for media content controls and child safety regulations can sometimes run afoul of conservative principles.

1) It’s a rejection of personal responsibility

Again, I understand all too well how hard parenting can be. But that does not mean we should abdicate our parental responsibilities to the State. Conservatives have spent decades fighting government when it comes to broken schools and the supposed brainwashing many kids get in them. The rallying cry of conservatives has long been: Let us have a greater say in how we raise and educate our children because the State is failing us or betraying our values.

Thus, when conservatives suggest that the State should be making decisions for us as it pertains to anything the government says is a “child safety” issue, there is some serious cognitive dissonance going on there. In his humorous Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce jokingly defined responsibility as, “A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.” For parental responsibility to actually mean something, it has to be more than a “detachable burden” that we unload upon government.

2) It’s an embrace of the administrative state & arbitrary rule by unelected bureaucrats

Beyond the classroom, conservatives have long been concerned about the specter of massive administrative agencies and armies of unelected bureaucrats controlling our lives from the shadows. I’ve spent decades working with conservative organizations and scholars trying to get the administrative state under some control to scale back its enormous power, arbitrary edicts, and costly burdens. Over-criminalization has become such a problem that, according to the Heritage Foundation, “regulatory offenses… have proliferated to the point that, literally, nobody knows how many federal criminal regulations exist today.” We’re all criminals of some sort in the eyes of the modern regulatory state.

Yet, when conservatives advocate the expansion of the administrative state through new “online safety” regulations, they are just making the over-criminalization problem worse, including by treating our own children as guilty parties for simply trying to access the primary media platforms of their generation and interact with their friends there. For example, calls to ban all teens from social media until they’re 18 would result in the most massive “forbidden fruit” nightmare in American history, with every teen suddenly becoming a criminal actor and working together to tunnel around bans using the same sort of VPNs and evasion technologies people in China and other repressive nations use to get around over-bearing speech policies. [See: “Again, We Should Not Ban All Teens from Social Media”]

Needless to say, all this regulation and bureaucratic empowerment would have massive negative externalities for online freedom more generally as the era of “permissionless innovation” is replaced by a new age of permission-slip regulation.

3) It’s a rejection of the First Amendment & free speech rights

Conservatives have spent many decades pushing for greater First Amendment-based freedoms as it pertains to religious liberty and or organizational/corporate speech issues. Thus, when conservatives seek to undermine free speech principles and jurisprudence in the name of child safety, it could undo everything conservatives have been fighting to accomplish in those other contexts.

Conservatives are understandably upset with some social media platforms for being too over-zealous with certain types of speech takedowns or de-platformings. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and they should not be calling on Big Government to be imposing its own editorial judgments in place of private actors. [See: “The Great Deplatforming of 2021“ and “When It Comes to Fighting Social Media Bias, More Regulation Is Not the Answer.“]

4) It’s a rejection of property rights and freedom more generally

Related to the previous two points, conservatives have long upheld the sanctity of property rights in many different contexts. This includes the property rights that private establishments enjoy under the Constitution to generally decide how to structure their operations, who they will do business with, and how they will do so. Private organizations and religious institutions possess not only free speech rights in this regard, but property and contractual rights, too.

But when it comes to “child safety” mandates, some conservatives would toss all this out the window and undermine those rights, replacing them with burdensome regulatory mandates that tell private parties how to conduct their affairs. Again, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on here and it could have serious blowback for conservatives when the property / contractual rights of other people or organizations are undermined on similar grounds.

5) It’s an embrace of frivolous lawsuits & the trial lawyers that bring them

The last time I checked, trial lawyers were not exactly the most conservative-friendly constituency. For many decades, conservatives have looked to advance tort reform, limit junk science and frivolous lawsuits, and make sure that the courts don’t engage in excessive judicial activism.

Unfortunately, many of the child safety regulations being proposed today would empower the regulatory state and trial lawyers at the same time. Many of the bills being floated open the door to open-ended litigation and potentially punishing liability for private platforms — and not just against deep-pocketed “Big Tech” companies. The fact is, once conservatives open the litigation floodgates based on amorphous accusations of potential online safety harms, they will be empowering the tort bar (one of the biggest supporters of the Democratic Party, no less) to launch a legal jihad against any and every media platform out there. Good luck putting that genie back in the bottle once you unleash it.

6) It’s an embrace of the same moral panic arguments your parents leveled against you

How quickly we forget the accusations our own parents and others leveled against us as children. Remember when video games were going to make us a lost generation of murderous youth? Or when rap and rock-and-roll music were going to send us straight to hell? Today, those kids are all grown up and trying to tell us that they are fine but it’s this latest generation that is doomed. It’s just an endless generational cycle of moral panics. [See: “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” and “Confessions of a ‘Vidiot’: 50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics”] Today’s conservatives need to remember that they, too, were once kids and somehow muddled through to adulthood.

The “3-E” Approach Is the Better Answer

At this point, some of the people who’ve read this far are screaming at the screen: “So, are you saying we should just do nothing!?”

Absolutely not. But it is important that we consider less onerous and more practical ways to address these challenging issues without falling prey to Big Government gimmicks that would undermine other important principles. We should start by acknowledging that there are no easy fixes or silver-bullet solutions. The plain truth of the matter is that the best solutions here can seem messy and unsatisfying to many because they require enormous ongoing efforts to mentor and assist our kids at a far deeper level than some folks are comfortable with.

For example, it is just insanely uncomfortable to have to speak with your kids about online bullying or harassment, pornography, violence in movies and games, hate speech, and so on. And I haven’t even mentioned the hardest things to talk to kids about: The daily news of the real world: wars, violence, tragic accidents, famines, etc. Honestly, the hardest conversations I’ve had to have with my kids were those about school shootings. By comparison, many other discussions about online content and interactions were much easier. To the extent that we’re attempting to measure and address negative media affects, I firmly believe that there a few things in this world more horrifying to kids — or harder to talk with them about — than the first 10 minutes of what’s on cable news each hour of the day.

Regardless, whether we’re talking about the potential “harms” or mass media or online content, we cannot pretend there exists a simple solution to any of it. Here’s the better approach.

I recently authored a study for the American Enterprise Institute on, “Governing Emerging Technology in an Age of Policy Fragmentation and Disequilibrium.” It was my attempt to sketch out a flexible, pragmatic, bottom-up set of governance principles for modern technology platforms and issues. In that report, I noted how “[t]he First Amendment constitutes a particularly high barrier to the use of hard law in the United States,” and that court challenges were likely to continue to block many of the regulatory efforts being floated today, just as been the case countless times before in recent decades. Thus, we need to have backup approaches to online safety beyond one-size-fits-all regulatory Hail Mary passes.

I have described that backup plan as the “3-E” approach or “layered approach” to online safety:

• Empowerment of parents: Parental controls cannot solve all the world’s problems. It’s better to view them as helpful speed bumps or emergency alerts for when things are going badly for your child. In the old days, we placed a lot of faith in filtering, and that still has a role along with other tools that help place some reasonable limits not only on content but also overall consumption. But the best types of parental empowerment are those that force conversations between parents and kids by allowing reasonable monitoring to happen that is scaled by age (as in more limits for younger kids until they are gradually relaxed over time). And other carrot-and-stick tools and approaches are incredibly useful in helping parents place smart limits on youth activity and overall consumption.
• Education of youth: Education is the strategy with the most lasting impact for online safety. Education and digital literacy provide skills and wisdom that can last a lifetime. Specifically, education can help teach both kids (and adults!) how to behave in — or respond to — a wide variety of situations. Building resiliency and encouraging healthy interactions is the goal.
• Enforcement of existing laws: There are many sensible and straightforward laws already in place that address more concrete types of harm and harassment. And we have lots of laws pertaining to fraud and unfair and deceptive practices. Sometimes these rules can be challenging (and time-consuming) to enforce, but they constitute an existing backstop that can handle most worst-case scenarios when other less-restrictive steps fall short. And we should certainly tap these existing remedies before advancing unworkable new regulatory regimes.

I noted in my AEI study that, between 2000 and 2010, six major online-safety task forces or blue-ribbon commissions were formed to study online-safety issues and consider what should be done to address them. Each of them recommended some variant of the “3-E” approach as they encouraged a variety of best practices, educational approaches, and technological-empowerment solutions to address various safety concerns. Self-regulatory codes, private content-rating systems, and a wide variety of different parental-control technologies all proliferated during this period. Many multi-stakeholder initiatives and other organizations were also formed to address governance issues collaboratively. There are countless groups doing important work on this front today, including my old friends at the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) among many others.

These organizations push for a layered approach to online safety and work closely with educators, child development experts, and other academics and activists to find workable solutions to new online safety challenges as they arise. Their work is never done, and at times it can feel overwhelming. But, again, it’s the nature of the task at hand. We all must work together to continuously devise new and better approaches to addressing these challenges, because they will be endless. But let’s please not expect that we can unload these responsibilities on government and expect regulators to somehow handle it for us.

Do the Ends Justify the Means When it Comes to Media & Content Control?

I could be wasting my breath here because I’ve been attempting to appeal to conservative principles that may be rapidly disappearing from the modern conservative movement. Donald Trump radically disrupted everything in American politics, but especially the Republican Party. Many so-called national conservatives now live by Trump’s central operating principle: The ends justify the means. The ends are “owning the libs” in any way possible. And “the libs” include not only anyone on the Left of the political spectrum, but even those individuals and institutions that Trumpian conservatives believe are “the enemy” and controlled by “liberal interests.” By their definition, this now includes virtually all large media and technology companies and platforms. Thus, when we turn to the means, it’s increasingly the case that just about anything goes — including many traditional conservative principles.

To see how far we’ve come, recall what President Ronald Reagan said 35 years ago when vetoing an effort to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. “History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and compe­tition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee,” he said. At the time, President Reagan was confronted with some of the same arguments we hear today about media being too biased or conservatives not getting a fair shake. But he called upon his fellow conservatives to reject the idea that Big Government was the solution to such problems.

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump and some of his most loyal followers and even some major conservative groups today have largely given up on this logic and instead embraced regulation. While Trumpian conservatives love to decry everyone they oppose as “communists,” ironically it is this same group that is embracing a sort of communications collectivism as it pertains to modern media control. In the Trumpian worldview, media and tech platforms are useful only to the extent they carry out the will of the party — or at least the man on top of it.

These national conservatives have made a horrible miscalculation. Feeling aggrieved by Big Tech “bias,” or just feeling overwhelmed by things they don’t like about online platforms, they’ve decided that two wrongs make a right. In reality, two political wrongs never make a right, but they almost always combine to make government a lot bigger and more powerful.

It’s an incredibly naïve gamble almost certainly destined to fail, but they should ask themselves what it means if it works. This endless ratcheting effect will result in comprehensive state control of most channels of communications and information dissemination. Is this a game that you really think you can play better than the Lefties?

I’ll close by returning to one of Reagan’s favorite jokes. He always used to say that, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” I would suggest that an even scarier version of that line would be, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you parent your kids.”

Don’t let it be you uttering that line.

______________

Additional Reading

· Adam Thierer, “Again, We Should Not Ban All Teens from Social Media”

· Adam Thierer, “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?”

· Adam Thierer, “The Classical Liberal Approach to Digital Media Free Speech Issues”

· Adam Thierer, “Confessions of a ‘Vidiot’: 50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics”

· Adam Thierer, “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment“

· Adam Thierer, “When It Comes to Fighting Social Media Bias, More Regulation Is Not the Answer“

· Adam Thierer, “Ongoing Series: Moral Panics / Techno-Panics”

· Adam Thierer, “No Goldilocks Formula for Content Moderation in Social Media or the Metaverse, But Algorithms Still Help”

· Adam Thierer, “FCC’s O’Rielly on First Amendment & Fairness Doctrine Dangers“

· Adam Thierer, “Conservatives & Common Carriage: Contradictions & Challenges“

· Adam Thierer, “The Great Deplatforming of 2021“

· Adam Thierer, “A Good Time to Re-Read Reagan’s Fairness Doctrine Veto“

· Adam Thierer, “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet“

· Adam Thierer, “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality“

· Adam Thierer, “Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media“

· Adam Thierer, “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’“

· Adam Thierer, “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“

· Adam Thierer, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods (2009).

James Pethokousis of AEI interviews me about the current miserable state of modern science fiction, which is just dripping with dystopian dread in every movie, show, and book plot. How does all the techno-apocalyptica affect societal and political attitudes about innovation broadly and emerging technologies in particular. Our discussion builds on my recent a recent Discourse article, “How Science Fiction Dystopianism Shapes the Debate over AI & Robotics.” [Pasted down below.] Swing on over to Jim’s “Faster, Please” newsletter and hear what Jim and I have to say. And, for a bonus question, Jim asked me is we doing a good job of inspiring kids to have a sense of wonder and to take risks. I have some serious concerns that we are falling short on that front.

How Science Fiction Dystopianism Shapes the Debate over AI & Robotics

[Originally ran on Discourse on July 26, 2022.]

George Jetson will be born this year. We don’t know the exact date of this fictional cartoon character’s birth, but thanks to some skillful Hanna-Barbera hermeneutics the consensus seems to be sometime in 2022.

In the same episode that we learn George’s approximate age, we’re also told the good news that his life expectancy in the future is 150 years old. It was one of the many ways The Jestons, though a cartoon for children, depicted a better future for humanity thanks to exciting innovations. Another was a helpful robot named Rosie, along with a host of other automated technologies—including a flying car—that made George and his family’s life easier.

Most fictional portrayals of technology today are not as optimistic as  The Jetsons, however. Indeed, public and political conceptions about artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics in particular are being strongly shaped by the relentless dystopianism of modern science fiction novels, movies and television shows. And we are worse off for it.

AI, machine learning, robotics and the power of computational science hold the potential to drive explosive economic growth and profoundly transform a diverse array of sectors, while providing humanity with countless technological improvements in medicine and healthcare, financial services, transportation, retail, agriculture, entertainment, energy, aviation, the automotive industry and many others. Indeed, these technologies are already deeply embedded in these and other industries and making a huge difference.

But that progress could be slowed and in many cases even halted if public policy is shaped by a precautionary-principle-based mindset that imposes heavy-handed regulation based on hypothetical worst-case scenarios. Unfortunately, the persistent dystopianism found in science fiction portrayals of AI and robotics conditions the ground for public policy debates, while also directing attention away from some of the more real and immediate issues surrounding these technologies.

Incessant Dystopianism Untethered from Reality

In his recent book Robots, Penn State business professor John Jordan observes how over the last century “science fiction set the boundaries of the conceptual playing field before the engineers did.” Pointing to the plethora of literature and film that depicts robots, he notes: “No technology has ever been so widely described and explored before its commercial introduction.” Not the internet, cell phones, atomic energy or any others.

Indeed, public conceptions of these technologies, and even the very vocabulary of the field, has been shaped heavily by sci-fi plots beginning a hundred years ago with the 1920 play  R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which gave us the term “robot,” and Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, with its memorable Maschinenmensch, or “machine-human.” There has been a deep and rich imagination surrounding AI and robotics since then, but it has tended to be mostly negative and has grown more hostile over time.

The result has been a public and policy dialogue about AI and robotics that is focused on an endless parade of horribles about these technologies. Not surprisingly, popular culture also affects journalistic framings of AI and robotics. Headlines breathlessly scream of how “Robots May Shatter the Global Economic Order Within a Decade,” but only if we’re not dead already because… “If Robots Kill Us, It’s Because It’s Their Job.”

Dark depictions of AI and robotics are ever-present in popular modern sci-fi movies and television shows. A short list includes:  2001: A Space Odyssey, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Battlestar Galactica (both the 1978 original and the 2004 reboot), Black Mirror, Blade Runner, Ex Machina, Her, The Matrix, Robocop, The Stepford Wives, Terminator, Transcendence, Tron, WALL-E, Wargames and Westworld, among countless others. The least nefarious plots among these films and television shows rest on the idea that AI and robotics are going to drive us to a life of distraction, addiction or sloth. In more extreme cases, we’re warned about a future in which we are either going to be enslaved or destroyed by our new robotic or algorithmic overlords.

Don’t get me wrong; the movies and shows on the above list are some of my favorites.  2001 and Blade Runner are both in my top 5 all-time flicks, and the reboot of Battlestar is one of my favorite TV shows. The plots of all these movies and shows are terrifically entertaining and raise many interesting issues that make for fun discussions.

But they are not representative of reality. In fact, the vast majority of computer scientists and academic experts on AI and robotics agree that claims about machine “superintelligence” are wildly overplayed and that there is no possibility of machines gaining human-equivalent knowledge any time soon—or perhaps ever. “In any ranking of near-term worries about AI, superintelligence should be far down the list,” argues Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.

Contra the  Terminator-esque nightmares envisioned in so many sci-fi plots, MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks says that “fears of runaway AI systems either conquering humans or making them irrelevant aren’t even remotely well grounded.” John Jordan agrees, noting: “The fear and uncertainty generated by fictional representations far exceed human reactions to real robots, which are often reported to be ‘underwhelming.’”

The same is true for AI more generally. “A close inspection of AI reveals an embarrassing gap between actual progress by computer scientists working on AI and the futuristic visions they and others like to describe,” says Erik Larson, author of, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do. Larson refers to this extreme thinking about superintelligent AI as “technological kitsch,” or exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama that is untethered from reality. Yet, the public imagination remains captivated by tales of impending doom.

Seeding the Ground with Misery and Misguided Policy

But isn’t it all just harmless fun? After all, it’s just make believe. Moreover, can’t science fiction—no matter how full of techno-misery—help us think through morally weighty issues and potential ethical conundrums involving AI and robotics?

Yes and no. Titillating fiction has always had a cathartic element to it and helped us cope with the unknown and mysterious. Most historians believe it was Aristotle in his Poetics who first used the term katharsis when discussing how Greek tragedies helped the audience “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.”

But are modern science fiction depictions of AI and robotics helping us cope with technological change, or instead just stoking a constant fear of it? Modern sci-fi isn’t so much purging negative emotion about the topic at hand as it is endlessly adding to the sense of dread surrounding these technologies. What are the societal and political ramifications of a cultural frame of reference that suggests an entire new class of computational technologies will undermine rather than enrich our human experiences and, possibly, our very existence?

The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore says we live in “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction,” but she worries that this body of work “cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one.” She argues this “fiction of helplessness and hopelessness” instead “nurses grievances and indulges resentments” and that “[i]ts only admonition is: Despair more.” Lapore goes so far as to claim that, because “the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism” has appeal to many on both the left and right, it “has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism.”

I’m not sure dystopian fiction is driving the unravelling of pluralism, but Lapore is on to something when she notes how a fiction rooted in misery about the future will likely have political consequences at some point.

Techno-panic Thinking Shapes Policy Discussions

The ultimate question is whether public policy toward new AI and robotic technologies will be shaped by this hyperpessimistic thinking in the form of precautionary principle regulation, which essentially treats innovations as “guilty until proven innocent” and seeks to intentionally slow or retard their development.

If the extreme fears surrounding AI and robotics  do inspire precautionary controls—as they already have in the European Union—then we need to ask how the preservation of the technological status quo could undermine human well-being by denying society important new life-enriching and life-saving goods and services. Technological stasis does not provide a safer or healthier society, but instead holds back our collective ability to innovate, prosper and better our lives in meaningful ways.

Louis Anslow, curator of  Pessimists Archive calls this “the Black Mirror fallacy,” referencing the British television show that has enjoyed great success peddling tales of impending techno-disasters. Anslow defines the fallacy as follows: “When new technologies are treated as much more threatening and risky than old technologies with proven risks/harms. When technological progress is seen as a bigger threat than technological stagnation.”

Anslow’s Pessimists Archive collects real-world case studies of how moral panic and techno-panics have accompanied the introduction of new inventions throughout history. He notes, “Science fiction has conditioned us to be hypervigilant about avoiding dystopias born of technological acceleration and totally indifferent to avoiding dystopias born of technological stagnation.”

Techno-panics can have real-world consequences when they come to influence policymaking. Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), has documented the many ways that “the social and political commentary [about AI] has been hype, bordering on urban myth, and even apocalyptic.” The more these attitudes and arguments come to shape policy considerations, the more likely it is precautionary principle-based recommendations will drive AI and robotics policy, preemptively limiting their potential. ITIF has published a report documenting “Ten Ways the Precautionary Principle Undermines Progress in Artificial Intelligence,” identifying how it will slow algorithmic advances in key sectors.

Similarly, in his important recent book Where Is My Flying Car ?, scientist J. Storrs Hall documents how “regulation clobbered the learning curve” for many important technologies in the U.S. over the last half century, especially nuclear, nanotech and advanced aviation. Society lost out on many important innovations due to endless bureaucratic delays, often thanks to opposition from special interests, anti-innovation activists, overzealous trial lawyers and a hostile media. Hall explained how this also sent a powerful signal to talented young people who might have been considering careers in those sectors. Why go into a field demonized by so many and where your creative abilities will be hamstrung by precautionary constraints?

Disincentivizing Talent

Hall argues that in those crucial sectors, this sort of mass talent migration “took our best and brightest away from improving our lives,” and he warns that those who still hope to make a career in such fields should be prepared to be “misconstrued and misrepresented by activists, demonized by ignorant journalists, and strangled by regulation.”

Is this what the future holds for AI and robotics? Hopefully not, and America continues to generate world-class talent on this front today in a diverse array of businesses and university programs. But if the waves of negativism about AI and robotics persist, we shouldn’t be surprised if it results in a talent shift away from building these technologies and toward fields that instead look to restrict them.

For example, Hall documents how, following the sudden shift in public attitudes surrounding nuclear power 50 years ago, “interests, and career prospects, in nuclear physics imploded” and “major discoveries stopped coming.” Meanwhile, enrollment in law schools and other soft sciences typically critical of technological innovation enjoyed greater success. Nobody writes any sci-fi stories about what a disaster that development has been for innovation in the energy sphere, even though it is now abundantly clear how precautionary principle policies have undermined environment goals and human welfare, with major geopolitical consequences for many nations.

If America loses the talent race on the AI front, it has ramifications for global competitive advantage going forward, especially as China races to catch up. In a world of global innovation arbitrage, talent and venture capital will flow to wherever it is treated most hospitably. Demonizing AI and robotics won’t help recruit or retain the next generation of talent and investors America needs to remain on top.

Flipping the Script

Some folks have had enough of the relentless pessimism surrounding technology and progress in modern science fiction and are trying to do something to reverse it. In a 2011  Wired essay decrying the dangers of “Innovation Starvation,” the acclaimed novelist Neal Stephenson decried the fact that “the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of [science fiction] has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone.” While good science fiction, “supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place,” Stephenson said modern sci-fi was almost entirely focused on its potential downsides.

To help reverse this trend, Stephenson worked with the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University to launch Project Hieroglyph, an effort to support authors willing to take a more optimistic view of the future. It yielded a 2014 book, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future that included almost 20 contributors. Later, in 2018, The Verge launched the “Better Worlds” project to support 10 writers of “stories that inspire hope” about innovation and the future. “Contemporary science fiction often feels fixated on a sort of pessimism that peers into the world of tomorrow and sees the apocalypse looming more often than not,” said Verge culture editor Laura Hudson when announcing the project.

Unfortunately, these efforts have not captured much public attention and that’s hardly surprising. “Pessimism has always been big box office,” says science writer Matt Ridley, primary because it really is more entertaining. Even though many of great sci-fi writers of the past, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, wrote positively about technology, they ultimately had more success selling stories with darker themes. It’s just the nature of things more generally, from the best of Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and on down the line. There’s a reason they’re still rebooting Beowulf all these years later, after all.

So, There’s Star Trek and What Else?

While technological innovation will never enjoy the respect it deserves for being the driving force behind human progress, one can at least hope that more pop culture treatments of it might give it a fair shake. When I ask crowds of people to name a popular movie or television show that includes mostly positive depictions of technology, Star Trek is usually the first (and sometimes the only) thing people mention. It’s true that, on balance, technology was treated as a positive force in the original series, although “V’Ger”—a defunct space probe that attains a level of consciousness—was the prime antagonist in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Later, Star Trek: The Next Generation gave us the always helpful android Data, but also created the lasting mental image of the Borg, a terrifying race of cyborgs hell-bent on assimilating everyone into their hive mind.

The Borg provided some of The Next Generation’s most thrilling moments, but also created a new cultural meme, with tech critics often worrying about how today’s humans are being assimilated into the hive mind of modern information systems. Philosopher Michael Sacasas even coined the term “the Borg Complex,” to refer to a supposed tendency “exhibited by writers and pundits who explicitly assert or implicitly assume that resistance to technology is futile.” After years of a friendly back-and-forth with Sacasas, I felt compelled to even wrap up my book Permissionless Innovation with a warning to other techno-optimists not to fall prey to this deterministic trap when defending technological change. Regardless of where one falls on that issue, the fact that Sacasas and I were having a serious philosophical discussion premised on a famous TV plotline serves as another indication of how much science fiction shapes public and intellectual debate over progress and innovation.

And, truth be told, some movies know how to excite the senses without resorting to dystopianism.  Interstellar and The Martian are two recent examples that come to mind. Interestingly, space exploration technologies themselves usually get a fair shake in many sci-fi plots, often only to be undermined by onboard Ais or androids, as occurred not only in 2001 with the eerie HAL 9000, but also Alien.

There are some positive (and sometimes humorous) depictions of robots as in  Robot & Frank, or touching ones as in Bicentennial Man. Beyond The Jetsons, other cartoons like Iron Giant and Big Hero 6 offer more kindly visions of robots. KITT, a super-intelligent robot car, was Michael Knight’s dependable ally in NBC’s Knight Rider. And R2-D2 is always a friendly helper throughout the Star Wars franchise. But generally speaking, modern sci-fi continues to churn out far more negativism about AI and robotics.

What If We Took It All Seriously?

So long as the public and political imagination is spellbound by machine machinations that dystopian sci-fi produces, we’ll be at risk of being stuck with absurd debates that have no meaningful solution other than “Stop the clock!” or “Ban it all!” Are we really being assimilated into the Borg hive mind, or just buying time until a coming robopocalypse grinds us into dust (or dinner)?

If there was a kernel of truth to any of this, then we should adopt some of the extreme solutions, Nick Bostrom of Oxford suggests in his writing on these issues. Those radical steps include worldwide surveillance and enforcement mechanisms for scientists and researchers developing algorithmic and robotic systems, as well as some sort of global censorship of information about these capabilities to ensure the technology is not used by bad actors.

To Bostrom’s great credit, he is at least willing to tell us how far he’d go. Most of today’s tech critics prefer to just spread a gospel of gloom and doom and suggest  something must be done, without getting into the ugly details about what a global control regime for computational science and robotic engineering looks like. We should reject such extremist hypothesizing and understand that silly sci-fi plots, bombastic headlines and kooky academic writing should not be our baseline for serious discussions about the governance of artificial intelligence and robotics.

At the same time, we absolutely should consider what downsides any technology poses for individuals and society. And, yes, some precautions will be needed of a regulatory nature. But most of the problems envisioned by sci-fi writers are not what we should be concerned with. There are far more specific and nuanced problems AI and robotics confronts us with today that deserve more serious consideration and governance steps. How to program safer drones and driverless cars, improve the accuracy of algorithmic medical and financial technologies, and ensure better transparency for government uses of AI are all more mundane but very important issues that require reasoned discussion and balanced solutions today. Dystopian thinking gives us no roadmap to get there other than extreme solutions.

Imagining a Better Future

The way forward here is neither to indulge in apocalyptic fantasies nor pollyannaish techno-optimism, but to approach these technologies with reasoned risk analysis, sensible industry best practices, educational efforts and other agile governance steps. In a forthcoming book on flexible governance strategies for AI and robotics, I outline how these and other strategies are already being formulated to address real-world challenges in fields as diverse as driverless cars, drones, machine learning in medicine and much more.

A wide variety of ethical frameworks, offered by professional associations, academic groups and others, already exists to “bake in” best practices and align AI design with widely shared goals and values while also “keeping humans in the loop” at critical stages of the design process to ensure that they can continue to guide and occasionally realign those values and best practices as needed.

When things do go wrong, many existing remedies are available, including a wide variety of common law solutions (torts, class actions, contract law, etc.), recall authority possessed by many regulatory agencies, and various consumer protection policies and other existing laws. Moreover, the most effective solution to technological problems usually lies in more innovation, not less. It is only through constant trial and error that humanity discovers better  and safer ways of satisfying important wants and needs.

These are complicated and nuanced issues that demand tailored and iterative governance responses. But this should not be done using inflexible, innovation-limiting mandates. Concerns about AI dangers deserve serious consideration and appropriate governance steps to ensure that these systems are beneficial to society. However, there is an equally compelling public interest in ensuring that AI innovations are developed and made widely available to help improve human well-being across many dimensions.

So, enjoy your next dopamine hit of sci-fi hysteria—I know I will, too. But don’t let that be your guide to the world that awaits us. Even if most sci-fi writers can’t imagine a better future, the rest of us can.

CollegeHumor has created this amazing video, “Black Mirror Episodes from Medieval Times,” which is a fun parody of the relentless dystopianism of the Netflix show “Black Mirror.” If you haven’t watched Black Mirror, I encourage you to do so. It’s both great fun and ridiculously bleak and over-the-top in how it depicts modern or future technology destroying all that is good on God’s green earth.

The CollegeHumor team picks up on that and rewinds the clock about a 1,000 years to imagine how Black Mirror might have played out on a stage during the medieval period. The actors do quick skits showing how books become sentient, plows dig holes to Hell and unleash the devil, crossbows destroy the dexterity of archers, and labor-saving yokes divert people from godly pursuits. As one of the audience members says after watching all the episodes, “technology will truly be the ruin of us all!” That’s generally the message of not only Black Mirror, but the vast majority of modern science fiction writing about technology (and also a huge chunk of popular non-fiction writing, too.)

If you go far enough back in the history of technology and technological criticism, you actually can find plenty of people insisting that the latest and greatest tech of the day would be the ruin of us all. As I noted here before, you can trace tech criticism at least back to Plato’s Phaedrus, which warned about the dangers of the written word. My colleague Tyler Cowen argues you can trace it even further back to the Bible and the Book of Genesis, especially the story of the Tower of Babel.

One can almost imagine how scorn was heaped on the first person to fashion a blade or a wheel out of stone. Before his untimely passing a few years ago, the great Calestous Juma used to occasionally tweet this hilarious cartoon that depicted just that moment in time. The people that carry those “NO” signs are still all around us today. Technopanics and fear cycles just repeat endlessly, as I have noted in dozens of essays and papers through the years.

[Based on forthcoming article in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, Vol. 14 Issue 1, Winter 2013, http://mjlst.umn.edu]

I hope everyone caught these recent articles by two of my favorite journalists, Kashmir Hill (“Do We Overestimate The Internet’s Danger For Kids?”) and Larry Magid (“Putting Techno-Panics into Perspective.”) In these and other essays, Hill and Magid do a nice job discussing how society responds to new Internet risks while also explaining how those risks are often blown out of proportion to begin with.

Both Hill and Magid are rarities among technology journalists in that they spend more time debunking fears rather than inflating them. Whether its online safety, cybersecurity, or digital privacy, we all too often see journalists distorting or ignoring how humans find constructive ways to cope with technological change. Why do journalists fail to make that point? I suppose it is because bad news sells–even when there isn’t much to substantiate it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about “moral panics” and “technopanics” in recent years (here’s a compendium of roughly two dozen essays I’ve penned on the topic) and earlier this year I brought all my work together in an 80-page paper entitled, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.”

In that paper, I identified several reasons why pessimistic, fear-mongering attitudes often dominate discussions about the Internet and information technology. I began by noting that the biggest problem is that for a variety of reasons, humans are poor judges of risks to themselves or those close to them. But I identified other explanations for why human beings are predisposed toward pessimism and are risk-averse, including:

• Generational Differences
• Hyper-Nostalgia, Pessimistic Bias, and Soft Ludditism
• Bad News Sells: The Role of the Media, Advocates, and the Listener
• The Role of Special Interests and Industry Infighting
• Elitist Attitudes among Academics and Intellectuals
• The Role of “Third-Person-Effect Hypothesis”

You can read my paper for fuller descriptions of each point. But let me return to my primary concern here regarding the role that the media plays in the process. It seems logical why journalists inflate fears: In an increasingly crowded and cacophonous modern media environment, there’s a strong incentive for them to use fear to grab attention. But why are we, the public, such eager listeners and so willing to lap up bad news, even when it is overhyped, exaggerated, or misreported?

“Negativity bias” certainly must be part of the answer. Michael Shermer, author of The Believing Brain, notes that psychologists have identified “negativity bias” as “the tendency to pay closer attention and give more weight to negative events, beliefs, and information than to positive.” Negativity bias, which is closely related to the phenomenon of “pessimistic bias,” is frequently on display in debates over online child safety, digital privacy, and cybersecurity.

But even with negativity bias at work, what I still cannot explain is why so many of these inflated fears exists when we have centuries of experience and empirical results that prove humans are able to again and again adapt to technological change. We are highly resilient, adaptable mammals. We learn to cope.

In my paper, I try to develop a model for how humans deal with new technological risks. I identify four general groups of responses and place them along a “risk response continuum”:

1. Prohibition: Prohibition attempts to eliminate potential risk through suppression of technology, product or service bans, information controls, or outright censorship.
2. Anticipatory Regulation: Anticipatory regulation controls potential risk through preemptive, precautionary safeguards, including administrative regulation, government ownership or licensing controls, or restrictive defaults. Anticipatory regulation can lead to prohibition, although that tends to be rare, at least in the United States.
3. Resiliency: Resiliency addresses risk through education, awareness building, transparency and labeling, and empowerment steps and tools.
4. Adaptation: Adaptation involves learning to live with risk through trial-and-error experimentation, experience, coping mechanisms, and social norms. Adaptation strategies often begin with, or evolve out of, resiliency-based efforts.

For reasons I outline in the paper, I believe that it almost always makes more sense to use bottom-up resiliency and adaptation solutions instead of top-down anticipatory regulation or prohibition strategies. And, more often than not, that’s what we eventually opt for as a society, at least when it comes to information technology. Sure, you can find plenty of examples of knee-jerk prohibition and regulatory strategies being proposed initially as a response to an emerging technology. In the long-run, however–and sometimes even in the short-run–we usually migrate down the risk response continuum and settle into resiliency and adaptation solutions. Sometimes we adopt those approaches because we come to understand they are more sensible or less costly. Other times we get there only after several failed experiments with prohibition and regulation strategies.

I know I am being a bit too black and white here. Sometimes we utilize hybrid approaches–a bit of anticipatory regulation with a bit of resiliency, for example. We use such an approach for both privacy and security matters, for example. But I have argued in my work that the sheer velocity of change in the information age makes it less and less likely that anticipatory regulation strategies–and certainly prohibition strategies–will work in the long-haul. In fact, they often break down very rapidly, making it all the more essential that we begin thinking seriously about resiliency strategies as soon as we are confronted with new technological risks. Adaptation isn’t usually the correct strategy right out of the gates, however. Just saying “learn to to live with it” or “get over it” won’t work as a short-term strategy, even if that’s exactly what will happen over the long-term. But resiliency strategies often help us get to adaption strategies and solutions more quickly.

Anyway, back to journalists and fear. It strikes me that sharp journalists like Hill and Magid just seem to get everything I’m saying here and they weave these insights into all their reporting. By why do so few others? Again, I suppose it is because the incentives are screwy here and make it so that even those reporters who know better will sometimes use fear-based tactics to sell copy. But I am still surprised by how often even respected mainstream media establishments play this game.

In any event, those others reporters need to learn to give humans a bit more credit and acknowledge that (a) we often learn to cope with technological risks quite rapidly and (b) sometimes those risks are greatly inflated to begin with.

NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam had a great spot on NPR’s Morning Edition today about the disputes among social scientists over the impact of violent video games on kids. [“It’s A Duel: How Do Violent Video Games Affect Kids?”] You won’t be surprised to hear I wholeheartedly agree with Texas A&M psychologist Chris Ferguson, who noted in the spot:

Ferguson says it’s easy to think senseless video game violence can lead to senseless violence in the real world. But he says that’s mixing up two separate things.  “Many of the games do have morally objectionable material and I think that is where a lot of the debate on this issue went off the rails,” he said. “We kind of mistook our moral concerns about some of these video games, which are very valid — I find many of the games to be morally objectionable — and then assumed that what is morally objectionable is harmful.”

I’ve written about Ferguson’s work and these issues more generally many times over through the years here at the TLF. Here are some of the most relevant essays:

• Video Games, Media Violence & the Cathartic Effect Hypothesis
• More on Monkey See-Monkey Do Theories about Media Violence & Real-World Crime
• Video Games, Free Speech & the Lunacy of “Ecogenerism”
• Video Games and “Moral Panic”
• Video Games, Violence, & Social “Science”: Another Day, Another Fight
• Do video games create cop killers?

In these essays, I’ve tried to make a couple of key points about the social science literature on “media effects” theory:

(1) Lab studies by psychology professors and students are not representative of real-world behavior/results. Indeed, lab experiments are little more than artificial constructions of reality and of only limited value in gauging the impact of violently-themed media on actual human behavior.

(2) Real-world data trends likely offer us a better indication of the impact of media on human behavior over the long-haul. And all those trends show encouraging signs of improvement even as video game consumption among youth and adults increases.

(3) Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Of course, whether we are talking about those artificial lab experiments or the real-world data sets, we must always keep this first principle of statistical analysis in mind.

(4) Finally, it’s worth reconsidering whether more weight should be given to the “cathartic effect hypothesis” in these debates. 

A bit more on this final point since I feel quite passionately about it…

The battle over media effect theory goes all the way back to the great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. While Plato thought the media of his day (poetry, plays & music) had a deleterious impact on culture and humanity, Aristotle took a very different view. Indeed, most historians believe it was Aristotle who first used the term katharsis when discussing the importance of Greek tragedies, which often contained violent overtones and action. He suggested that these tragedies helped the audience, “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” In Part IV of his Poetics, Aristotle spoke highly of tragedies that used provocative or titillating storytelling to its fullest effect:

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.

And for me, that remains the best explanation for how humans process dramatic depictions of violence and tragedy. We humans are unique among all mammals in our ability to adapt to changes in our environment and to process new and different forms of content and culture. We process. We learn. We assimilate. We adapt. Thus, we can enjoy the “tragic wonder” of watching a violent Greek drama or playing a violent video game without running for the kitchen to find a knife to plunge into somebody’s back. We can separate fantasy from reality and we do so every day of our lives.

Yet, many social scientists today, echoing Plato, continue to search for proof that the alternative is true and that depictions of violence on the stage or screen will have a direct and quite deleterious impact on human behavior. They subscribe to the “monkey see-monkey do” theory of media effects. Again, I think that’s utterly bogus and flatly contradicted by real-world facts. After all, if there was anything to their theories, shouldn’t it have shown up sometime, somewhere in real-world data trends by now?

Still, don’t expect this debate to ever end.  Just wait till virtual reality technologies go mainstream!  Oh boy, now that will have the “monkey see-monkey do” crowd whipped into a lather.  I look forward to the debate (and to playing those VR games with my kids!)

John Naughton, a professor at the Open University in the U.K. and a columnist for the U.K. Guardian, has a new essay out entitled “Only a Fool or Nicolas Sarkozy Would Go to War with Facebook.” I enjoyed it because it touches upon two interrelated concepts that I’ve spent years writing about: “moral panic” and “third-person effect hypothesis” (although Naughton doesn’t discuss the latter by name in his piece.) To recap, let’s define those terms:

“Moral Panic” / “Techno-Panic“: Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M’s Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice, offers the following definition: “A moral panic occurs when a segment of society believes that the behavior or moral choices of others within that society poses a significant risk to the society as a whole.” By extension, a “techno-panic” is simply a moral panic that centers around societal fears about a specific contemporary technology (or technological activity) instead of merely the content flowing over that technology or medium.

“Third-Person Effect Hypothesis“: First formulated by psychologist W. Phillips Davison in 1983, “this hypothesis predicts that people will tend to overestimate the influence that mass communications have on the attitudes and behavior of others. More specifically, individuals who are members of an audience that is exposed to a persuasive communication (whether or not this communication is intended to be persuasive) will expect the communication to have a greater effect on others than on themselves.” While originally formulated as an explanation for how people convinced themselves “media bias” existed where none was present, the third-person-effect hypothesis has provided an explanation for other phenomenon and forms of regulation, especially content censorship. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects about censorship efforts historically is that it is apparent that many censorship advocates desire regulation to protect others, not themselves, from what they perceive to be persuasive or harmful content. That is, many people imagine themselves immune from the supposedly ill effects of “objectionable” material, or even just persuasive communications or viewpoints they do not agree with, but they claim it will have a corrupting influence on others.

All my past essays about moral panics and third-person effect hypothesis can be found here. These theories are also frequently on display in the work of some of the “Internet pessimists” I have written about here, as well as in many bills and regulatory proposals floated by lawmakers. Which brings us back to the Naughton essay.

Naughton comments on French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent speech at the eG8 summit, which many regarded as an attack on the Internet and online freedoms. Naughton argues:

in a way, he was just acting as a mouthpiece for the political, judicial, commercial and security establishments which are becoming increasingly hysterical about the way the internet is upending their respective applecarts. In that sense, Sarky was echoing the fulminations of England’s lord chief justice that “technology is out of control”, by which he meant, as Peter Preston has pointed out, is beyond his control. Establishment panic about the net’s disruptiveness is matched by renewed outbreaks of an age-old neurosis – moral panic about the impact of new communications technology on young people. This was fuelled last week by a report that Facebook was going to allow children under the age of 13 to become members. US law currently insists that websites that collect information about users (as Facebook does) aren’t allowed to sign on anyone under the age of 13.

I think Naughton’s probably on to something here. I’m not quite sure Sarkozy’s speech fit the classic “moral panic” model, but I did sense a bit of third-person effect hypothesis at work in some of Sarkozy’s comments.  Naughton continues on to discuss the rising fears about social networking sites in particular and notes “the fixed conviction of the adult world that young people are being seduced, hoodwinked, fixated, dumbed down (insert favourite downside here) by Facebook and Twitter.”  To this concern Naughton rightly notes:

Much of the moral panic about social networking is a projection of adult fears. A neurosis, as Ken Tynan wisely observed, is a secret that you don’t know you’re keeping. Many teenagers do silly things online; what their parents forget is that they also did silly things in their youth.

Quite right. This is actually a very old story. From the waltz to rock and roll to rap music, from movies to comic books to video games, from radio and television to the Internet and social networking websites—every new media format or technology spawns a fresh debate about the potential negative effects it might have on kids. In each case, the adult generation forgets they, too, were once kids and somehow got through the trials and tribulations of the adolescent experience.

The late University of North Carolina journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once noted: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.” And Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that: “We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to eschew habits we’ve never managed to break.”

What is needed, as I argued in my old book on Parental Controls and Online Child Protection, is a measured and balanced approach to children’s exposure to media content and online interactions — whether the fear is objectionable content or privacy.  All-or-nothing extremes are not going to work. In particular, fear-mongering and “techno-panics” are never the proper response. “Fear, in many cases, is leading to overreaction, which in turn could give rise to greater problems as young people take detours around the roadblocks we think we are erecting,” argue John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, authors of the brilliant recent book, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. What parents, guardians, and educators need to understand, they argue, “is that the traditional values and common sense that have served them well in the past will be relevant in this new world, too.”

That is good advice to parents and policymakers alike.

[UPDATE Feb. 2012: This little essay eventually led to an 80-page working paper, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.”]

In this essay, I will suggest that (1) while “moral panics” and “techno-panics” are nothing new, their cycles seem to be accelerating as new communications and information networks and platforms proliferate; (2) new panics often “crowd-out” or displace old ones; and (3) the current scare over online privacy and “tracking” is just the latest episode in this ongoing cycle.

What Counts as a “Techno-Panic”?

First, let’s step back and define our terms. Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M’s Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice, offers the following definition: “A moral panic occurs when a segment of society believes that the behavior or moral choices of others within that society poses a significant risk to the society as a whole.” By extension, a “techno-panic” is simply a moral panic that centers around societal fears about a specific contemporary technology (or technological activity) instead of merely the content flowing over that technology or medium. In her brilliant 2008 essay on “The MySpace Moral Panic,” Alice Marwick noted:

Technopanics have the following characteristics. First, they focus on new media forms, which currently take the form of computer–mediated technologies. Second, technopanics generally pathologize young people’s use of this media, like hacking, file-sharing, or playing violent video games. Third, this cultural anxiety manifests itself in an attempt to modify or regulate young people’s behavior, either by controlling young people or the creators or producers of media products.

While protection of youth is typically a motivating factor, some techno-panics transcend the old “It’s For the Children” rationales for information control. What all panics share in common, however, is a general desire by the public, media pundits, and policymakers to “do something” to rid ourselves of the apparent menace. Thus, an effort to control the particular content or technology in question is what really defines a true “panic.”

It’s impossible to be scientific about this but there seems to be a cycle of such moral panics or techno-panics at work in our society.  Indeed, looking back over the past few decades, it seems that we experience a new panic roughly every 3 to 5 years. Consider this chronological breakdown of some notable techno-panics since the 1980s on:

• mid-1980s: music lyrics and music videos
• early to mid-1990s: violent video games
• mid- to late 1990s: Internet porn
• late 1990s to early 2000s: browser cookies + kids privacy
• mid-2000: TV & movie violence
• mid- to late 2000: online predators / “stranger danger”
• late 2000s to present: cyberwar
• late 2000s to present: online privacy / web “tracking”

Of course, there were other “mini-panics” that occurred during this stretch and, again, some of them did not involve child safety rationales. There was a brief panic over RFID chips and even the Y2K scare in the late 1990s, for example. Some might argue we also had a bit of panic with copyright and file-sharing back in the early 2000s, and perhaps even one back in the early 1980s when the VCR came on the scene, although that seemed to be more industry-driven. Wireless geo-location and geo-tagging has also been getting more attention recently and still may blossom into a full-blown techno-panic.   And you could make the case that we experienced a different type of techno-panic last year over the supposed “Death of the Web,” although few took that one all that seriously.

Why Do Techno-Panics Pass?

To be clear, there are no clear boundaries with techno-panics.  They do not just suddenly begin and end, and it is impossible to gauge their relative severity since no metric or yardstick exists to measure them against.  Nonetheless, these techno-panics certainly seem to have peaks and valleys in terms of public / political / media attention.

Just a few years ago, for example, the online predator panic reached a fever pitch and “stranger danger” reports were all over the media. As a result, legislation banning social networking sites in publicly funded schools and libraries was introduced, and state attorneys general proposed mandatory online age verification schemes for the Internet to segregate adults and children online. And then, it seems, the fever passed. I couldn’t tell you exactly what week or month it happened — and in many ways some of those fears still exist out there — but it’s clear that the panic about online predation has subsided greatly. I’d like to think that education and awareness helped debunk some of the myths that were fueling that particular panic, just as I’d like to believe that education and awareness helped deflate the fear bubbles that surrounded previous panics.

While I don’t want to entirely discount that possibility, I’m convinced another more cynical explanation may exist: New techno-panics simply crowd-out old techno-panics. There may be several explanations for this:

• Perhaps there is only so much fear-mongering our minds can handle at any given time.
• Perhaps it is becuase the media gets myopically focused on one panic and then hammers it till all the fear has been squeezed out of it such that they have to move on.
• Perhaps it is because a new technology comes along that spooks politicians and the media even more than the previous one they were demonizing.
• Or perhaps all of those factors combine to limit the duration of panics.

Regardless, it seems evident that moral panics and techno-panics have always been with us and will always be with us. From the waltz to rock and roll to rap music, from movies to comic books to video games, from radio and television to the Internet and social networking websites — every new media format or technology spawns a fresh debate about the potential negative effects it might have on society or our kids in particular. An excellent recent report by the U.K. government entitled Safer Children in a Digital World noted that “New media are often met by public concern about their impact on society and anxiety and polarisation of the debate can lead to emotive calls for action.” Indeed, each of the media technologies or communications platforms mentioned above was either regulated or threatened with regulation at some point in its history.

The Cycle is Accelerating but is the Severity of Each Panic Diminished as a Result?

However, it seems like these cycles are now accelerating somewhat.  They peak and fizzle out faster, that is. Perhaps that is a natural outgrowth of the technological explosion we have witnessed in recent years.  Digital innovation is unfolding at a breakneck pace and each new development gives rise to a new set of concerns. Going forward, this could mean we experience more “mini-panics” and fewer of those sweeping “the-world-is-going-to-hell” type panics.

This brings me to the current debate over online advertising, web “tracking,” and personal privacy. What’s interesting about this debate is that, unlike many of the other moral or techno-panics mentioned above, this debate is not being driven by the mantra that “It’s For the Children.”  Today’s privacy panic reflects a more widespread unease with the notion that our digital footprints are somehow being “tracked” for nefarious purposes.  In reality, there isn’t anything nefarious going on here at all. Online sites and service providers are simply using data collection to improve our web experience and better target ads to us in an attempt to cross-subsidize all that wonderful free stuff we enjoy online today. This is truly one of the great pro-innovation, pro-consumer success stories of modern times.  Yet, irrational fears about data collection and targeted marketing have given rise to the second major privacy techno-panic of the past dozen years. (Again, the first privacy-related panic was the “cookie craze” that took place back in the late-90s but then subsided). It is also somewhat ironic that many of the same people and groups who have done yeoman’s work debunking techno-panics in other contexts are driving this modern privacy panic.

I want to make it clear that I am not oblivious to the fact that there are occasionally some legitimate concerns behind some of these moral panics or techno-panics.  For example, I certainly don’t want my young children (ages 9 & 6) viewing hard-core porn, playing extremely violent video games, or even reading graphic comics. And I understand that some forms of personal information are quite sensitive and a legitimate topic for policy discussions.  But, again, these concerns are typically greatly over-hyped, and to the extent that they represent more legitimate concerns, I would argue that education and empowerment-based solutions typically represent a more sensible approach than regulation. Although I sometimes question whether the “harm” that people fear is legitimate, I would hope we could work together to find more sensible ways to address people’s concerns without calling for comprehensive control of the media, content, technology, or the Internet more generally.

Resiliency, Responsibility & Common Sense

Finally, in these discussion, I believe many people overlook the importance of human adaptability and resiliency.  The amazing thing about humans is that we adapt so much better than other creatures. When it comes to technological change, resiliency is hard-wired into our genes.  “The techno-apocalypse never comes,” notes Slate’s Jack Shafer, because “cultures tend to assimilate and normalize new technology in ways the fretful never anticipate.” We learn how to use the new tools given to us and make them part of our lives and culture.  Indeed, we have lived through revolutions more radical than the Information Revolution.  We can adapt and learn to live with some of the legitimate difficulties and downsides of the Information Age. [See my recent book chapter on, “The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1: Saving the Net From Its Detractors.”]

A healthy does of humility, patience, personal responsibility, and good ‘ol common sense will usually get us through these things. Quite literally, there is no need to panic!

Related Reading

• Techno-Panic Cycles (and How the Latest Privacy Scare Fits In)
• Against Techno-Panics
• Collier on “Why Technopanics are Bad”
• Kids, Media, Commercialism & Moral Panic
• The Next Great Technopanic: Wireless Geo-Location / Social Mapping
• Technopanics and the Great Social Networking Scare
• Sen. Klobuchar Stirs Up Facebook Child Safety Technopanic
• A Rarity: Newspaper Argues Against Techno-panic, Cites Constitution
• Google Street View/Wi-Fi Privacy Technopanic Continues
• Digital Sensors, Darknets, Hyper-Transparency & the Future of Privacy

I spend a lot of time here trying to debunk media “moral panics,” “techno-panics,” or unfounded hysteria over the impact of commercialism in general on kids. To believe what some politicians and regulatory agitators have to say, today’s youth always seem at the precipice of the moral abyss.  Our misguided youth are seemingly all going straight to hell and they dragging our culture and society down with them.

Except they’re not. It’s all the same old tripe we’ve heard one generation after another.  As the late University of North Carolina journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once noted: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.” And Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that: “We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to eschew habits we’ve never managed to break.”

Anyway, I was reminded of this again today as I was finally reading through a report published last year by the U.K.’s Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It’s entitled “The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing” and it is very much worth your attention. Several people had recommended I check it out in recent months, but I’m ashamed to say I am only now getting around to it as I prepare an amicus brief for the Supreme Court’s review of a California video game law.  But this U.K. report is not to be missed. Here are a few of the choice bits from the study:

On moral panics generally:

Concerns about the harmful effects of popular culture on children and young people have a very long history, dating back well before electronic technology. These concerns reflect much more general anxieties about the future direction of society; but, as several studies have shown, they can also be inflamed and manipulated by those with much broader political, moral or religious motivations. These concerns occasionally reach the level of a ‘moral panic’, in which particular social groups and practices are publicly demonised – often on the basis of what are ultimately found to be quite spurious accusations. Perhaps paradoxically, such stories also play well in the media themselves, often receiving extensive and highly sensational coverage. (p. 25)

On “blaming commercialism” for the woes of the world:

Children’s growing access to media and technology, and the apparent increase in ‘commercialism’, are often cited as key reasons for this apparent corruption of childhood innocence. According to this view, childhood used to be a non-commercial experience: children were kept away from the sordid realities of the economy, and from the deceitful appeals of advertisers. But as commercialism has increasingly dominated childhood, and as children have come to be seen as ‘fair game’ for marketers, the freedom and innocence of childhood have been destroyed. These kinds of arguments have been made many times over the years by commentators from a wide range of political, moral and religious persuasions. Indeed, they can be seen as part of a long-standing tradition in Western social thought that dates back at least to the Romantics. This is a long and complex tradition, which has motivated significant reforms in children’s lives – for example through the work of writers such as Blake and Dickens and campaigners such as Shaftesbury. However, in some respects it has also entailed a resistance to modernity. Modern technology, urbanisation, consumer capitalism, the pressure to compete, and the ‘speed’ of contemporary life have all been cited as the villains of the piece; and there is a strong sense of nostalgia for a simpler, slower time, a rural idyll of family togetherness and spontaneous play, in which ‘children could be children’. (p. 26)

On how childhood is represented in political debates:

it is important to consider how children and childhood are represented in this debate. The ‘toxic childhood’ approach provides an extremely negative representation of contemporary childhood. Children are portrayed here as vulnerable and helpless victims, rather than in any way resilient or competent – or indeed happy. They are seen to be suffering from a litany of ills and problems: the more positive aspects of modern childhood – for example, in terms of the range of opportunities children enjoy – are largely ignored. The potential benefits of the commercial world, or of modern media and technology, for children are effectively marginalised. The possibility that most children (and their parents) are reasonably well-adjusted and doing fairly well is rarely entertained: the glass is very definitely half-empty. (p. 28)

On causal relationships (or what I refer to as the “monkey-see, monkey-do” theories):

[Another] key problem here is to do with the nature of the causal relationships and explanations that are suggested for the apparent ‘crisis’ of contemporary childhood. There is a persistent logical confusion in these arguments between correlations and causes. The fact that x and y happened at more or less the same time does not in itself mean that x must have caused y, or indeed vice-versa. Even if we can prove an association between x and y (that is, that more of x coincides with more of y), this does not amount to proof of a causal connection. In these debates, the distinctions between symptoms and causes are frequently  blurred; and incompatible or contradictory phenomena are often attributed to the same fundamental cause.  Unfortunately, this is also the case with a good deal of the research in this field. (p. 29)

On “The Limits of Nostolgia”:

Finally, it is important to consider the historical dimension of the argument. There is a very dominant strain of nostalgia here – a looking back to a ‘golden age’ when childhood and family life were apparently harmonious, stable and well-adjusted. But it is often far from clear when that time was, or the social groups to whom this description applies; and the basis on which historical comparisons are being made is frequently unclear. Historical studies of childhood certainly give good grounds for questioning whether such a ‘golden age’ has ever existed: if anything, they would suggest that the lives of children in earlier times were significantly harder than they are today. (p. 29)

Absolutely correct on all those counts.  Of course, I’m cherry-picking a bit here and pulling out the bits with which I find myself in general agreement. The report is more balanced than I’ve suggested here. So read the entire thing for yourself. It’s quite interesting. [More background on it here.]

Many folks are discussing Christopher Ferguson’s latest paper on “The School Shooting / Violent Video Game Link: Causal Relationship or Moral Panic?” And with good reason. It’s an important look at how “moral panics” develop in modern society, in this case around video games. [Moral panics is a subject I have written on at length here many times before.  Alice Marwick’s brilliant article on “technopanics” is also worth reading in this regard].

As I’ve noted here before, Ferguson has penned many important articles raising questions about the claims made by some other psychologists (and politicians) that there is causal relationship between exposure to violent video games and youth aggression. Ferguson has shown there are reasons to be skeptical of such claims — both methodologically and practically-speaking. More on that down below.

In his latest piece, however, Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M’s Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice, is more fully developing moral panic theory, which he describes as follows: “A moral panic occurs when a segment of society believes that the behavior or moral choices of others within that society poses a significant risk to the society as a whole.”  To illustrate the various forces at work that drive moral panics, Ferguson uses this “Moral Panic Wheel”:

This image makes it clear that there is no one group or factor responsible for moral panics. Rather, it is the combination of many forces and influences that ultimately bring such panic about. Activist groups and agenda-driven researchers obviously play a part. Ferguson notes that:

As for social scientists, it has been observed that a small group of researchers have been most vocal in promoting the anti-game message (Kutner & Olson, 2008), oftentimes ignoring research from other researchers, or failing to disclose problems with their own research. As some researchers have staked their professional reputation on anti-game activism, it may be difficult for these researchers to maintain scientific objectivity regarding the subject of their study. Similarly, it may be argued that granting agencies are more likely to provide grant money when a potential problem is identified, rather than for studying a topic with the possibility that the outcome may reveal that there is nothing to worry about…

Ferguson points out that the media and politicians also play a key role in whipping up a frenzy:

The media dutifully reports on the most negative results, as these results ‘sell’ to an already anxious public. Politicians seize upon the panic, eager to be seen as doing something particular as it gives them an opportunity to appear to be ‘concerned for children’. Media violence, in particular, is an odd social issue with the ability to appeal both to voters on the far right, who typically are concerned for religious reasons, and on the far left, who are typically motivated by pacifism…

Importantly, Ferguson also notes that the generation gap fuels the fires of moral panics: “[T]he majority of individuals critical of video games are above the age of 35 (many are elderly) and oftentimes admit to not having directly experienced the games. Some commentators make claims betraying their unfamiliarity,” he says.

Now, let’s get back to Ferguson’s more general skepticism of what other psychologists or social scientists have said about violent video games causing real world violence. [I highly recommend this layman-friendly essay that Ferguson wrote as an introduction to his thinking on the topic]. In his latest piece, he summarizes what is wrong — both from a methodological and real-world perspective — with that research. Here’s some of what he has to say:

• “Seldom are actual physical acts of aggression examined” in that research
• “there are considerable difficulties in generalizing the results from laboratory tests of aggression to real world serious acts of aggression”
• “the generalisability of these results to real world acts of serious violence is dubious”
• “most correlational studies fail to take account of potentially confounding ‘third’ variables such as personality, family violence, or genetics. A few do, and consistently find that the link between video game violence and aggression is greatly weakened by the inclusion of ‘third’ variables.”
• “[there are] significant problems in the violent games literature related to the use of unstandardized, unreliable aggression measures, as well as publication bias.”
• “the empirical link between violent gameplay and serious acts of aggression or violent behavior appears to be slim at best.”
• “In at least one recent court case, it was pointed out that even some social scientists have cherry-picked data that support the panic view, ignoring unsupportive research.”

Next, Ferguson does something I have been trying to do in all the papers and essays I have penned on this subject in recent years: Introduce real-world data! After all, if there is anything to the ‘monkey see-monkey do’ theory of media effects, then the lab research should be showing up somehow in the data we have about actual societal trends. Of course, when you do look at real-world data you find the exact opposite story, as Ferguson illustrates:

as violent video games have become more prevalent, violent crimes have decreased dramatically. This is true both for police arrest data, as well as crime victimization data. Similar statistics for reduced crime have been found in Canada, Australia, the European Union, and the United Kingdom using both arrest and victimization data. This is certainly not to say that violent video games are necessarily responsible for this decline, even partially. However, this certainly cuts away the basis of any belief that violent games are promoting societal violence. The correlation (an astonishing r = -0.95) is simply in the wrong direction. This would be akin to lung cancer decreasing radically after smoking cigarettes was introduced into a population, which is simply not the case.

(Sources: C.F. Ferguson, ESA, Childsats.org)

I highly recommend Prof. Ferguson’s latest paper and hope that it can contribute to the shaping of a new dialogue about youth and media. We do need to be good stewards of our children and be mindful of watch they watch, listen to, download, and play. [I’ve written an entire book about how to do so.]  But we first need to bring this moral panic over games to an end so we can get on with a serious, level-headed conversation about how to better mentor our kids in an age of media abundance.  The current hysteria is not helpful.

My Kid is the Man of Steel! ... in his mind.

Regular readers will recall my great interest in video games and the public policy debates surrounding efforts to regulate “violent” games in particular. One thing I bring up in almost every essay I write on this subject is how fears about kids and video games are almost always overblown and that kids can typically separate fantasy from reality. Nonetheless, kids have active imaginations and adults sometimes fear that which they cannot understand or appreciate.  Friendly mentoring and open-minding parenting can go a long way to encouraging kids to make smart choices and understand where to draw lines, whereas efforts to demonize video games and youth culture almost always backfire.

Anyway, what got me thinking about all this again was an entertaining column in today’s Washington Post by Ron Stanley (“Who Needs a TV to Play Video Games“), which describes the author’s experiences with his nephew when they played out video game-like scenarios using traditional toys and household items. It’s a wonderful piece worth reading in its entirety, but here’s the key takeaway that I’d like to discuss:

There was no evidence that television and video games had stifled the kids’ creativity. Nor was there any evidence that technology had made them smarter than earlier generations. They simply had a different frame of reference, one that included video games and computers as well as ponies, pet stores and sword fights. Children play with the tools at hand, and they’re great at thinking metaphorically — at imagining that a landspeeder is a sentient robot or that a stick is a gun or that salt-and-pepper shakers are a bride and groom or that a card table is a horse’s stable. They’re also geniuses at figuring out simple mechanics. My 6-year-old nephew had to explain to me that miniature low-rider cars don’t roll very well on carpet and will flip over more than if racing on hardwood floors. Novice that I was, I was choosing cars that looked the coolest. And they are geniuses at intuiting rules and systems, and at re-creating these rules and systems in their own play. Children who play lots of card games will invent their own card games. Children who play lots of board games will invent their own board games. And children who play lots of video games will invent their own video-game-like games when they don’t have access to the game controllers.

What Stanley was discovering with his nephew is that (1) kids have rich imaginations and love play-acting and just being creative, and (2) video games have become part of the new narrative of adolescent play-acting and creativity. Kids adapt and learn to cope with new cultural and technological realities; often much quicker than their parents. More importantly, much of their play-acting, including that in which they play out “violent” scenarios, is an entirely natural part of childhood.

Henry Jenkins has done some brilliant work on this front, and the new book Grand Theft Childhood by Kutner and Olson is also essential reading in this regard [my lengthy review is here]. But the best thing every written on this subject is Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super-Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, by Gerald Jones. It is a masterpiece, and I wish every parent and policymaker in America could read it before they propose the regulation of video games. As Jones correctly notes, “Video games are most threatening to adults who have seen images of them but never tried to play them.” He continues:

One of the functions of stories and games is to help children rehearse for what they’ll be in later life. Anthropologists and psychologists who study play, however, have shown that there are many other functions as well–one of which is to enable children to pretend to be just what they know they’ll never be. Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden to them is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.

And “playing with rage” is exactly what we old farts were doing as kids too when we played (politically incorrect) games like “Cowboys and Indians” or countless other games that involved toy guns, cap guns, slingshots, bows-and-arrows, and the like. Of course, my generation gradually traded in our BB guns and slingshots for digital equivalents as video games came on the scene. And that was probably a good thing since, as Ralphie’s mom always warned us, “You’ll shoot your eye out” with those things!)

Bottom line: Cultures and the nature of childhood play-acting fantasies may change, but what will never change is the fact that kids need their fantasies. This is why I get down on my knees every night with my two kids and “play monster” with them. I stuff pillows in my shirt and let them bop me good as my dog and I chase them around and try to put them in “the dungeon” (which is usually a laundry basket or cardboard box). The X-Mas season is always great because we have a ton of those left-over cardboard tubes from wrapping paper, which still make the best toy swords. The game typically ends after Dad gets tired of getting bopped and plays “dead” so that the kids can declare victory and return to their castle and go to bed. But lately we’ve been playing video games together that play out in similar ways. (Lego Star Wars and Little Big Planet are big hits in our house currently.)

In the end, it’s just a different sort of fantasy. And they need all of them to become well-functioning adults. As Judge Richard Posner argued in his tour-de-force opinion in the 2000 case of American Amusement Machine Association v. Kendrick:

“Self-defense, protection of others, dread of the ‘undead,’ fighting against overwhelming odds—these are all age-old themes of literature, and ones particularly appealing to the young.” … “To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.” … “People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.”

Exactly. Why can’t others see this?

Incidentally, I should mention that I just bought my son his first set of boxing gloves and a punching bag for a Christmas present. I’m going to let him beat up the bag a little to give my belly and head a rest!

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years trying to debunk various myths about online child safety or at least put those risks into perspective. Too often, press reports and public policy initiatives are being driven by myths, irrational fears, or unjustified “moral panics.”  Luckily, the New York Times reports that there’s another study out this week that helps us see things in a more level-headed light. This new MacArthur Foundation report is entitled Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. This white paper is a summary of three years of research on kids’ informal learning with digital media. The survey incorporates the insights from 800 youth and young adults and over 5000 hours of online observations. The information will eventually be contained in a book from MIT Press (“Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media.”)

From the summary of the study on the MacArthur website:

“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time online – that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”

Importantly, regarding the concerns many parents and policymakers have about online predation, Ms. Ito told the New York Times that, “Those concerns about predators and stranger danger have been overblown.” “There’s been some confusion about what kids are actually doing online. Mostly, they’re socializing with their friends, people they’ve met at school or camp or sports.”

In the report, according to the summary, the researchers “identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on “hanging out” with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.” The specific findings of the study are as follows:

• There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.
  • Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.
  • Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.
• Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.
  • Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.
  • The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.
• Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.
  • The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.
  • Young people respect each other’s authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.
• Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.
  • Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.
  • Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.
  • “Geeked-out” learning opportunities are abundant – subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

These findings are consistent with the much of the existing research already out there about online youth behavior and Internet interactions. As I have mentioned here before, over the past year, I have been serving on the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), which was formed following a January 2008 agreement between social networking website operator MySpace.com and 49 state Attorneys General. As part their “Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety,” MySpace promised the AGs it would expand online safety tools, improve education efforts, and expand its cooperation with law enforcement. Importantly, they also agreed to create the ISTTF to study online safety issues and technologies.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School was tapped to run the ISTTF, and the Task Force included a wide diversity of child safety groups, non-profit organization, and Internet companies. During a session the Task Force held in Washington, DC on April 30th, we heard from several of the nation’s top researchers in the field of online child safety. The presentations were quite enlightening and the videos of the sessions — as well as supporting materials — have all been posted on a special Berkman Center website. I just wanted to share all of those links with you here so that you have access to these wonderful materials. As you will see, they tell the same story the new MacArthur report does: Almost everything the press and policymakers have told us about online child actions and safety has been wrong.

Anyway, read (or watch) for yourself and decide. (P.S. When the final ISTTF report comes out later this year, it will include a massive compendium of all the relevant surveys and academic research done in this field. It will be the definitive treatment of the issue. An early draft is online here. I will post the final link here once the Task Force wraps up.)

April 30, 2008 – ISTTF Child Online Safety Expert Panel

• Teens OnlineStranger Contact and Cyberbullying: What research is telling us Amanda Lenhart, Pew Internet & American Life Project Presentation in .pdf video
• Youth & Law Enforcement Surveys Janis Wolak, Crimes against Children Research Center Presentation in .pdf video
• Social networking sites, unwanted sexual solicitation, Internet harassment, and cyberbullying Michele Ybarra, Internet Solutions for Kids, Inc. Presentation in .pdf video
• Panel Q&A video
• Further reading
  • 1 in 7 Youth: The Statistics about Online Sexual Solicitations
  • Online “Predators” and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment
  • Internet Safety Education for Teens: Getting It Right
  • Internet Prevention Messages: Targeting the Right Online Behaviors
  • Teens, Stranger Contact & Cyberbullying
  • How Risky Are Social Networking Sites?
  • Updated Trends in Child Maltreatment, 2006

My friend Larry Magid, one of America’s leading Internet safety experts, has an outstanding column over at the Yahoo Kids “Connected Parent” site entitled “Is the Internet as Dangerous as Drunk Driving?” In it, he discusses the surprising results of a recent survey of 1,000 moms of teenagers commissioned by McAfee and conducted by Harris Interactive which found that “about two-thirds of mothers of teens in the United States are just as, or more, concerned about their teenagers’ online safety, such as from threatening emails or solicitation by online sexual predators, as they are about drunk driving (62 per cent) and experimenting with drugs (65 per cent).”

Like Larry, I was a bit shocked that so many mothers would equate online safety with the dangers of drunk driving. After all, as Larry proves, the relative risks aren’t even close:

While moms have good reason to be concerned about how their teens use the Internet, online dangers pale compared to the risks of drunk driving. In 2007, 6,552 people were killed in auto accidents involving young drivers (16-20), according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). In 2006, nearly a fifth (18%) of the 7,643 15- to 20-year-old drivers involved in fatal traffic crashes had a blood had a blood alcohol concentration of .08 or higher. Perception of Internet danger has been heightened thanks to the TV show “To Catch a Predator” and inaccurate reports such as “one in five children have been sexually solicited by a predator.” That statistic is a misquote from a 2000 study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center. The data (which, based on a 2005 follow-up study was revised to one in seven) is based on a survey that asked teens if they had in the last year received an unwanted sexual solicitation. But many (possibly most) of those solicitations were from other teens, not from adult predators. What’s more most recipients didn’t view them as serious or threatening, “almost all youth handled the solicitations easily and effectively” and “extremely few youth (two out of 1500 interviewed) were actually sexually victimized by someone they met online,” reported the authors of the study. Other studies have shown that “the stereotype of the Internet child molester who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate” (Wolak, Finkelhor & Mitchell, 2004). In a survey of law enforcement investigators of Internet sex crimes, it was reported that only 5% of offenders pretended to be teens when trying to meet potential victims online.

Those of us who work on Internet policy issues need to do a better job of helping the press and public put online safety risks in proper perspective. Misguided Internet legislation is often premised upon irrational or conjectural fears. Unfortunately, a lot of average moms have been swayed by misperceptions, many of which have been driven by the press or public interest groups that favor more regulation of the Net.

This week, I have been up at Harvard University participating in another meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), of which I am a member. The ISTTF was organized earlier this year pursuant to an agreement between 49 state attorneys general (AGs) and social networking giant MySpace.com. A group of experts from academia, non-profit organizations, and industry were appointed to the Task Force, which is charged with evaluating the market for online child safety tools and methods and issuing a report on the matter to the AGs at the end of this year.  ISTTF members have been meeting privately and publicly in both Cambridge, MA and Washington, D.C. The Task Force has been very ably chaired by John Palfrey, co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Although the ISTTF is looking at a wide variety of tools and methods associated with online child protection (ex: filters, monitoring tools, educational campaigns, etc.), many of the AGs who crafted the agreement with MySpace that led to the Task Force’s formation have made it clear that they are most interested in having the ISTTF evaluate age verification / online verification technologies.  In fact, at the start of this week’s session at Harvard Law School, AGs Martha Coakely of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut both spoke and made it abundantly clear they expect the Task Force to develop age and identify-verification tools for social networking sites (SNS). AG Blumenthal said we need to deal with “the dangers of anonymity” and repeated his standard line about online age verification: “If we can put a man on the moon, we can make the Internet safe.”  [Of course, putting a man on the moon took hundreds of billions of dollars and a decade to accomplish, but never mind that fact! Moreover, one could also argue that if we can put a man on the moon we can cure hunger, AIDS, and the common cold, but some things are obviously easier said than done. Finally, putting a man on the moon didn’t require all Americans or their kids to give up their anonymity or privacy rights in order to accomplish the feat!]

On many occasions here before, I have outlined various questions and reservations about proposals to mandate online age verification.  Last year, I also published a lengthy white paper on the issue and hosted a lively debate on Capitol Hill [transcript here] about this.  I also have discussed age verification in my book on parental controls and online child safety. [Braden Cox also talked about his experiences up at Harvard this week here, and CNet’s Chris Soghoian had a brutal assessment of this week’s proposals on his “Surveillance State” blog.]

In this essay, I will discuss the new fault lines in the debate over online age verification and outline where I think we are heading next on this front.  I will argue:

• There is now widespread understanding that it is extraordinarily difficult to verify the ages and identities of minors online using the methods we typically use to verify adults. Because of this, age verification proponents are increasingly proposing two alternative models of verifying kids before they go online or visit SNS…
• First, for those who continue to believe that we must do whatever we can to verify kids themselves, schools and school records are increasingly being viewed as the primary mechanism to facilitate that. This raises two serious questions: Do we want schools to serve as DMVs for our children? And, do we want more school records or information about our kids being accessed or put online?
• Second, for those who are uncomfortable with the idea of verifying kids or using schools, or school records, to accomplish that task, parental permission-based forms of authentication are becoming the preferred regulatory approach. Under this scheme, which might build upon the regulatory model found in the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), parents or guardians would be verified somehow and then would vouch for their children before they were allowed on a SNS, however defined.  But how do we establish a clear link between parents and kids?  And will parents be willing to surrender a great deal more information (about themselves and their kids) before their kids can go online? And, is it sensible to use a law that was meant to protect the privacy and personal information of children to potentially gather a great deal more information about them, and their parents?
• It remains very unclear how either of those two verification methods would make children safer online. Indeed, that could actually make kids less safe by compromising their personal information and creating a false sense of security online for them and their parents.
• It is highly unlikely the Internet Safety Technical Task Force will be able to reach consensus on this complicated, controversial issue. A small camp will likely flock to the sort of proposals mentioned above. Another, larger camp (including me) will flock to education-based approaches to child safety as well increased reliance on other parental empowerment tools and strategies, industry self-regulatory efforts, social norms, and better intervention strategies for troubled youth. But the age verification debate will go on and, as was the case over the past two years, the legal battleground will be state capitals across America, with AGs likely pushing for age verification mandates regardless of what the Task Force concludes.

Continue reading if you are interested in the details.

How We Could Verify Kids, and Why We Should Not Do It

Let’s assume that we want to achieve AG Blumenthal’s “man-on-the-moon” dream of verifying all kids before they go online. How would we do it?  There are really only two solutions: (1) full-blown national ID cards for kids, or (2) tapping school records about kids to somehow age-verify kids (sort of a “National ID card-Lite” scheme).

National ID Cards for Kids

The first scheme is fairly straightforward, but incredibly frightening to those of us who care about civil liberties. Basically, government could demand that all minors be issued the equivalent of a domestic passport or a national ID card. After all, minors aged 14 to 17 are already required to obtain a passport before they travel overseas. Minors under 14 must have both parents or legal guardians appear together to vouch for the child when applying for a passport. Conceivably, government could simply extend this model to incorporate a domestic identification requirement. Once the youngster had been issued such a domestic passport, it could be requested by others — including social networking sites — as proof of age. Sites could cross-reference a government national ID database to verify identity.

Clearly, however, imposing such a solution domestically would raise serious privacy concerns because it would require the collection, retention and processing of sensitive information about children.  Adults are not required to carry such a domestic passport or national ID card, so why should children? Indeed, all the same privacy concerns related to national ID cards for adults would be amplified with children because, as a society, we generally take extra precautions to protect the privacy of minors and their personal information. And a national ID card for kids would need to include a great deal of information about themselves to allow the card to be used by third parties online as an age-verifying tool. Government would need to issue an age-verified identity, user name, and password to every child.

Particularly concerning is the fact that a national ID card for children would require the creation of more government databases and bureaucracy. The potential for “mission creep” then enters the picture in that more tracking of children by government (and others) becomes possible. What other uses might there be for such information? We don’t know, and we probably don’t want to find out.

The costs of setting up and enforcing such a system would be substantial and must also be considered. Although the cost of digital storage continues to fall, we’re talking about potentially massive digital databases here. But the more important cost factor is the human time and effort that would go into  collecting, processing, and organizing such records and databases.

For those reasons, a government-issued ID card or age verification scheme for kids is a nonstarter. It would raise grave privacy concerns, induce public paranoia, probably encourage a great deal of evasion, and require significant government expenditure to enforce. Moreover, a national ID card would do little to prevent youngsters from visiting offshore sites.

Using the Schools to Help Verify Kids

So, let’s work from the assumption that National ID cards for kids is not going to fly as an online identity authentication solution.  The only other realistic scheme would involve getting the schools involved in the process.  Why?  Because to paraphrase Willy Sutton: “That’s where the data is.”  Schools have more information about our children than probably every other institution or organization combined.  They have very detailed records about kids, their ages and much more, which makes schools a logical candidate for participation in a possible age verification system for minors.  But involving schools in any age verification scheme would raise serious privacy concerns and administrative problems.

Depending on how the scheme worked, the administrative burdens imposed on schools could be significant. Someone at each school would have to be in charge of answering phones calls and e-mails from potentially hundreds of website operators looking to age-verify minors. Who will be liable if things go wrong? The school? The school district? An employee in the school’s administrative department who accidentally releases thousands of digital records? And will schools receive the additional funding needed to administer whatever scheme is mandated?

Moreover, if schools are required to create more accessible databases containing personal information about minors, who else besides social networking websites would be given access? Data breaches would become a real concern for both students and schools alike. Such a scheme could run up against federal or state laws. For example, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 makes it illegal to release school records without written permission from parents. Both parents and government officials have long demanded that access to school records be tightly guarded because, as a society, we take the privacy of our children very seriously.

Thus, serious questions remain about the wisdom and practicality of roping the schools into the age verification process. Most schools and school districts are already over-burdened with federal and state mandates and probably wouldn’t like the sound of additional mandates of this variety.  But what if a technology vendor could serve as the middleman and facilitate the easy transfer of some basic data about kids from the school system in an effort to provide digital credentials? That’s probably where we are heading.  Even the most vociferous advocates of age verification for minors must realize how absolutely radioactive this issue could become since school records about our kids are in play here.  Identity theft concerns are already running at an all-time high in our country and the thought of being required to surrender more info about our kids in this environment is not going to go over well with many parents.

But, again, what if we could keep to a minimum the amount of data being transferred about the child to the vendor or the SNS?  Perhaps at the beginning of each school year when a minor is registering they could be given a “secure” digital token or ID number that only associated a grade year (i.e., “sophomore”) with their name, and little or no additional info was included in that token in order to minimize the threat of identity theft or privacy violations.  Of course, the fewer pieces of information contained in that token or credential, the less likely it will be a credible verification tool, or the more likely it is it will be easy to forge or defeat (especially by kids themselves).

Regardless, whether we like it or not — and I do not like it one bit — schools are now at the center of the online age verification debate. It will be very interesting to hear what the educational community itself has to say about this development going forward.  Incidentally, no one from the educational community was present at Harvard this week as these proposals were flying.  Something tells me that school administrators and educational officials aren’t going to look too kindly on proposals that would turn them into the equivalent of a DMV for kids.

How about Parental Permission Slips for Online Verification?

Another potential way to go about online verification is to avoid verifying the kids directly and instead just verify parents (or guardians) and then get them to vouch for their children.  Some age verification advocates are now calling for such parental consent-based forms of child verification.  Specifically, they are now attempting to drive regulation through the prism of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998.

By way of background, COPPA required websites that marketed to children under the age of 13 to get “verifiable parental consent” before allowing children access to their sites. Generally speaking, the goal was to make sure that such websites were not collecting personal information about children without getting parental permission. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is responsible for enforcing COPPA, adopted a sliding scale approach to obtaining parental consent. The sliding scale approach allows website operators to use a mix of the methods to comply with the law, including print-and-fax forms, follow-up phone calls and e-mails, and credit card authorizations. The FTC also authorized four “safe harbor” programs operated by private companies that help website operators comply with COPPA.

In a February 2007 report to Congress about the status of the COPPA and its enforcement, the FTC said that no changes to COPPA were necessary at this time because it had “been effective in helping to protect the privacy and safety of young children online.” In discussing the effectiveness of the parental consent methods, however, the agency also said that “none of these mechanisms is foolproof” and that “age verification technologies have not kept pace with other developments, and are not currently available as a substitute for other screening mechanisms.” This seems to imply that the FTC does not regard COPPA’s parental consent methods as the equivalent of perfect age verification.

Nonetheless, what should be evident here is that COPPA’s parental consent framework could serve as a vehicle for pushing through greater regulation of all social networking sites, not just those sites geared toward kids under 13.   Indeed, we have already seen that proposed at the state level.  For example, in the debate that took place over age verification in the North Carolina statehouse last summer, a parental permission-based verification proposal supported by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper was billed as a way to strengthen and expand the COPPA framework.  (Never mind the fact that COPPA is a federal statute, or that the state of North Carolina is likely barred from regulating Internet speech and commerce thanks to the First Amendment and the Commerce Clause of the Constitution!)

In other words, future age verification mandates could arrive in the form of COPPA amendments, or at least cite COPPA’s regulatory framework as precedent.  Specifically, the proposal would be to: (a) extend COPPA’s coverage to kids up to the age of 18 and then (b) broaden the range of SNS sites that are covered by its parental consent requirements.

There are many problems associated with such a proposal, and I will get to some of them in a moment. But here’s the more interesting question that few have asked: Is COPPA really working?  It is very much unclear to me that COPPA actually works as billed, but to the extent it does, it is likely because of the very limited scale and nature of the operations it covers.  As I have said in my past writing on the issue, there is a direct relationship between the size of a site and the likelihood of success in attempting to verify its users / members. Of course, that is hardly surprising.  But let’s get a little more concrete about why that is important.  Here are the two reasons that I believe the COPPA / parental consent regime has generally worked so far, or at least hasn’t failed miserably:

(1) Many smaller sites charge a fee for admission; and

(2) The functionality of those sites is usually tightly limited. They are closed, walled gardens.

Regarding the first point: Obviously, the more a site charges for access, the more likely it is that the parent / guardian pays attention to what their kid is doing.  Of course, that doesn’t mean a bad guy couldn’t still get into those “verified” environments under false pretenses.  And there’s the problem of minors with access to credit cards.  Moreover, even assuming credit cards worked as an age verification method, there is the more practical question of whether lawmakers have the guts to mandate that every social networking site in the land start charging admission for access.  Since almost all SNSs are free-of-charge today, that is not going to be a very popular mandate!

Nonetheless, for very small, niche-oriented social networking sites geared toward younger kids, credit cards and fees are part of the reason people think COPPA has “worked.”  In essence, it acts as a bit of a roadblock or hassle thrown in the way of access, and that gets parents thinking and talking to the kids about those sites. That is the argument put forward by Denise Tayloe of Privo, one of the four FTC-approved COPPA safe harbor providers.   Ironically, Tayloe has noted that one of the problems associated with the current COPPA regime is that “Children quickly learned to lie about their age in order to gain access to the interactive features on their favorite sites. As a result,” she notes, “databases have become tainted with inaccurate information and chaos seems to be king where COPPA is concerned,” she says.

Despite these problems, Tayloe argues that COPPA serves an important role.  Even though “there is no perfect solution” and it is not possible to completely “stop a child from lying and putting themselves at risk,” Tayloe believes that COPPA “provides a platform to educate parents and kids about privacy.”  Of course, providing a platform to educate parents and kids about online privacy or safety is very important, but it is not necessarily synonymous with strict age verification.  And we don’t really have any idea what level of parent-child interaction COPPA incentivizes.  More importantly, we don’t really have any good data regarding the accuracy of claims made pursuant to COPPA’s requirements regarding the relationship between parents and the kids seeking access to the site.  How many people (kids or adults) were able to gain access under false pretenses? We don’t know.

Nonetheless, the operating assumption here is that by creating an added economic hurdle or barrier to entry (in the form of the hassle of filling out paperwork or forms), COPPA gets some parents (perhaps most?) to put more thought into what their kids are doing online, and that somehow improves online safety in larger scheme of things.  The problem is that that does not necessarily mean that their kids are operating in perfectly “secure” or “verified” environments.  The danger is that – to the extent some “bad guys” are getting on those sites under false pretenses – kids and parents may fall prey to a false sense of security after they are told the site is COPPA-verified.  Of course, COPPA wasn’t put on the books to keep “bad guys” away from kids online; it was about keeping site operators from collecting personal information about kids.

The second reason COPPA has “worked” to a limited degree is that SNS sites geared toward younger kids tightly limit functionality.  In essence, the site administrators “cripple” the sort of functionality we find in SNS sites geared toward older kids.  That fact alone makes these sites far less likely to be subject to fraudulent entry or dangerous interactions.   If I am an older teen or a pervert, why would I ever want to gain access to a site that has nothing more than drop-down menus and a few buttons to click on when interacting with others?  Thus, the primary reason that kids are likely safer in those environments has almost nothing to do with COPPA’s parental consent mechanisms and almost everything to do with the fact that most of the sites it covers are tightly controlled walled gardens with very limited functionality.

With these facts in mind, let’s gets back to the ultimate question: What would happen if we tried to apply COPPA to all social networking sites for kids of all ages? The threshold question that would need to be answered remains the same as it does today: How do we verify the parent-child relationship when someone asserts they are the parent or guardian?  That’s a very thorny question.  But let me just list out the many other questions that everyone is overlooking here:

(1) What sort of mechanisms will need to be put in place to guarantee that the parent or guardian is who they claim to be (for both initial enrollment and subsequent visit authentication)?  Sign-and-fax forms can be easily forged, so credit cards (and perhaps mandatory user fees) will likely become the default solution. A third method, follow-up phone calls, just doesn’t seem practical.  But might lawmakers demand a mix of all of the above?

(2) Regardless, how burdensome will those mandates be for parents / guardians?

(3) And how burdensome will those mandates be for SNS site operators? What kind of compliance costs / legal penalties are we talking about?

(4) Will the barriers to site enrollment become economic in character such that it requires previously free social networking sites to charge admission?

(5) If so, could that be a disadvantage to low-income families / youth?

(6) If compliance costs go through the roof for SNS sites, will this be a recipe for massive industry consolidation in order to comply with the mandates?

(7) Who is collecting the massive databases of information created by such a mandate for all SNS? Who has access to that data? What might government use it for?

(8) Will this new regime be applicable to offshore sites? And will kids flock to offshore sites as a result of such mandates on domestic sites? If some do, how will we stop them?

And so on.  Bottom line: The future of age verification battles will likely be increasingly tied up with COPPA and the question of how well parental permission-based forms of authentication might work. It is unlikely, however, that such a framework could be easily applied on “Internet scale.”  There is a world of difference between something like Disney’s “Club Penguin” and MySpace, Xanga or Bebo.  And with social networking capabilities being integrated into every site and service these days — from CNN.com to Microsoft’s Xbox Live service — one wonders how that will magnify the compliance costs and hassles for all involved.  Are parents really going to be expected to verify themselves and then their kids for every “social networking site” their kids want to visit?  That seems unnecessary, unworkable, and potentially counter-productive.

Finally, the irony of a proposal to expand COPPA in this fashion is that lawmakers would be using a law that was meant to protect the privacy and personal information of children to potentially gather a great deal more information about them, and their parents!  It’s important we not overlook the privacy implications of any effort to expand COPPA to do something it was not originally intended to cover.

Conclusion

It will likely be very difficult for the Technical Task Force to reach consensus on these controversial and complicated issues.  There are many challenging technical, legal, and even philosophical issue in play here.  The problem is that this Task Force is charged with looking at technical solutions and yet most child safety advocates and academics on the Task Force are of the mind that technical solutions are only one part — and probably the smallest part — of the sort of “layered solution” to online child safety that I describe in my book on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection.” As I argue in that book:

“the best answer to the problem of unwanted media exposure or contact with others is for parents to rely on a mix of technological controls, informal household media rules, and, most importantly, education and media literacy efforts.”

In sum, we need to get serious about talking to our kids about online safety and proper online behavior. Education is the key, and government has a major role to play in that regard in the classroom and through awareness-building efforts. And technical tools that empower parents to better monitor and guide their child’s online experiences can help too. Social networking sites and other online service providers can offer more of those tools and also take additional steps to improve the safety of their sites and encourage a dialog about appropriate and inappropriate online behavior. Again, it’s a multi-layered effort with education and communication at the core of the plan.

It’s not like I am saying anything new here. Indeed, that layered approach was the recommended approach of two previous online safety blue ribbon task force efforts: The 2000 COPA Commission and the 2002 National Academy of Sciences “Thornburgh Commission.” And every major book about online child safety published over the last 5 years has come to the same conclusion.

But that is not likely going to be enough for state attorneys general. There is no other way for me to state this than to just come right out and say it: The AGs are looking for a silver-bullet technical solution to a complex problem they do not fully understand.  And age verification schemes are the technical bullet du jour.

Alas, for all the reasons I have stated here and elsewhere, age verification schemes are likely to fail miserably.  Even if age verification systems worked as billed, it is unlikely that kids would really be any better off.  All the academic research in this field points to a single, inescapable conclusion: The primary danger to kids online is not adult predators, it is other kids.  In particular, it is peer-on-peer harassment and cyber-bullying.   As parents and a society, we have to do more — a lot more — to address that problem.

Age verification schemes, however, aren’t going to help us solve that problem.  Worse yet, by creating the illusion of safety, it could compromise our children’s privacy in the process and create a false sense of security when kids or their parents come to believe they are operating in “trusted” online environments.  For the sake of our children, it is essential we not fall prey to such a fatal conceit.

To: Hon. David Patterson, Governor, State of New York From: Adam Thierer, life-long gamer and Senior Fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation Date: July 17, 2008 Re: That video game bill (A. 11717/ S. 6401) you have been asked to sign

Dear Gov. Patterson:

I write today to ask a few questions about a measure that is currently sitting on your desk awaiting your signature. The measure (A. 11717/ S. 6401), which recently passed through the New York legislature, proposes a new regulatory regime for video games. It would include greater state-based oversight of video game labels and console controls as well as an advisory board to monitor the industry.

As a life-long gamer—and now the parent of two young gamers—this is a subject I care deeply about. I also come at this topic from an academic perspective as someone who analyzes the intersection of child safety concerns and free speech issues surrounding various types of media and communications technologies. I am the author of a frequently-updated book, Parental Controls & Online Child Safety: A Survey of Tools & Methods, which provides a comprehensive look at the many tools and methods on the market today that can help parents deal with concerns about objectionable media content.

But mostly I write you today from the perspective of someone who just enjoys games. Actually, let me clarify that: I am utterly infatuated with video games. Gaming has been a life-long passion of mine and something I have enjoyed with friends and family since I owned my very first PONG and Atari 2600 systems in the 1970s. Since then, I have owned virtually every major video game console sold in the United States. Even today, as I approach 40 years of age, I find myself sitting down many nights to enjoy games with my son and daughter on the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 consoles that we have in our home.

Like millions of other Americans, gaming is now fully integrated into the fabric of my life and the lives of my children. It has become one of the most enjoyable media experiences for my generation and the generation of kids that we are raising. And, although I am certain that the New York legislature had the best of intentions in mind when passing this bill, I believe I speak for a great number of those other American gamers when I say that the measure on your desk is somewhat of an insult to our intelligence. Let me explain by raising a few questions about this bill, which I will argue is unnecessary, unworkable, and unconstitutional: •
Why does this bill impose mandatory labeling requirements when all video games sold at retail are already clearly rated and labeled? The bill demands that every game bear labels describing its content, but such a labeling scheme already exists. As any parent or game buyer can tell you, every video game container has detailed content descriptors on the cover that clearly tell you what you can expect to see or hear in the game. These ratings and labels, which are created and enforced by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), are highly specialized. The ESRB applies seven different rating symbols and over 30 different content descriptors to every game it rates. Since the New York bill is particularly concerned about the labeling of violent content, you should be aware that the ESRB has over a dozen descriptors just for violent forms of content. That makes it perfectly clear to the parent if the game contains merely “mild violence” or “cartoon violence” or, at the other extreme, “intense violence” or “sexual violence.”

Does the New York legislature imagine that parents are unaware of these ratings or labels? Frankly, I don’t see how anyone could miss them. Again, they are on every game box and can be found online via the ESRB’s website or other gaming sites and media watchdog sites. And survey data shows that parents are aware of these labels. Surveys by Peter D. Hart Research Associates reveal that 89% of American parents of children who play video games are aware of the ESRB ratings and that 85% consult the ratings regularly when buying games for their families. And those numbers have risen every year for the past decade. The Federal Trade Commission has also praised the industry for those ratings and descriptors and for the industry’s efforts to make the public more aware of them.

In light of these facts, why does the New York legislature believe any additional labeling requirements are necessary?

•
Why does this bill require mandatory parental controls when every gaming console already includes them? The bill also requires that every new video game console be equipped with technology that can allow parents to block access to certain video game content. Well, Governor, I have good news to report… those tools already exist! Every new console (Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PS3, and Nintendo Wii) recognizes the ESRB’s digitally embedded ratings in games and offers blocking tools that allow parents to prevent games rated above a certain designation from being played on the system. These tools are quite sophisticated, and parents can even employ additional controls to block online purchases and interactive chat while their kids are gaming.

Again, does the New York legislature imagine that parents are unaware of these controls? That’s equally hard to fathom in light of how easy it is to find and set up these controls. Moreover, the industry has spent a great deal of time and money promoting these controls and making the public aware of them.

•
Isn’t the New York legislature aware of the fact that parents spend good money on consoles and games? In my book on Parental Controls & Online Child Safety, I note that the ultimate parental control tool is the “power of the purse” that parents can exercise when their kids come to them asking for money for new media titles or technologies. Although this isn’t a fact that the video game likes to advertise about itself, one of the reasons that its ratings and parental controls have been so much more effective than the systems that preceded them is because the price tag is so much higher than other media! New consoles cost hundreds of dollars, and most new game titles retail for $40 to $60.

Few parents would blindly hand their children that sort of money and leave their kids free to purchase whatever they desire. Thus, when kids ask for gaming consoles or game titles that cost that much, it creates a heightened sense of interest or concern by parents about what it is that their child is consuming. Again, in light of this fact, why does the New York legislature feel it must act in loco parentis?

•
Why an “advisory council” just for video games? The bill also calls for a 16-member “Advisory Council on Interactive Media and Youth Violence” that would study whether there is a relationship between gaming and youth violence. It’s tough to be against anyone “studying” anything, but one wonders if the body would become a politicized mess with endless in-fighting about a topic that has already been exhaustively researched and debated in other venues. Moreover, if we are simply hoping for still more “study” of this issue, let’s not forget that some of the nation’s finest universities reside in the State of New York! Why not just let one of them convene events or task forces to study this issue?

More importantly, why is it that video games are being singled-out for oversight by a state-run commission when other media providers have no similar overseers? Why not an advisory council for books, for example? After all, they can be checked out of any library free-of-charge, and there are plenty of titles in most libraries that include violent themes.

Finally, what sort of authority does this advisory council possess? Will it become a taxpayer-supported platform for anti-gaming activism that is masqueraded as social science? Will it seek to compel game developers to self-censor content that many in the gaming public demand? Will the focus and powers of this advisory entity grow over time? What is to prevent that from happening?

•
Isn’t the New York legislature aware that federal oversight already takes place? For over a decade, the Federal Trade Commission has been monitoring the video game industry’s practices. The FTC has also issued a reoccurring report, Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children, which surveys the marketing and advertising practices of major media sectors. As mentioned, the video game industry has been praised by the FTC for its improved efforts to curb underage access to objectionable materials. Why, then, is state-level regulation necessary? And will New York’s effort spawn additional state-based “oversight” efforts leading to a patchwork of conflicting state standards or expectations about game content or game industry behavior?

•
Do we really need another constitutional catfight? This measure will almost certainly be litigated. A dozen federal courts have ruled that video game content represents constitutionally protected speech and that efforts to regulate that speech will be subjected to strict scrutiny. The concerns I have raised above each present an issue or angle that could be challenged in court. So, get ready for another lengthy, unnecessary legal battle. The state will likely lose and then also be on the hook for the industry’s attorney’s fees. Which begs a final question…

•
Aren’t there better ways to spend the money? Every dollar spent by both industry and government litigating these issues is a dollar that could have been spent on something else. Similarly, every dollar spent by the advisory council is a dollar that could have been spent elsewhere. Here’s an idea: Instead of wasting the money on litigation and advisory councils that will accomplish nothing, how about a commitment by both industry and government to redouble their efforts to make consumers more aware of the excellent parental controls and labeling system already at their disposal?

In recent years, the game industry has been partnering with federal and state lawmakers to run public service announcements of that variety. And the industry has also stepped up the production and dissemination of promotional materials to build awareness of parental control tools. The more of that the better. That is the constructive, constitutional solution. Education—not regulation—is the path forward.

Gov. Patterson, I do hope you will take these facts under consideration as you sit down to contemplate signing this measure. Countless gamers, and even gaming parents, are growing tired of the seemingly endless witch hunt surrounding video games. The moral panic and rush to regulate on this front is all too reminiscent of past battles over comic books, rock-and-roll music, cinema, and so on. If we learned anything from those episodes it is this: Moral panics and regulatory responses are never the best way to respond to concerns about objectionable content or child safety.

Instead, we must be willing to talk to our kids in an open, understanding and loving fashion about the realities of this world, including the distasteful bits. And, to the extent curbs on underage consumption of potentially objectionable media are necessary, that process should be driven by voluntary, not compulsory, efforts. That includes industry self-regulation, voluntary content labeling efforts, a variety of parental control tools, and education and awareness-building initiatives. Most importantly, we should trust parents to do the job of rearing their children and not expect the State of New York to serve as our national nanny.

A few days ago, I posted an essay about the recent history of “moral panics,” or “technopanics,” as Alice Marwick refers to them in her brilliant new article about the recent panic over MySpace and social networking sites in general.

I got thinking about technopanics again today after reading the Washington Post’s front-page article, “When the Phone Goes With You, Everyone Else Can Tag Along.” In the piece, Post staff writer Ellen Nakashima discusses the rise of mobile geo-location technologies and services, which are becoming more prevalent as cell phones grow more sophisticated. These services are often referred to as “LBS,” which stands for “location-based services.”

Many of phones and service plans offered today include LBS technologies, which are very useful for parents like me who might want to monitor the movement of their children. Those same geo-location technologies can be used for other LBS purposes. Geo-location technologies are now being married to social networking utilities to create an entirely new service and industry: “social mapping.” Social mapping allows subscribers to find their friends on a digital map and then instantly network with them. Companies such as Loopt and Helio have already rolled out commercial social mapping services. Loopt has also partnered with major carriers to roll out its service nationwide, including the new iPhone 3G. It is likely that many other rivals will join these firms in coming months and years.

These new LBS services present exciting opportunities for users to network with friends and family, and it also open up a new world of commercial / advertising opportunities. Think of how stores could offer instantaneous coupons as you walk by their stores, for example. And very soon, you can imagine a world were many of our traditional social networking sites and services are linked into LBS tools in a seamless fashion. But as today’s Washington Post article notes, mobile geo-location and social mapping is also raising some privacy concerns:

what many users may not realize is that by sharing this information, they are creating often permanent records that can tell not only wireless providers, but also social networking sites, other users, and potentially law enforcement and civil attorneys every place they are and have been, as long as their phone and tracking device are on.

My friend Jim Dempsey of Center for Democracy & Technology was also quoted in the WP story raising additional concerns:

“How easy is it for the user to turn the location function on and off, and how easy it is for the user to delete past location information?” he said. “What are the companies collecting? Who are they sharing it with? How long do they store it? And what control does the consumer have over the information? These are the fundamental questions.” The wireless industry, through CTIA The Wireless Association, has issued guidelines for location-based services that stress consumer notice and consent and data security. But, Dempsey said, self-regulation is only part of the solution. What is needed, he said, is baseline federal legislation covering all firms that collect personal electronic data.

Moreover, when child safety advocates become more aware of this technology, you can imagine some of the other types of bogeyman scenarios that some people will conjure up: stalkers, jealous boyfriends, predators, etc, etc. So, I don’t think I’m going out on too much of limb here when I predict that mobile geo-location and social mapping will become America’s next great technopanic.

But before the hysteria begins, let’s step back and try to take a level-headed look at this issue and understand why we likely don’t have as much to fear as some privacy advocates or child safety advocates might suggest.

First, no one is forcing you to buy the phones equipped with LBS or purchase / download these technologies! These tools are luxuries that we are blessed to have at our disposal. These technologies are barely out of the cradle and we already have people hinting that preemptive regulation might be necessary based merely on hypothetical fears. That’s a recipe for destroying innovation.

Second, if you do choose to use LBS services, you will obviously first need to own a mobile phone. That means you pay money for that phone and a monthly plan. To the extent, therefore, this becomes a child safety issue, we have a very important tool for parents in place right up front: the power of the purse. As I have written in my book on parental controls and online child safety (p. 33), when media and communications technologies cost good money—and cell phones and mobile data plans certainly do!—parents have a very important additional check on the child’s media exposure or interactive communication capabilities. In the case of LBS, parents can first decide if they want to buy their kids phones with those technologies. If they do, then they will also be able to monitor and manage usage of such tools by keeping a close tab on the monthly statements. After all, the kids don’t pay the bills! Mom and Dad do.

Third, just as is the case with other child safety and privacy-based technopanics (social networking, Gmail, etc) the likely harm is being greatly over-stated and self-help tools and controls are being completely ignored. In this case, even if you do choose to purchase or use these services, you must take active steps to share your information to others.

Consider how Loopt works. Luckily, I have had the opportunity to play with the Loopt service and learn more about it. It’s very cool. But what really impresses me about Loopt is how the company has layered on safety and security controls. Loopt has put together a slick “privacy & security” website that summarizes the advice they give their customers. The best part about it is the “Be Safe Guide” that offers sensible guidance for safe and responsible use of this new technology. Loopt stresses that you should only open your network and share location-based information with a close circle of friends. And Loopt encourages users to confirm phone numbers with other users after they have open up their network to others. Because Loopt is a closed, private network, this process means it would be very difficult for privacy violations of any sort to occur. Here’s how they describe it:

To initiate a friend-request (or contact other users in any way), a subscriber must already know the other user’s mobile phone number. Even when a friendship request is successfully sent, the prospective friend must consent as well to a reciprocal “friendship connection” before any location sharing will occur. In other words, Loopt users only see where their established friends are, not strangers. Loopt is not an “open” social network and does not offer any browsing or searching of full profiles by non-friends.

And Loopt doesn’t retain all that “location history” over an extended period; just the most recent locational position such that users can connect when they want. So, in light of these many layers of protection, it is difficult for me to see how anyone can raise privacy concerns about how Loopt works.

Of course, it is true that there will be other rivals to Loopt in coming years, and they might have somewhat different policies or procedures. But remember three things:

First, the industry as a whole has been working together to develop a set of best practices on this front. As part of their effort to create and refine their “Wireless Content Guidelines,” the CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade association, has worked with its member companies to create privacy and safety guidelines for this emerging industry sector.

Second, the combination of that industry self-regulation and vigilant oversight / pressure from privacy groups and industry watchdogs will put enormous pressure on LBS providers to make sure they take steps to protect user privacy / safety. Consumers will come to expect a certain baseline level of privacy and security based on industry leaders like Loopt. Those who ignore the wishes of consumers will have hell to pay in the marketplace. And bad PR or grief from all those privacy and child safety advocates will be a real killer for LBS providers who don’t craft and enforce sensible policies.

Third, self-help tools exist that can help users (or parents) take additional steps to protect privacy. And consumer education / safety awareness efforts for younger users is increasing. I talk at length about those efforts in my book. While LBS providers certainly should take steps to help consumers protect privacy, personal responsibility has to play a role here too. We shouldn’t be rejecting every new innovation that hits the market just because there is some potential theoretical downside or some way that consumers could really screw up and do something stupid with it. People have to be responsible. And self-help tools are flourishing to help consumers protect their privacy in many different contexts. Just as those self-help tools represent a better, less-restrictive way of dealing with concerns about media content, so too do they offer a superior way of dealing with privacy concerns. (I often wonder why it is that some of the free speech groups out there defend the existence of such tools as the “less-restrictive means” of protecting children as compared to speech-stifling regulations, but when it comes to privacy regulation they never bother to mention those same self-help tools and methods. What gives? If the tools represent the better alternative to regulation in the free speech context then why not also in the privacy context?? It makes no sense to me, and in an upcoming PFF report, Berin Szoka and I are going to be discussing this issue at much greater length.)

Regardless, and in conclusion, before people go making a mountain out of a molehill and creating a technopanic around LBS and services like Loopt, I do hope they take a deep breath and consider these facts before they rush to regulate this exciting new technology and emerging industry sector.

Sean Garrett of the 463 Blog posted an excellent essay this week about the great moral panic of 1995, when Time magazine ran its famous cover “Cyberporn” story that included this unforgettable image. Unfortunately for Time, the article also included a great deal of erroneous information about online pornography that was pulled from a bogus study that found 83.5 percent of all online images were pornographic! The study was immediately debunked by scholars, but not before Congress rushed to judgment and passed the Communications Decency Act, which sought to ban all “indecent” online content. It was later struck down as unconstitutional, of course.

Anyway, Sean’s essay also brought to my attention this amazing new article by Alice Marwick, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University: “To Catch a Predator? The MySpace Moral Panic“. The topic of “moral panics” is something I have done quite a bit of work on, but Marwick’s paper is absolute must-reading on the topic, especially as it pertains to the recent moral panic of MySpace and social networking sites. She sets forth a theory of “techopanics” based on earlier research about moral panics. Here are some nuggets from her gem of paper:

This paper is about moral panics over contemporary technology, which I call “technopanics.” I use two examples, the cyberporn panic of 1996 and the contemporary panic over online predators and MySpace, to demonstrate the links between media coverage and content legislation. In both cases, Internet content legislation is directly linked to media–fueled moral panics that concern uses of technology deemed harmful to children. This is of particular interest right now as a new Internet content bill, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), is being debated in Congress. The technopanic over “online predators” is remarkably similar to the cyberporn panic; both are fueled by media coverage, both rely on the idea of harm to children as the justification for Internet content restriction, and both have resulted in carefully crafted legislation to circumvent First Amendment concerns. While both panics have their roots in legitimate concerns, I am not primarily concerned with the extent of the purported harms. However, my research demonstrates that the legislation proposed (or passed) to curb these problems is an extraordinary response; it is misguided and in many cases masks the underlying problem.

She goes on to articulate her “theory of technopanics”:

The technopanic is an attempt to contextualize the moral panic as a response to fear of modernity as represented by new technologies. […] Technopanics have the following characteristics. First, they focus on new media forms, which currently take the form of computer–mediated technologies. Second, technopanics generally pathologize young people’s use of this media, like hacking, file–sharing, or playing violent video games. Third, this cultural anxiety manifests itself in an attempt to modify or regulate young people’s behavior, either by controlling young people or the creators or producers of media products.

She builds upon the work of other “moral panic” scholars, such as Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, who “specif[ied] three particular models of moral panic causality: grassroots, elite–engineered, and interest group.”

The first model presumes that public, grassroots anxiety over social stresses (new technologies, social changes, and so on) is mapped to a particular group which serves as a scapegoat. In the second model, elites or incumbents, including government actors, the wealthy, or socially influential persons, strategically create a moral panic to divert attention from social problems, in essence creating a distraction. In the third model, moral crusades by special interest groups, such as activist groups, community organizers or non–profits give unintentional rise to moral panics.

Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what is going on in the debate over social networking with various media reports and regulatory-minded activists groups spinning horror stories about the “evils” that will befall our society if we let our children communicate online. As Marwick concludes:

the furor over MySpace is disproportionate to the amount of harm produced by the site. Indeed, the furor over online predators seems also to be disproportionate. Rather than focusing on nebulous “predators,” it seems that parents, teachers, and social workers should emphasize identifying and preventing abuse in specific, local community settings. This fits Goode and Ben–Yehuda’s model of moral panics.

And finally, in conclusion, she argues that:

The Deleting Online Predators Act is not a remedy for any of the concerns discussed in this paper and should not be considered a viable legal solution. First, while online predators do not represent an epidemic or socially significant problem, child pornography and child abuse are important social issues that require attention. However, they are not caused by minors using MySpace, and preventing children from using social networking sites will do nothing to end these problems. Second, the media should attend to their social responsibility when covering technology. While new discoveries almost always have both benefits and disadvantages, breathless negative coverage of technology frightens parents, prevents teenagers from learning responsible use, and fuels panics, resulting in misguided or unconstitutional legislation. Third, teenagers should be encouraged in their use of technology. Technological skills are advantageous both in terms of social capital and job prospects, and we should promote technological knowledge among young people rather than discouraging it. Finally, parents should work with their teens to teach responsible Internet surfing habits. Prohibiting teens from using MySpace will not prevent them from using the site, and instead will dissuade them from talking about any problems that occur. Taking a nuanced, informed, and gradual approach to the social integration of new technologies will do more to lessen harm and improve responsible user practice than a panicked, emotional response. DOPA, unfortunately, is an example of the latter.

Marwick’s essay is a masterpiece. I strongly encourage you to read every word of it. As I have noted in my book on parental controls and online child safety, we must break this endless cycle of moral panics and learn the importance of talking to our kids in an open, loving and understanding fashion about the realities of the world. And we must do so in a rational, level-headed fashion and be guided by the facts, not fanaticism.

The USA Today editorial board published a nasty piece today belittling MySpace.com’s recent efforts to implement more safeguards for its users. Despite the fact that MySpace made over 70 promises to the Attorneys General as part of the agreement–the entire agreement is summarized here–that’s still not good enough for the USA Today’s editorial board, which wants full-blown identity verification before anyone is allowed on a social networking site:

“Even in the absence of a perfect software solution, interim steps are possible. How about using databases of drivers’ licenses to cross-check ages? In more than 20 states, they are public records. The point is, more effective safeguards are needed now, …. MySpace [should be] moving faster to set up age and ID verifications, not just study them.”

Well, where do I begin? I get so frustrated when I see comments like this because it is abundantly clear to me that people don’t think things through when it comes to age verification. As I pointed out in my lengthy PFF report, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions,” age verification is extremely complicated, and it would be even more complicated in this case because public officials are demanding the age verification of minors as well as adults, which presents a wide array of special challenges and concerns.

What Age Verification Really Is: The Death of Online Anonymity We need to begin by understanding what age verification really is. By definition, mandatory age verification represents an effort to make online anonymity a crime. In simple terms, citizens would be forced to “show their papers” at the door of every website or else run the risk of being denied access–simply because they do not want to surrender their name or age.

Think about what that means. It’s easy to take the benefits of online anonymity for granted. There are millions of people who comment anonymously on blogs like this one every day, or write anonymous book or product reviews on Amazon.com or eBay, or who just chat with others about various topics under the cloak of anonymity. It is a wonderful thing.

Of course, anonymity has some downsides. The downside of people speaking their minds freely is that, well, people will speak their minds freely! And, yes, on occasion, that means some people will talk smack and just generally be jerks while disguising their identities because don’t want to stand by their comments or be accountable for them. But that’s the cost of free expression. If you want to live in a free society and encourage a vibrant exchange of views, there will be times when that means we must defend the right of people to say incredibly silly or even insulting things.

And God knows there are plenty of silly and insulting things being said on social networking sites every second of the day. But there are also countless moments of joy and wonder, when people come together and communicate with each other, or share culture with others in incredibly creative and social-beneficial ways. And, again, a great deal of that communication or culture-sharing is done in a completely anonymous fashion.

For example, as I have mentioned here before, I am fanatical about cars and home theater gadgets. I spend a lot of my free time hanging out at a small social networking site for fellow Lotus car lovers called Lotus Talk. And I also spend a fair amount of time at the amazing AVS Forum, which is the world’s biggest chat board for home theater and A/V stuff. On these sites, thousands of random strangers come into contact every day. We create profiles, we post pictures, we share stories, we talk about life and our passions for cars and A/V gadgets. This is very the essence of social networking. And, for the most past, we are all doing it anonymously. And it is happens everywhere online, every second of every day. Do we really want to make it all illegal?

Practical Considerations: The Complexities of Human Identification OK, so there might be some downsides to making anonymity illegal online. But some critics would say: “So what, we need to make people show their papers at the door of every website–at least for those social networking sites where kids hang out–to make sure kids are safe online.” Well, that’s easier said than done.

At least in theory, the problem that age verification is supposed to solve is to keep older people away from youngsters, at least in certain circumstances. Also, some proponents wish to use age verification to ban preteen access to social networking sites. To accomplish either of those objectives, we must be able to effectively verify everyone’s age by consulting reliable records about those looking to create an account on a social networking site. In other words, when Janie Smith comes to a social networking site for the first time, the site must be able to verify not only that she is Janie Smith, but that she really is as old as she claims to be. But, again, such verifying is easier said than done.

Consider first what is required to verify an adult’s identity. When government officials or even corporations seek to verify someone identify or age, they can rely on birth certificates, Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, military records, home mortgages, car loans, other credit records, or credit cards.

But even with all those pieces of information, challenges remain. Is the information publicly accessible or restricted by legal or other means? Are all the underlying pieces of information and documentation trustworthy, or have they been manipulated or misreported in some way? Has someone faked his or her identity? And so on. Thus, while the identity authentication systems–both public and private–have improved significantly in recent decades, they still face some inherent challenges and concerns about fraud.

The current concern about “identity theft” demonstrates the complexities and level of difficulty involved in stamping out this problem. Even U.S. passports, which are relatively robust identification documents that contain authentication data, are occasionally forged with success. “It is safe to assume that future age verification efforts will yield failures on par with other identification/authentication mechanisms,” says information security expert Jeff Schmidt, former CEO of Authis, Inc.: “When one considers how frequently college students successfully circumvent age verification requirements in person and with government issued documents, one can begin to grasp the challenges that lie ahead.”

Importantly, we’re talking just about adults here. When the focus of identity verification efforts shifts to minors, the endeavor becomes far more complicated. Minors don’t have home mortgages or car loans. They don’t have military records and most have never worked. Most don’t have driver’s licenses or credit cards either.

Of course, minors do have birth certificates, Social Security numbers, and school records, but both parents and government officials have long demanded that access to those records be tightly guarded. That’s for a very good reason: As a society, we take privacy seriously—especially the privacy of our children. Laws and regulations have been implemented that shield such records from public use, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 and various state statutes.

Also, to the extent that age verification of adults works for some websites–online dating services, for example–it is important to realize that in most of those cases the users want to be verified. In that context, identify authentication increases marketability of a user’s “profile,” or it allows him or her to participate more actively in an environment where trust is essential. This fact makes it far more likely that age verification will work because user compliance is driven by market forces, not regulation. That compliance will not be the case when users–especially kids–inherently resist the idea of being age-verified before they go onto certain websites. (We should also not forget that some kids will share their online credentials or passwords with friends.)

It is also important to realize that age verification and background checks are not synonymous. Information security expert John J. Cardillo, President and CEO of Sentinel, a leading authentication firm, argues that:

Most people are ignorant of what we do. They hear the words “check” or “verification” and they assume a full background check will be run on the individual. When this is sponsored by an AG, the chief law enforcement officer of their state, there’s a perception that the criminal background checks are inclusive in whatever they’re proposing. Age verification, on its own, doesn’t indicate whether or not a person is a convicted sex offender. Mandated age verification, as proposed, would allow the hundreds of thousands of offenders… who are over 18, unrestricted access to sites. Worse, it would allow these offenders the ability to vouch for children that might or might not exist. This is where it gets most dangerous. People might assume that “verified” users have undergone some type of vetting, and let their guard down just that little bit the offenders need to exploit. In the case of convicted sex offenders, age verification actually helps them by giving them an additional layer of legitimacy.

This points to the danger of creating a false sense of security online by mandating a solution that doesn’t address the real problem.

Finally, the special challenges raised by the nature of the Internet and online communication must be reiterated. Finding a dependable source of identity or age information and then reliably matching it to someone thousands of miles away on the Internet (perhaps in another jurisdiction, or even another country) is a daunting challenge—made even more difficult by the fact that a remote individual may be actively attempting to subvert the age verification process. Solving this problem necessitates authentication data that are appropriate for online interaction. In the real world, we perform in-person authentication with a photo or physical description; the online world requires a username/password combination, biometric authenticator, or physical security token. An arms-race scenario is obviously at work here, and because a perfect solution is impossible, we must guard against a false sense of security. Lastly, because technology is evolving at such a rapid pace in this area, there is a risk that legislative solutions will become obsolete very rapidly.

In light of those complications, how would government, social networking sites, or anyone else, go about age-verifying minors online?

Do We Really Want National ID Cards for Kids? In the extreme, government could demand that all minors be issued the equivalent of a domestic passport or a national ID card. After all, minors aged 14 to 17 are already required to obtain a passport before they travel overseas. Minors under 14 must have both parents or legal guardians appear together to vouch for the child when applying for a passport. Conceivably, government could simply extend this model to incorporate a domestic identification requirement. Once the youngster had been issued such a domestic passport, it could be requested by others—including social networking sites—as proof of age. Sites could cross-reference a government national ID database to verify identity.

Clearly, however, imposing such a solution domestically would raise serious privacy concerns because it would require the collection, retention and processing of sensitive information about children. Adults are not required to carry such a domestic passport or national ID card, so why should children? Indeed, all the same privacy concerns related to national ID cards for adults would be amplified with children because, as a society, we generally take extra precautions to protect the privacy of minors and their personal information. And a national ID card for kids would need to include a great deal of information about themselves to allow the card to be used by third parties online as an age-verifying tool. Government would need to issue an age-verified identity, user name, and password to every child.

Particularly concerning is the fact that a national ID card for children would require the creation of more government databases and bureaucracy. The potential for “mission creep” then enters the picture in that more tracking of children by government (and others) becomes possible. What other uses might there be for such information? We don’t know, and we probably don’t want to find out.

The costs of setting up and enforcing such a system would be substantial and must also be considered. Although the cost of digital storage continues to fall, we’re talking about potentially massive digital databases here. But the more important cost factor is the human time and effort that would go into to collecting, processing, and organizing such records and databases.

For those reasons, a government-issued ID card or age verification scheme for kids is a nonstarter. It would raise grave privacy concerns, induce public paranoia, probably encourage a great deal of evasion, and require significant government expenditure to enforce. Moreover, a national ID card would do little to prevent youngsters from visiting offshore sites.

Sources of Age Information Thus, if social networking sites are going to age-verify minors, they will likely need to devise or rely on some other, nongovernmental solution. The most commonly proposed solutions typically fall into the following groupings:

(1) Credit cards as approximate age proxies; (2) Driver’s licenses as approximate age proxies or as a source of date of birth; (3) Birth certificates as a source of actual date of birth; (4) Parents or guardians vouching for minors; (5) Schools vouching for minors; (6) Third parties vouching for minors; and, (7) Biological or biometric determination of age.

I won’t summarize all them here since I do so in my longer PFF report on the issue. But let me just point out the deficiencies of the two leading proposals: Credits cards and parents vouching for children.

(1) Credit Cards as Approximate Age Proxies: Credit cards are often viewed by policy makers as the silver bullet solution for age verification. Even though credit card companies typically do not wish their cards to be used as age verification tools, government has advocated their use in that way in the past. But they are not a silver bullet.

“Mere possession of a credit card is not a reliable assertion of identity or age,” argues Jeff Schmidt. Credit cards can be a rough proxy for age on the assumption that only adults over the age of 18 have credit cards, but that assumption is false. Many minors are given credit cards by their parents. Youngsters can borrow or steal credit cards from their parents or others. And Schmidt notes that newly created stored value cards, specifically marketed for use by children, “are in many cases indistinguishable from actual credit cards—both in physical appearance and in the back-end transaction processing systems.” Sentinel’s John Cardillo points out additional reasons why credit cards are not effective age verification tools:

When a card is used for verification purposes, an authorization on that card is run for $1.00 (or less), however a charge isn’t put through. The card typically isn’t reconciled against any database for name and/or age, nor is a signature checked. Because of the insignificant dollar amount, the only thing that’s checked for security purposes, in some instances, is zip code. Anyone who’s ever bought gasoline with a credit card knows this to be true. Our names and ages aren’t checked at the pump. Check your statement online next time you gas up. You’ll see an authorization for $1.00 and the actual charge a few days later. The same merchant banks handle the transactions online. In other words, in most cases, all that’s being verified is that the card account isn’t closed or stolen. Who’s using it is irrelevant.

Moreover, “many parents may feel uncomfortable giving their credit card number online at children’s Web sites where there is no [commercial] transaction involved,” notes a coalition of major commercial organizations, including the American Advertising Federation, American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, The Direct Marketing Association, Inc., and Magazine Publishers of America. In a June 2005 filing to the Federal Trade Commission, those organizations noted that “in light of current online scams, heightened concerns about online security, and the rise of such practices as phishing, parents may be reluctant to provide credit card numbers absent a transaction.” But that begs the question: If lawmakers require social networking sites to process a financial transaction to age-verify, is that fair? In particular, is it fair for low-income families? And what about those families that do not possess a credit card?

Finally, the law is not even settled about using credit cards for access to adult-oriented websites. The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was passed by Congress in 1998 in an effort to restrict minors’ access to adult-oriented websites. The measure provided an affirmative defense to prosecution if a website operator could show that it had made a good faith effort to restrict site access by requiring a credit card, adult personal identification number, or some other type of age-verifying certificate or technology. But the legislation was immediately challenged and has gone to the Supreme Court for review twice. And the law is still being debated in a lower court. Thus, almost 10 years after its initial passage, the legislation remains stuck in jurisprudential limbo after endless legal wrangling about its constitutionality.

Incidentally, COPA established an expert Commission on Online Child Protection to study methods for reducing access by minors to harmful material on the Internet. As part of its final report, the COPA commission said that credit card-based age verification would be completely inappropriate for instant messaging and chat, which were the precursors of social networking. The commission found: “This system’s limitations include the fact that some children have access to credit cards, and it is unclear how this system would apply to sites outside the U.S. It is not effective at blocking access to chat, newsgroups, or instant messaging.”

(2) Parents or Guardians Vouching for Minors: Legislation has been floated in a few states, such as North Carolina, that would make it illegal for a minor to maintain an account or webpage on a social networking site “without the permission of the minor’s parent or guardian and without providing such parent or guardian access to such profile web page.” Similar measures were recently introduced in North Carolina and Connecticut that would require social networking sites not only to obtain parental approval but also take steps to verify that they are the actual parents of the child.

This approach will appeal to many because it can be likened to a parent signing a “permission slip” for a child. Unfortunately, parental permission-based approaches are more complicated for online activities. Because websites are far away from the parents, how is the site operator going to ensure that the person vouching for the child’s age is really the parent or even an adult? Would the verifier mail or fax notarized documents? Those documents can be forged, of course. Mandatory follow-up phone calls would be cumbersome, costly, and potentially viewed as intrusive. And the use of credit cards to satisfy the permission requirement might raise some of the same problems already discussed above.

Despite these potential drawbacks, this was the general framework established by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998, which required websites that marketed to children under the age of 13 to get “verifiable parental consent” before allowing children access to their sites. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is responsible for enforcing COPPA, adopted a sliding scale approach to obtaining parental consent. The sliding scale approach allows website operators to use a mix of the methods mentioned above to comply with the law, including print-and-fax forms, follow-up phone calls and e-mails, and credit card authorizations. The FTC also authorized four “safe harbor” programs operated by private companies that help website operators comply with COPPA.

In a recent report to Congress, the FTC said that no changes to COPPA were necessary at this time because it had “been effective in helping to protect the privacy and safety of young children online.” In discussing the effectiveness of the parental consent methods, however, the agency also said that “none of these mechanisms is foolproof” and that “age verification technologies have not kept pace with other developments, and are not currently available as a substitute for other screening mechanisms.” This seems to imply that the FTC does not regard COPPA’s parental consent methods as the equivalent of perfect age verification.

And the marketplace experience with COPPA so far reflects that conclusion. One of the problems associated with the current COPPA regime is that “Children quickly learned to lie about their age in order to gain access to the interactive features on their favorite sites,” notes Denise G. Tayloe, CEO of Privo, Inc., one of the four FTC-approved safe harbor programs. “As a result, databases have become tainted with inaccurate information and chaos seems to be king where COPPA is concerned,” she says. Parry Aftab of Wired Safety confirms this, noting that: “Preteens quickly learned that if they say they are under thirteen they will be prohibited from using many sites. So they regularly lie about their age everywhere online.”

Despite these flaws, Tayloe argues that COPPA serves an important role. Even though “there is no perfect solution” and it is not possible to completely “stop a child from lying and putting themselves at risk,” Tayloe believes that the law “provides a platform to educate parents and kids about privacy.” Of course, providing a platform to educate parents and kids about online privacy or safety is very important, but it is not necessarily synonymous with strict age verification.

Nonetheless, these permission-based verification schemes might work reasonably well for smaller, closed online communities in which the kids and parents are willing to take the time (and expense) to undertake extensive authentication. For example, smaller social networking sites such as ZoeysRoom.com, Imbee.com, ClubPenguin.com, and Tweenland.com have extremely strict enlistment policies, primarily because they target or allow younger users. As Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal explains:

The under-16 sites pose few of the hazards linked to networking sites for older people. The activities range from chats and blogging to creating virtual pets or characters and acting out roles in virtual cities. For a child to register, the sites typically require a parent’s email permission, a parental signature on a permission form, or a parent’s credit card verification. Some limit young children’s interchanges to drop down menus of preapproved words and phrases. Most filter content for inappropriate material and employ live adult monitors who ensure that kids’ conversations don’t stray off course. Some limit chats or blog access to participants who are already preapproved and already known to a child’s family.

Ironically, one can probably safely assume that the kids using such services are not in the high-risk group discussed earlier. The parents who use such services are probably doing a fine job of mentoring their kids and don’t really need to resort to such restrictive solutions. Nonetheless, such highly restrictive “walled garden” approaches do provide parents with greater ease of mind. That’s not necessarily because of the strict enlistment policies so much as the extreme limitations on what kids can do on those sites or with whom they can communicate while online.

But regardless of how well the above-mentioned parental consent schemes work in practice for these smaller, more closed online communities–and some experts, like Cardillo, do question how well they actually work–such solutions lack scalability. Schemes that demand laborious and expensive enrollment requirements, or that greatly limit functionality and interactivity after users sign up, will almost certainly not work for larger social networking sites with a massive community of users. The administrative burdens would be significant for both site operators and parents alike. For example, Parry Aftab notes that COPPA has made it much more difficult for some smaller website operators to staff afloat. “The cost of obtaining verifiable parental consent for interactive communications is very high, estimated at more than $45 per child, and even at that price [consent is] difficult to obtain.”

And because users would sacrifice a great deal of autonomy and functionality once online, many would likely rebel against the system or would seek to subvert it in some fashion. If such a system significantly slows or impedes the creation of new accounts for domestic social networking sites, it will create a perverse incentive for kids to seek other sites with less-restrictive policies, including offshore sites.

Conclusion There are many other issues I haven’t mentioned here that deserve consideration. I’ll just check off a few:

• Assuming we go through with this, who is aggregating all this data? Who has access to the databases? How might that data be used?

• Is all this constitutional? Won’t there be First Amendment or privacy cases brought that endlessly complicate implementation?

• Will kids just flock off-shore to unregulated sites in an effort to reclaim some of the independence they have lost through by surrendering anonymity on U.S.-based sites? What are the consequences of that? Do parents or American policymakers really have any leverage over shady websites operators in Antigua?

• Aren’t there better ways to use our resources? How about focusing our time, energy and resources on educating kids about online risks and deal with these concerns in more constructive ways?

You get the point: Age verification is complicated. Insanely complicated. And it would have enormous costs and profound ramifications for the future of online speech and privacy. We must never forget that government regulation–no matter how well-intentioned–can often have such unintended consequences. It’s a lesson that the USA Today and many others need to heed before they flippantly suggest that age verification is a piece of cake and it’s just a matter of MySpace or someone else throwing a switch to magically make it happen.

Not. That. Simple.

This morning in New York City, social networking website operator MySpace.com announced a major joint effort with 49 state Attorneys General aimed at better protecting children online. (Coverage at CNet, NYT and Forbes). At a joint press conference, MySpace and the AGs unveiled a “Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety” involving expanded online safety tools, improved education efforts, and law enforcement cooperation. They also agreed to create an industry-wide Internet Safety Technical Task Force to study online safety tools, including a review of online identity authentication technology. Generally speaking, the agreement is step forward for online safety. Indeed, many of the principles in the agreement could form a potential model “code of conduct” that other social networking sites could adopt. In a report I authored for the Progress & Freedom Foundation in August 2006, I argued that it was vital for companies and trade associations to take steps such as this to avoid the specter of government regulation or censorship:

All companies doing business online… must show policymakers and the general public that they are serious about addressing [online safety] concerns. If companies and trade associations do not step up to the plate and meet this challenge soon—and in a collective fashion—calls will only grow louder for increased government regulation of online speech and activities. What is needed is a voluntary code of conduct for companies doing business online. This code of conduct, or set of industry “best practices,” would be based on a straight-forward set of principles and policies that could be universally adopted by [a] wide variety of operators…

In particular, this code of conduct proposal called for companies to make specific pledges regarding improved online safety tools, expanded education / media literacy efforts, and ongoing assistance to law enforcement regarding investigations of online crimes.

The Agreement

MySpace responded to this challenge in impressive fashion with its announcement today. The agreement touched upon all of those elements and included the following “Principles of Social Networking” (as described in a MySpace press release):

• Site Design and Functionality: The Principles incorporate safety initiatives that MySpace has already implemented and initiatives it will work to implement in the coming months. Examples of safety features MySpace has in place include reviewing every image and video uploaded to the site, reviewing the content of Groups, making the profiles of 14 and 15 year old users automatically private and protecting them from being contacted by adults that they don’t already know in the physical world, and deleting registered sex offenders from MySpace. Examples of improvements MySpace will make include defaulting 16 and 17 year old users’ profiles to private and strengthening the technology that enforces the site’s minimum age of 14.

• Education and Tools for Parents, Educators and Children. The Principles acknowledge that MySpace has already been devoting meaningful resources to Internet safety education including a new online safety public service announcement targeted at parents and free parental software that is under development. MySpace will explore the establishment of a children’s email registry that will empower parents to prevent their children from having access to MySpace or any other social networking site. In addition, under the Principles MySpace will increase its communications with consumers who report a complaint about inappropriate content or activity on the site.

• Law Enforcement Cooperation. The Attorneys General view MySpace’s cooperation with law enforcement, which includes a 24-hour hotline, to be a model for the industry. The parties will continue to work together to enhance the ability of law enforcement officials to investigate and prosecute Internet crimes.

• Online Safety Task Force. As part of the Principles, MySpace will organize, with the support of the Attorneys General, an industry-wide Internet Safety Technical Task Force to develop online safety tools, including a review of identity authentication tools. While existing age verification and identity products are not an effective safety tool for social networking sites, the Task Force will explore all new technologies that can help make users more safe and secure including age verification. The Task Force will include Internet businesses, identity authentication experts, non-profit organizations, academics and technology companies.

The agreement then goes on—in the form of two appendices—to detail over 70 specific steps that MySpace will take to expand upon these principles. As part of the agreement, MySpace agreed to:

• Implement “age locking” for existing profiles such that members will be allowed to change their ages only once above or below the 18 year old threshold. Once changed across this threshold, under 18 members will be locked into the age they provided while 18 and older members will be able to make changes to their age as long as they remain above the 18 threshold. MySpace will implement “age locking” for new profiles such that under 18 members will be locked into the age they provide at sign-up while 18 and older members will be able to make changes to their age as long as they remain above the 18 threshold.

• Users able to restrict friend requests to only those who know their email address or last name. “Friend only” group invite mandatory for 14 and 15 year olds. “Friend only” group invite by default for 16 and 17 years olds. Users under 18 can block all users over 18 from contacting them or viewing their profile. Users over 18 will be limited to search in the school section only for high school students graduating in the current or upcoming year. Users over 18 may designate their profiles as private to users under 18, and users under 18 may designate their profiles as private to users over 18.

• Change the default setting for 16-17 year olds’ profiles from “public” to “private” and create a closed high school section for users under 18. The “private” profile of a 16/17 year old will be viewable only by his/her “friends” and other students from that high school who have been vouched for by another such student. Students attending the same high school will be able to “Browse” for each other.

• Obtain a list of adult sites on an ongoing basis and sever all links to those sites from MySpace. They will also demand that adult entertainment industry performers set their profiles to block access to all under 18 users and remove all under 18 users from profiles of identified adult entertainment industry performers.

And that just scratches the surface. There is much more to the agreement. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how MySpace could have gone any further to satisfy the online safety concerns raised by AGs or other public policymakers. Indeed, some MySpace users will likely protest that some of the changes go too far. That’s especially clear after reading some of the other technical details of the proposal included in the two appendices.

E-Mail Registry

For example, in the technical appendix summarizing the design and functionality initiatives that MySpace has agreed to consider, they say they will pursue a new “children’s e-mail registry”:

[MySpace will] engage a third-party to build and host a registry of email addresses for children under 18. Parents would register their children if they did not want them to have access to MySpace or any other social networking site that uses the registry. A child whose information matches the registry would not be able to register for MySpace membership.

That proposal might raise some eyebrows since it is unclear how that registry would work and what, if any, privacy / security concerns it might raise. Of course, other critics will argue that such a system will be easily circumvented or tricked. After all, how does MySpace know that the person submitting an e-mail is child’s real parent? And what about multiple e-mail accounts? It’s fairly easy to get a free e-mail account these days. But, if the system somehow did work as billed, it would raise serious questions about who has access to that e-mail registry and how secure the database was.

The agreement also contains a number of restrictions on access by minors to specific types of content, or to other users or groups on MySpace. Viewed in isolation, those restrictions seem fairly reasonable—especially those dealing with access by minors to adult areas (ex: “swingers” clubs or the “Romance and Relationship Forum and Groups”). Taken together, however, the growing list of site restrictions might be viewed by many young users as an impediment to their social networking activities. Many parents and policymakers will like the sound of that, of course. But where might those users go if they are frustrated by the growing number of restrictions imposed on their online activities? This is indicative of the difficult position MySpace finds itself into today: They are piling on additional restrictions and safeguards in the name of online safety to satisfy the concerns raised by many parents and policymakers. But if these initiatives impose too many encumbrances on social networking activity and interactions it could undermine the very purpose of the site and its value to members.

This explains why MySpace is eager to get other social networking sites to adopt policies similar to those found in the agreement it struck with the AGs. Obviously, MySpace would prefer not be the only website stuck with these burdens. Moreover, it probably does not want other sites to have an unfair competitive advantage in terms of more lax operating restrictions. Of course, even if every domestic social networking site adopted stricter policies along the lines of what MySpace agreed to, there will always be offshore alternatives for youngsters to choose from. This is the tricky balance that complicates all debates about online child safety today: How do we create sensible online policies without encouraging kids to operate completely surreptitiously in a “digital underground,” especially shady offshore environments?

Age Verification

Generally speaking, however, MySpace struck the right balance with most of the other proposals in the agreement with the AGs, especially considering the pressure they were under from some policymakers to go much further. In that regard, the agreement with the AGs is especially notable for what it does not include: age verification mandates. The call for an Internet Safety Technical Task Force to study online safety methods and identity authentication tools is a sensible alternative to the rush to mandate age verification, which some AGs have been advocating vociferously over the past two years.

Hopefully the task force will provide critical examination of the issue and not simply begin with pre-ordained conclusions about the wisdom or effectiveness of online age verification techniques and technologies. At the press conference announcing the agreement, however, Attorneys General Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut seemed to imply that that the goal of the task force would be to develop and implement a full-blown age verification system for the Internet. “We are going to find and develop online identity authentication tools,” said AG Cooper. And AG Blumenthal reiterated an argument he made ad nauseum last year when he argued that, “if we can put a man on the moon” then we ought to be able to verify the ages of people when they go online. [I first heard AG Blumenthal make this argument when I debated him and AG Cooper at a NCMEC conference two years ago. Here’s the summary of my response that day.]

But it’s just not that simple. As I argued in a lengthy PFF study last year entitled, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions,” there are no silver bullet age verifications solutions. Online authentication is a complicated, multi-faceted technical issue. And, even assuming we could find a way to make it work, there are many other considerations that must be taken into account, such as the burden it might impose on freedom of speech or individual privacy.

The danger, therefore, is that the AGs have preconceived notions about the wisdom and efficacy of age verification mandates, and that they will either seek to stack the deck on the task force with age verification advocates or pressure the task force to adopt mandatory age verification without thoroughly studying the issue. Again, that would be a serious mistake and it would also likely give rise to legal challenges.

Education & Empowerment

The better approach is to focus on other steps that actually will keep kids safe online. As I have argued in my book on Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods, the best solution to online safety concerns is what I call the “3-E Solution: which stands for “education, empowerment, and enforcement.”

Luckily, there’s a great deal of that included in the MySpace agreement with the AGs. MySpace has pledged to “continue to dedicate meaningful resources to convey information to help parents and educators protect children and help younger users enjoy a safer experience on MySpace.” In particular, MySpace will “engage in public service announcements, develop free parental monitoring software, and explore the establishment of a children’s email registry.”

The importance of education initiatives cannot be overstated. Technical solutions, such as those the AGs clearly favor, will always suffer from inherent limitations and will often be circumvented. Education, by contrast, lasts a lifetime. We need to be teaching our kids how to be good cyber-citizens and how to identify and report legitimate online threats (predators, bullies, scam artists, etc). It is my belief that today’s youth are far more savvy and sensible about these threats than most adults or policymakers give them credit for. Nonetheless, it is important to be vigilant about online safety education and etiquette in an attempt to teach kids—especially more “at-risk” youth who might be susceptible to online threats—basic life lessons about sensible cyberspace behavior and interactions.

Conclusion

Despite the handful of concerns raised above, the MySpace agreement serves as a model for what other social networking companies and online operators could do if they wanted to get more serious about promoting Internet safety. MySpace has done about all it can to be responsive to the demands of parents and policymakers.

Of course, it could be true that no matter how much the company does to improve parental control tools or educate the public, some parents may never take advantage of those tools or information. This remains one of the great mysteries of the parental controls debate: Why is it that so many parents say they want more and better controls and strategies, but when they are made available many of them choose not to use them?

Regardless, if for whatever reason, parents are not taking advantage of these tools and options, their inaction should not be used to justify government regulation as a surrogate for household choice / parental responsibility. Parents have been empowered. It is now their responsibility to take advantage of the tools and controls at their disposal to determine what is acceptable in their homes and in the lives of their children.

MySpace should be applauded for its new statement of principles and its impressive efforts to empower and educate both parents and children about online safety while assisting law enforcement when necessary to root out the real bad guys lurking online.

As Braden mentioned, we were both down in Raleigh, North Carolina this week testifying at a big hearing on mandatory age verification for social networking sites.

It was quite a heated battle. The legislation, SB 132, was supported at the hearing by North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper, several of his staff attorneys, a couple of NC senate lawmakers, and some folks from Aristotle, a company that claims it has devised a workable age verification solution for social networking purposes. A vote on the proposal was delayed and we’re still awaiting the final outcome.

Down below, I have attached the outline of my remarks in which I argued that age verification mandates would actually make kids less safe online. Here’s why:

1) Age verification is not synonymous with a background check.

• Are citizens being lead to believe that age verification guarantees them perfectly safe online environments? After all, even if the verification process gets the age part of the equation right, it tells us little else about the person being verified.

• Incidentally, what happens when the parent being verified is a predator using their child to create false credentials? Unfortunately, we know that some predators have children.

• This gets to the primary concern in this debate: The very real potential exists that we are creating solutions that inject a false sense of security in parents and children alike.

2) Even assuming we do not encounter problems with the initial sign-up phase and procedures, questions remain about follow-ups and subsequent validations.

• Will parents be asked to fill out and submit paperwork routinely to verify their identity (or their child’s) on an ongoing basis? Will parents be expected to take phone calls from dozens of social networking sites (or call sites themselves) to continue authorization? Will parents tolerate that?

• If the sign-up and subsequent authentication process proves cumbersome and time-consuming, will this encourage kids to search out less trustworthy “underground” or offshore websites?

• How are we going to regulate those offshore sites? Also, could new regulations drive domestic operators offshore?

• In sum, the sheer scale of the Net and online activities greatly complicate the enforcement of age verification schemes, especially those of the parental permission-based variety.

3) Will age verification mandates encourage the rise of an illegal black market in credentials?

• Will kids share or even sell their online credentials, such as their user name and passwords, to others who desire them?

• Certainly kids won’t just stop trying to get onto social networking sites. Are we going to punish kids (or prosecute their parents) for evasion? And, again, will kids look to offshore sites?

4) There are serious privacy issues at stake here, and those issues could give rise to other problems.

• Requiring all parents to be verified before their children can go online will obviously be seen by some parents as intrusive and a potential violation of their privacy.

• If some parents resist such regulations or refuse to submit to such verifications, what will their kids do? Again, it might encourage kids to seek out false credentials of to visit offshore sites.

• Incidentally, who has access to all this new information about parents and children that the government is requiring that social networking operators collect? Do we want online operators creating massive new databases of information about us or our kids if better alternatives exist?

Bottom line: The inherent danger of age verification regulation is that it: • results in unintended consequences or solutions that don’t solve the problems they were intended to address; • creates a false sense of security that might encourage some youngsters (or adults) to let their guard down while online; and • creates potential incentives to push mainstream social networking sites offshore. No matter how bad parents or policy makers think social networking sites are today—and, in reality, the sites are not nearly as bad as they imagine—those sites are infinitely superior to potentially shady offshore websites that are completely unaccountable to U.S. officials. And the domestic sites are more accountable to the general public and are responsive to press scrutiny.

In sum, there are no silver bullet solutions. Instead, we need a multi-prong, layered strategy…

Better approach to online child safety = The “3-E Solution”: Education, Empowerment, and Enforcement

“Education” refers to not only the need for K-12 information literacy efforts but also, more broadly, to the need for comprehensive online safety instruction and awareness-building efforts. Governments at all levels need to take an aggressive role here.

“Empowerment” refers to the importance of providing parents with more and better tools to make informed decisions about media and communications tools in their lives of their children. Government can facilitate these efforts in partnership with industry and non-profit organizations. For example, helping to make parents more aware of Internet monitoring tools and strategies would be one of the most constructive solutions.

“Enforcement” refers to stepped up law enforcement efforts to find and adequately prosecute child predators. It is essential that law enforcement officials receive the resources and training necessary to adequately monitor online networks for predators and to bring them to justice when they are found. For example, law enforcement agencies need sophisticated computer forensic labs and skilled experts to help investigate online crimes. And they need to be trained to conduct proper sting operations to find predators before they harm our children. Finally, much longer prison sentences are needed for child predation.

[For additional information, please see my March study, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.”]

In late March, I hosted a congressional seminar entitled “Age Verification for Social Networking Sites: Is It Possible? And Desirable?” I brought together 5 experts in the field to debate the issue, including:

• John Cardillo, President & CEO, Sentinel
• Jay Chaudhuri, Special Counsel to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper
• Raye Croghan, Vice President, IDology, Inc.
• Tim Lordan, Executive Director, Internet Education Foundation
• Jeff Schmidt, CEO, Authis

It was an outstanding discussion and I’m happy to report that the transcript is now available online here. Also, you can listen to the audio from the event here. Also, you can find the big study of mine that we discussed that day here.

Jennifer Medina of the New York Times penned an article yesterday on the debate over social networking fears leading to calls for age verification mandates. She noted that measures are moving in several states that would require social networking sites to age-verify users before they are allowed to visit the sites or create profiles there. But Medina also noted that there are many difficult questions about how age verification would work and how “social networking” would even be defined. (I summarize these questions in my recent PFF report, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.”)

Ms. Medina was also kind enough to interview me for the story and she summarizes some of what I had to say in her piece. In a nutshell, I stressed that the most effective way to deal with this problem is to get serious about dealing with sex offenders instead of trying to regulate law-abiding citizens. We need to be locking up convicted sex offenders for a lot longer in this country to make sure they behind bars instead of behind keyboards seeking to prey on our children.

I also stressed the importance of online safety education as part of the strategy here. But my comments on that didn’t make the cut in the story. But you can read my big recent paper on this issue for additional details.

Lisa Lerer of Forbes was nice enough to do a feature story this week about my views on the panic over social networking and the push for age verification of such sites. Her piece is entitled “Why MySpace is a Safe Space,” and begins as follows: “Adam Thierer doesn’t look like much of a revolutionary. But last month he challenged both Washington and conventional wisdom with a fairly radical proposition: Perhaps MySpace and the Internet aren’t so scary for kids, after all.”

I don’t really regard what I’ve been saying in my recent essays or big new PFF study as “revolutionary.” Rather, if you spend any time studying this issue and these sites in a dispassionate, educated way, I think the conclusions I draw seem quite reasonable. Unfortunately, I don’t think many policy makers or critics have spent any serious time on these sites or seriously explored the relative danger of online social networking sites relative to offline social networking places. A classic “moral panic” has developed because of this: An older generation fears a new medium that it does not use or understand.

Anyway, read my discussion with Lisa for more details.

I’m putting the wraps on a big paper on the dangers of mandating age verification for social networking websites. One of the questions I ask in the study is exactly how broadly “social networking sites” will be defined for purposes of regulation? Will chat rooms, hobbyist sites, listservs, instant messaging, video sharing sites, online marketplaces or online multiplayer gaming sites qualify? If so, how will they be policed and how burdensome will age-verification mandates become for smaller sites? Finally, does the government currently have the resources to engage in such policing activities since almost all websites now have a social networking component? I explore these and other questions in my paper.

But now I have another type of site to add to list, and not one that I originally gave much consideration to: online newspapers. Over the weekend, the USA Today relaunched its website, not only to freshen up its look, but also to fundamentally change the ways the site works. According to the editors, the new features of the site will give readers the ability to:

• Scan other news sources directly on USATODAY.com; • See how readers are reacting to stories; • Recommend stories and comments to other readers; • Comment directly on stories; • Participate in discussion forums; • Write reviews (of movies, music and more); • Contribute photos; • Better communicate with USA Today staff.

Other bloggers were quick to note that the newspaper is essentially trying to refashion itself as a social networking site. Some wonder whether a newspaper can really be a social networking site. Others point out that traditional newspaper readers may resist such changes for a variety of reasons. (Don Dodge points out that 92% of reader responses have been negative so far).

But let’s ignore all that for a moment and get back to the question I posed in the title of my post: If USA Today is billing itself as a social networking site–or if others argue that it represents a social networking site–will the company be required to age-verify users before they visit the site?

Well, that depends on how the age verification regs would get written, of course. But one definition has already been suggested under the proposed “Deleting Online Predators Act” (DOPA), which would ban such sites in publicly funded schools and libraries. Under DOPA, “Commercial Social Networking Websites” are defined as any site that: “(a) allows users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users; and (b) offers a mechanism for communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, email, or instant messenger.”

Keeping that definition in mind, let’s check out some more material from the USA Today’s “Quick Guide to New Features.” Specifically, look at sections on this page about “personal spaces” and “avatars”:

Personal space: When you become a member, we automatically establish a personal profile page. As you interact with the USA Today community, your comments, recommendations and other contributions are automatically appended to your page. Your profile page includes a place for you to upload photos, write a blog, and the ability to send messages to other users. These pages allow readers to get a better sense of the site’s most active contributors. Avatar: Every one of our pages features a spot just for you: up there in the right-hand corner. That’s where you’ll be notified of messages left by other readers. Make yourself at home. Upload a picture of yourself, a funny icon, or choose from our selection of ready-made avatars.

Sounds a heck of lot like a social networking site to me. And if it was defined as such by lawmakers, it could mean that (under DOPA) access to the USA Today would need to be banned in public schools and libraries and that everyone would need to be age-verified before they go on the new USA Today website in their own homes. Welcome to the world of unitended regulatory consequences!

Additional Reading:

“Social Networking Websites & Child Protection: Toward a Rational Dialogue,” by Adam Thierer, Progress & Freedom Foundation Progress Snapshot 2.17, June 2006.

“Is MySpace the Government’s Space?,” by Adam Thierer, Progress & Freedom Foundation Progress Snapshot 2.16, June 2006.