In all my work on online child safety issues, I always try to stress how important education and media literacy efforts are. Indeed, technical parental control tools and methods, while important, should be viewed as just one part of a more holistic approach to encouraging digital literacy and digital citizenship.  In recent years, many scholars and child development experts such as Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, Anne Collier and Larry Magid of ConnectSafely.org, Marsali Hancock of iKeepSafe, Common Sense Media, the Family Online Safety Institute, and many others have worked to expand traditional education and media literacy strategies to place the notion of digital citizenship at the core of their lessons and recommendations.

What does it mean? Anne Collier defines digital citizenship as “Critical thinking and ethical choices about the content and impact on oneself, others, and one’s community of what one sees, says, and produces with media, devices, and technologies.” And Common Sense Media defines digital literacy and digital citizenship as follows:

Digital Literacy programs are an essential element of media education and involve basic learning tools and a curriculum in critical thinking and creativity. Digital Citizenship means that kids appreciate their responsibility for their content as well as their actions when using the Internet, cell phones, and other digital media. All of us need to develop and practice safe, legal, and ethical behaviors in the digital media age. Digital Citizenship programs involve educational tools and a basic curriculum for kids, parents, and teachers.

Stephen Balkam, CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute, had an excellent essay in The Huffington Post yesterday on “21^st Century Citizenship,” that did a fine job of explaining these concepts in practical terms:

While there is a recognition that there must be a base-line of safety—using filters for younger kids and monitoring and privacy settings for the older ones—the emphasis is now placed on education, media literacy and a new kind of civics. It’s time for kids of all ages to understand and value the rights of free speech and assembly (i.e., connecting through social networking and other means) as well as an expectation of privacy and safety. And with those rights, go an important range of responsibilities and duties. These include the need to respect others views, even if they disagree with them, to adhere to terms of service (however lengthy and obtuse) and the rules regarding fair use, flaming, accessing or uploading porn, and so on. Just as we teach our kids to help at the scene of an accident, or to report a crime and to get involved in their local community, so we need to encourage similar behavior online. To report abusive postings, to alert a grownup or the service provider of inappropriate content, to not pile on when a kid is being cyberbullied, to be part of the solution and not the problem. We need to use what we’ve learned about social norms to align kids and ourselves with the positive examples of responsible behavior, rather than be transfixed and drawn towards the portrayals of the worst of the web. It may be true that one in five kids have been involved in sexting, but that means the vast majority exercise good judgment and make wise choices online. The social norms field is ripe with possibilities and guidance in how to foster good digital citizenship.

That’s 100% correct. This approach must be at the center of child safety debates going forward. As Nancy Willard notes, digital citizens:

1. Understand the risks: They know how to avoid getting into risk, detect if they are at risk, and respond effectively, including asking for help.
2. Are responsible and ethical: They do not harm others, and they respect the privacy and property of others.
3. Pay attention to the well-being of others: They make sure their friends and others are safe, and they report concerns to an appropriate adult or site.
4. Promote online civility and respect.

Only by teaching our kids to be good cyber-citizens can we ensure they are prepared for life in an age of information abundance.  Talk to your kids, people!  Teach them well.

Connect Safely, which is great parenting and online child safety resource run by my friends Anne Collier and Larry Magid, has just released some excellent “Virtual World Safety Tips for Parents of Teens.”  Tons of good advice in there worth checking out, especially the thing I always focus on in all my online safety work—talk to your kids!! Here’s Anne and Larry on that point:

Talk with your teens about the virtual worlds they use – ask them to show you around. See what their avatars look like and what screen names they’ve chosen to represent themselves. What do their profiles and the appearance of their avatars say about them? Try to hold back snap judgments (long-term guidance usually works better than control if the goal is learning rather than short-term compliance – see this). Are their virtual-world profiles linked to social-network ones, and how much do those linked-up profiles together reveal about them – too much? Are their in-world friends mostly friends they know in real life? If not, do they know that they can’t really know who people are online unless they know them offline?

It’s about getting a dialogue going with your kids. That is so absolutely essential and it would help head off about 90% of the problems that develop online today with kids. Kids need mentoring, whether its in meatspace or cyberspace. But make sure to read all the Connect Safely tips. They are excellent.

Incidentally, I talked about some of these issues when I did a virtual guest lecture in Second Life last October hosted by Metanomics. The show was called “Live Free and Prosper: Government’s Place in Virtual Worlds and On-line Communities,” and I posted all the video clips here.  I also encourage those of you interested in these issues to check out these recent TLF guest posts by Joshua Fairfield an Associate Professor of Law at Washington & Lee University School of Law.  He recently posted and interesting essay entitled, “Virtual Paternalism” as well as a summary and discussion of the recent “FTC Report on Kids and Virtual Worlds.”  Worth reading.

My friends Anne Collier and Larry Magid, two of America’s leading experts on Internet safety matters, have just released a terrific new “Online Safety 3.0” manifesto.  Anne is the editor of Net Family News, Larry pens the “Safe and Secure” blog for CNet News, and together they run ConnectSafely.org.  Everything they do is must-reading for those of us who cover and care about the intersection of online child safety and free speech issues. [Disclosure: I am currently serving along with Anne and Larry on the new, government-appointed Online Safety Technology Working Group.]

In their new “Online Safety 3.0” essay, Anne and Larry argue that:

Both the Internet and the way young people use technology are constantly changing, but Internet safety messages change very slowly if at all. A few years ago, some of us in the Net safety community started talking about how to adjust our messaging for the much more interactive “Web 2.0.” And we did so, based on the latest research as it emerged. But even those messages are starting to get a bit stale.

Their “Version 3.0” for online safety refocuses the discussion on “the positive reasons for safe use of social technology.” They want to”enable[] youth enrichment and empowerment. Its main components — new media literacy and digital citizenship – are both protective and enabling.”  They argue that “promoting critical thinking, mindful producing, and the ethics, responsibilities and rights of citizenship” is “empowering because it’s protective. This is protection that lasts a lifetime.”  Amen to that.

What I like best about Anne and Larry’s approach is that is fundamentally optimistic.  Whereas so many supposed child safety experts talk down to both parents and kids and seem to suggest that both are completely oblivious to the world around them, Anne and Larry have a very different worldview and approach. They are positive about the potential of both parents and kids to take on new challenges and make the best of the new technologies they have at their disposal, even if there are some bumps along the way. The other thing I love about Anne and Larry is that they have done more than any two journalists I know to debunk the “technopanic” hysteria that others in the media world have propagated over the past 15 years.

Anyway, make sure to read their “Online Safety 3.0” manifesto.  Best thing I’ve seen on the subject in a long time.

I’ve just had a new article published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in which I make the case against “techno-panics,” which refers to public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young. The article is entitled “Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” and it appears in the July 2009 Inside ALEC newsletter.  This is something I have spent a lot of time writing about here in recent years (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and I finally got around to putting it altogether in a concise essay here.  I have pasted the full text below. [And I just want to send a shout-out to my friend Anne Collier of Net Family News.org, whose work on this topic has been very influential on my thinking.]

“Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” by Adam Thierer

A cursory review of the history of media and communications technologies reveals a reoccurring cycle of “techno-panics” — public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young.  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 has spawned a fresh debate about the potential negative effects they might have on kids.

Inevitably, fueled by media sensationalism and various activist groups, these social and cultural debates quickly become political debates. Indeed, each of the media technologies or outlets mentioned above was either regulated or threatened with regulation at some point in its history. And the cycle continues today. During recent sessions of Congress, countless hearings were held and bills introduced on a wide variety of media and content-related issues. These proposals dealt with broadcast television and radio programming, cable and satellite television content, video games, the Internet, social networking sites, and much more.  State policymakers, especially state Attorneys General (AGs), have also joined in such crusades on occasion.  The recent push by AGs for mandatory age verification for all social networking sites is merely the latest example.

What is perhaps most ironic about these techno-panics is how quickly yesterday’s boogeyman becomes tomorrow’s accepted medium, even as the new villains replace old ones.  For example, the children of the 1950s and 60s were told that Elvis’s hip shakes and the rock-and-roll revolution would make them all the tools of the devil. They grew up fine and became parents themselves, but then promptly began demonizing rap music and video games in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  And now those aging Pac Man-era parents are worried sick about their kids being abducted by predators lurking on MySpace and Facebook. We shouldn’t be surprised if, a decade or two from now, today’s Internet generation will be decrying the dangers of virtual reality.

These techno-panics are almost always disproportionate to the real risk posed by new media and technology, which typically do not have the corrupting influence on youth that older generations fear.  Parents and public policymakers alike need to remember they were once kids, too, and managed to live through many of the same fears and concerns about media and popular culture. 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.”

The better response by both parents and policymakers is a measured and balanced approach to children’s exposure to media content and online interactions.  All-or-nothing extremes are never going to work.  In particular, techno-panics are hopelessly counter-productive. “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 Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. What parents, educators, and policymakers 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.”

Most simply, we need to be willing to talk to our kids about the new technologies and cultural developments that shape their generation. When we as parents (or policymakers) do not fully comprehend or appreciate the new-fangled gadget in our kids’ pocket—or whatever they are playing, watching, or listening to on it—instead of engaging in demagoguery and driving a wedge between us and them, we should instead invite them to have a conversation with us about it.  Ask three simple questions to get that conversation started: “What is this new thing all about?”  “Tell me how you use it.”  “Why is it important to you?”  Once you’ve got them talking to you, good ‘ol fashion common sense and timeless parenting principles should kick in. “Do you understand why too much of this might be bad for you?” “Will you please come talk to me if you don’t understand something you’ve seen or heard?” And so on.

In sum, it’s about parental responsibility and rational, measured responses. The “techno-panic” mentality, by contrast, creates distrust and distance between our kids and us. As Anne Collier of Net Family News notes, techno-panics “cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.”

Parents and policymakers need to engage kids in an ongoing conversation about the technologies du jour—even when we don’t fully understand or appreciate them.

————— [printable Scribd version follows] —————

“Against Techno-Panics” by Adam Thierer, PFF (July 2009 – Inside ALEC) http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=17392730&access_key=key-2gdkqylyeu5h376buyyi&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

My friend Larry Magid, the co-director of ConnectSafely.org (with Anne Collier) and founder of SafeKids.com, has a sharp new piece up at CBS News.com entitled, “Stop Cyberbullying with Education,” in which he rightly points out how “we need to be careful with legislation that would outlaw cyberbullying.”  He points out that although cyberbullying is “not an epidemic and it’s not killing our children”:

Bullying has always been a problem among adolescents and, sadly, so has suicide. In the few known cases of suicide after cyberbullying, there are other contributing factors. That’s not to diminish the tragedy or suggest that the cyberbullying didn’t play a role but–as with all online youth risk, we need to look at what else was going on in the child’s life. Even when a suicide or other tragic event doesn’t occur, cyberbullying is often accompanied by a pattern of offline bullying and sometimes there are other issues including long-term depression, problems at home, and self-esteem issues.

He goes on to provide some solid advice:

identifying the reasons kids are acting as bullies can go a long way toward preventing it as can educational programs that stress ethics and cyber citizenship (“netiquette”). It also helps kids to know what to do if they are victims of bullying. At ConnectSafely.org (a site I help operate) we came up with a number of tips including: don’t respond, don’t retaliate; talk to a trusted adult; and save the evidence. We also advise young people to be civil toward others and not to be bullies themselves. Finally, “be a friend, not a bystander.” Don’t forward mean messages and let bullies know that their actions are not cool. If your child is a victim of cyberbullying, don’t start by taking away his or her Internet privileges. That’s one reason kids often don’t talk about Net-related problems with parents. Instead, try to get your child to calmly explain what has happened. If possible, talk with the parents of the other kids involved and, if necessary, involve school authorities. If the impact of the bullying spills over to school (as it usually does), the school has a right to intervene.

And Larry cautions against rushing into legislative solutions that would criminalize the problem and throw the book at kids instead of adopting a more sensible education and counseling approach to the problem.  This is very much in line with the approach Berin Szoka and I set forth in our recent PFF white paper, “Cyberbullying Legislation: Why Education is Preferable to Regulation.”  While some truly troubled teens who instigate truly awful cyber-bullying attacks might deserve some time in the juvenile justice system, that shouldn’t be our first option for all kids involved in incidents. Anyway, read Larry’s essay.

Full disclosure:  Larry and I are currently serving together on the new, congressionally-mandated Online Safety Technology Working Group. (OSTWG)

As Berin mentioned last week, we have a new paper out on proposals to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998.   We generically refer to those COPPA-expansion efforts as “COPPA 2.0.” Hence, the title of our paper: “COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech.”  To recap what Berin already noted, in the name of improving online child safety, some legislators and state attorneys general (AGs) are advocating the expansion of COPPA’s “verifiable parental consent” model of age verification before certain sites or services may collect, or enable the sharing of, personal information for children.

Unlike “COPPA 1.0,” however, which only applied to children under the age of 13, “COPPA 2.0” would apply to all minors up to age 17.  Moreover, the range of sites covered by the new law would generally be expanded to include just about any site or service with social networking functionality.

Since Berin has already summarized our general concerns with efforts to expand COPPA’s “verifiable parental consent” online age verification system to cover more online users and sites, I thought I would focus here on what I believe will be the most controversial (and important) part of our paper — our discussion about how COPPA 2.0 affects the speech rights of both adults and adolescents.

Remember COPA?

To understand why COPPA expansion will raise serious First Amendment issues, we first need to step back and recall the legal battle over the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA.  Both COPPA and COPA rest on a stratification of users by age, but the approach of the two laws is very different: While COPPA requires age verification if content is “directed at” minors under age 13, COPA would have required that all website operators restrict access to material deemed “harmful to minors” by minors under the age of 17 and therefore requires age verification of all users who attempt to access such content (in order to identify minors). COPPA is focused on certain kinds of potentially harmful contacts while COPA is focused on potentially harmful content.

But by expanding the age range of COPPA to include adolescents, COPPA 2.0 proposals essentially converge with COPA, reaching the same practical consequence: age verification mandates for large numbers of adults as users (not as parents). Only the scope of sites covered by the laws is different: under COPA, sites deemed “harmful to minors,” and, under COPPA 2.0, adolescent-oriented or certain social networking sites. Thus, to the extent that COPPA 2.0 proposals require age verification of adults, they would be subject to constitutional attacks similar to those against COPA.  But COPPA 2.0 proposals would also burden the rights of adults to communicate with adolescents and the free speech rights of adolescents.

Finally, the fact that COPPA (like COPA) applies only to commercial sites would do little to protect it from constitutional attack, because in a world of user-generated content, the commercial nature of a site has little to do with the commercial/non-commercial nature of the speech carried on it. For example, obviously commercial sites like MySpace and Facebook serve as platforms for a wide variety of not-for-profit and political communications.

How COPPA 2.0 Would Impact the Free Speech Rights of Adults

After a decade-long court battle over the constitutionality of COPA, the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2009 rejected the government’s latest request to revive the law, meaning it is likely dead. Three of the key reasons the courts struck down COPA would also apply to COPPA 2.0 proposals.

(1) First, like COPA, COPPA  2.0 would raise burden the speech rights of adults to access information subject to age verification requirements, both by making speech more difficult and by stigmatizing it.  In 2003, the Third Circuit noted that age verification requirements “will likely deter many adults from accessing restricted content, because many Web users are simply unwilling to provide identification information in order to gain access to content, especially where the information they wish to access is sensitive or controversial.” In 2008, in striking down COPA for the third and final time, the Third Circuit approvingly quoted the district court, which had noted that part of the reason age verification requirements deterred users from accessing restricted content was “because Internet users are concerned about security on the Internet and because Internet users are afraid of fraud and identity theft on the Internet.” The district court had held that: “Requiring users to go through an age verification process would lead to a distinct loss of personal privacy” by threatening their anonymity.

By imposing broad age verification requirements, COPPA 2.0 would restrict the rights of adults to send and receive information anonymously just as COPA did. If anything, the speech burdened by COPPA 2.0 deserves more protection, not less, than the speech burdened by COPA: Where COPA merely burdened access to content deemed “harmful to minors” (viz., pornography), COPPA 2.0 would burden access to material by adults as well as minors not because that material is harmful or obscene but merely because it is “directed at” minors! Thus, the content covered by COPPA 2.0 proposals could include not merely pornography, but communications about political nature, which deserved the highest degree of First Amendment protection.

(2) Second, like COPA, COPPA expansion threatens the speech rights of website operators. The necessary corollary of blocking adults from accessing certain content anonymously — and thereby deterring some users from accessing that content — is that COPPA 2.0, like COPA, would necessarily reduce the audience size of websites subject to age verification mandates. Furthermore, such mandates would encourage websites to self-censor themselves to avoid offering content they fear could be considered “directed at” adolescents because doing so might subject them to an age verification mandate — or to legal liability if they fail to implement age verification. The substantial cost of age verification could significantly impact, if not make impossible, the business models of many personal information-collecting (PI) sites, which generally do not charge for content and rely instead on advertising revenues. The Third Circuit cited all of these burdens on the free speech rights of website operators in striking down COPA.

(3) Third, less restrictive alternatives are available to COPPA 2.0, just as they were for COPA.

The Third Circuit drew on the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision striking down COPA on the grounds that “blocking and filtering software is an alternative that is less restrictive than COPA, and, in addition, likely more effective as a means of restricting children’s access to materials harmful to them.” Similarly, parental control software already empowers parents to restrict their kids’ access to PI-collecting sites. (It’s particularly easy for parents to restrict access to the leading social networking sites that seem to be driving so much of the push for COPPA 2.0, so that their kids.)

Thus, the free speech rights burdened COPPA 2.0 proposals are at least as important as those burdened by COPA, and blocking software already empowers parents to restrict their kids’ access to PI-collecting sites, just as it allows parents to restrict access to pornography. Of course, if COPPA 2.0 laws were actually enacted and subject to legal challenge, the outcome of the case would depend largely on the level of constitutional scrutiny involved. COPPA 2.0 advocates might argue that, whatever the rights at stake, a lower level of constitutional scrutiny should apply because COPPA 2.0 does not target a special category of content. If true, this could mean that, although age verification mandates to restrict access to “harmful” material are unconstitutional, far more sweeping mandates restricting access to non-harmful information could be constitutional. Such inconsistency is indeed a perverse consequence of the fact that our First Amendment jurisprudence focuses not on the rights at stake, but on whether a regulation is “content-neutral” in deciding what level of scrutiny to apply—which, in turn, often determines the outcome of the case. But in this case, COPPA 2.0 proposals likely would be subject to strict scrutiny to the extent that they are, like COPA, focused on a certain category of content: that “directed at” adolescents (rather than “harmful to minors”).

Legislators who attempt to escape strict scrutiny by defining the scope of their bill not by its targeted audience but by reference to specific functional capabilities (in the definition of “social networking site”) will likely find that a court will see through such window-dressing: If they recognize that such bills are nonetheless aimed at a certain category of adolescent-oriented content, they will apply strict scrutiny anyway. But even under intermediate scrutiny, COPPA 2.0 proposals would be subject to serious attack.

Minors Have Speech Rights, Too!

In addition, in COPPA 2.0 approaches, the government would restrict the ability of adolescents to access content, not because it could be harmful to them or because it is obscene, but merely because it is “directed to” them. While the First Amendment rights of minors may not be on par with those of adults, adolescents do have the right to access certain types of information and express themselves in certain ways. The Supreme Court has held (in Planned Parenthood of Cent. Mo. v. Danforth) that “constitutional rights do not mature and come into being magically only when one attains the state-defined age of majority.” It remains unclear how an expanded COPPA model might interfere with the First Amendment rights of adolescents, but it is clear that privacy and speech rights would come into conflict under COPPA 2.0, as they do in other contexts.

For example, how might the parental-consent based model limit the ability of adolescents to obtain information about “safer sex” or how to deal with trauma, depression, family abuse, or addiction. Would an abusive father authorize a teen to visit a website about how to report child abuse? Would a parent of an adolescent struggling with their sexual identity let their kid participate in a self-help social networking page for gay and lesbian youth? What rights are at play here and how do we reconcile them?

Maintaining the ability of kids to participate online interactions goes beyond content that most people would recognize as “serious”—from the perspective of both First Amendment values and the education of children. As a recent MacArthur Foundation study of the online youth Internet use concluded:

Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture.

It was at least in part in recognition of such difficult First Amendment questions that Congress removed the requirement in the initial legislative draft of COPPA that would have required PI-based sites to “use reasonable efforts to provide the parents with notice and an opportunity to prevent or curtail the collection or use of personal information collected from children over the age of 12 and under the age of 17.”

Even if parents have an absolute right to block their adolescents’ access to such data, they can already exercise that right by applying strict controls on the computers in their home. COPPA 2.0 proposals go well beyond recognizing this right by setting the default to “parental consent required” for adolescents to access a wide range of content—meaning that parents must “opt-in” on behalf of their children before their children can participate in PI-collecting sites. This, in turn, burdens the ability of adolescents to communicate, because their parents might censor (rightly or wrongly) certain information, or simply fail to understand the technologies involved or to be actively engaged. But whatever the free speech rights of adolescents, if anyone should be interfering with those rights, it should be their parents — not the government.

Some parents may object that, however effective parental control software may be in the home, it does not allow parents to control what their kids’ access outside the home. This argument is understandable on some level, but in the end, it amounts to a demand that roadblocks be put up everywhere for the sake of particularly sensitive parents at the expense of everyone else in society, including potentially huge numbers of adult users — and of online anonymity in general.

But Illinois’s COPPA 2.0 proposal goes even further, not merely expanding COPPA to cover a particular variety of social networking sites, but requiring that such sites “allow the parent or guardian of the minor unrestricted access to the profile webpage of the minor at all times.” Congress considered just such a parental access mandate in the initial draft of COPPA legislation back in 1998, but ultimately removed it from the final version of the legislation, apparently because even some of COPPA’s supporters worried, given the bill’s initial application to the 13-16 age bracket, that “The establishment of a parental right to access all personal information about a teenager may intrude on older minors’ privacy, rather than protect.”

What about Communication between Adolescents & Adults?

Finally, COPPA 2.0 could infringe on the free speech rights of adults to communicate with adolescents online by driving PI-collecting sites to segregate users by age or to attempt to block access by adolescents. The vast majority of adult-minor interactions online are not of a harassing or predatory nature—indeed, they generally involve adults looking to help or assist minors in various ways. As the MacArthur Foundation study cited above concluded:

In contexts of peer-based learning, adults … have an important role to play, though it is not the conventionally authoritative one. In friendship-driven practices, direct adult participation is often unwelcome, but in interest-driven groups we found a much stronger role for more experiences participants to play. Unlike instructors in formal educational settings, however, these adults are passionate hobbyists and creators, and youth see them as experienced peers, not as people who have authority over them. These adults exert tremendous influence in setting communal norms and what educators might call “learning goals,” though they do not have direct authority over newcomers.

A substantial portion of those interactions involve parents talking to their own kids, older and younger siblings communicating with one another, teachers and mentors talking to their students, or even co-workers of different ages communicating. Even when adult-minor communications involve complete strangers, there is typically a socially-beneficial purpose. Think of two people — one an adult and one a minor — debating politics on a discussion board, or creating a Wikipedia entry together. What about a presidential campaign website that involves millions of volunteers of all ages communicating and collaborating to a common purpose? There are countless other examples. How would such interactions be affected by COPPA 2.0? Restricting such interactions would raise profound First Amendment concerns about freedom of speech as well as of association.

In any First Amendment analysis, a court must consider not only the free speech rights at stake and the availability of less restrictive alternatives to regulation, but the governmental interest being advanced. Again, neither COPPA nor the COPPA 2.0 proposals discussed herein (e.g., the New Jersey and Illinois proposals) requires exclusion of older users from a website, nor directly governs the sharing of personal information among users (where that sharing does not also constitute collection by the site itself). But separation of adolescents from adults is likely to be an indirect effect of COPPA 2.0 requirements—as COPPA 2.0 advocates probably realize—because, once PI-collecting sites are required to age-verify users, they will face reputational, political and potentially legal pressure to make interactions between adolescents and children more difficult in the name of “child safety.” More subtly, if PI-collecting site operators have an incentive to avoid being considered “directed at” adolescents, they will also have an incentive to discourage adolescent participation on their site—which achieves a similar result.

Here, one must further ask if attempting to quarantine children from adults (however indirectly) actually advances, on net, a strong governmental interest in child protection. Such a quarantine is unlikely to stop adults with truly nefarious intentions from communicating with minors, as systems designed to exclude participation by adults in a “kids-only” or “adolescents-only” area can be easily circumvented. Given the lack of strong identity records for minors, it’s much easier for an adult to pretend to be a minor than vice versa. The effect of age stratification on truly bad actors is likely to be marginal at best—or harmful at worst: Building walls around adolescents through age-verification might actually make it easier for predators to target teens, since a predator who gains access to a supposedly teen-only site will be less likely to be exposed as a predator by targeting an adult they think is a teen. So for the sake of marginal (if any) gains in child protection, would we not be excluding beneficial interaction between adults and minors?

To hear some of the advocates of COPPA 2.0 talk about how teens currently behave online, one might think that online environments in which adolescents were left to their own devices—imagine a “Teen MySpace” for the 13-17 crowd, walled off from the rest of MySpace—would be far worse, perhaps an online version of Lord of the Flies. These concerns are clearly exaggerated: The critics frequently complain about “the way kids talk to each other these days” while looking at their own past adolescent banter with rose-colored lenses. What is clear is that adolescents (and young adults) behave better in online environments where adults are present, too. Perhaps the best demonstration of this fact has been the uproar from adolescents and young adults that has accompanied Facebook’s explosive growth in popularity among older users in recent months. Many kids hate the idea of adults joining Facebook precisely because the presence of adults encourages kids to “self-regulate” by exercising better judgment and following better netiquette.

Anne Collier, founder and executive director of the child safety advocacy organization Net Family News, Inc. and editor of NetFamilyNews.org and ConnectSafely.org, suggests that the push for “segregation” by age (e.g., creating a teen-only version of Second Life) for safety’s sake is “losing steam” because:

it’s a response to the predator panic teens and parents have been subjected to in U.S. society, not to the realities of youth on the social Web. What nearly a decade of peer-reviewed academic research shows is that peer-to-peer behavior is the online risk that affects many more youth, the vast majority of online kids who are not already at-risk youth offline. Segregating teens from adults online doesn’t address harassment, defamation, imposter profiles, cyberbullying, etc. It may help keep online predators away from kids (even though online predation, or abuse resulting from online communication, constitutes only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation…), which is a great outcome, but it’s not enough unless all that parents are worried about is predators.

Collier discusses the particularly acute problem of “actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender expression,” which the Salt Lake Tribune has noted are “two of the top three reasons secondary school students said their peers were most often bullied at school.” This kind of harassment recently attracted widespread public attention after two 11-year-old boys committed suicide after experiencing anti-gay harassment and bullying at school. Nationwide, “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.” This child safety risk is painfully real, with anti-gay harassment being only its most obvious form. But “segregating” teens from adults seems likely to aggravate this problem by removing adults from the mix as a potential source of discipline.

Of course, adults play a critical role in disciplining interaction among the 0-12 age bracket, but not as direct participants in on-site interaction. Again, how many adults actually want to use Club Penguin? Instead, parents can supervise what their kids do online through parental control software. Parents could, of course, use that same software to monitor what their adolescent kids do, too. But as kids get older, most parents realize that the training wheels have to come off at some point. Few parents will want to spy on their 17-year old until the day before the kid starts college (or enlists in the military or gets married). But most parents probably would prefer that, if their kids are interacting in an online environment, they think twice about what they do and say online. It is by no means clear that restricting online interaction between teens and adults will serve that end.

Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.”

As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most importantly that websites obtain the “verifiable consent” of a child’s parent before collecting personal information about that child or giving that child access to interactive functionality that might allow the child to share their personal information with others. The law was intended primarily to “enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities” as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children.

Yet advocates of expanding COPPA—or “COPPA 2.0″—see COPPA’s verifiable parental consent framework as a means for imposing broad regulatory mandates in the name of online child safety and concerns about social networking, cyber-harassment, etc. Two COPPA 2.0 bills are currently pending in New Jersey and Illinois. The accelerated review of COPPA to be conducted by the FTC next year (five years ahead of schedule) is likely to bring to Washington serious talk of expanding COPPA—even though Congress clearly rejected covering adolescents age 13-16 when COPPA was first proposed back in 1998.

We’ll discuss some of the key points of our paper in a series of blog posts, but here are the top nine reasons for rejecting COPPA 2.0, in that such an approach would:

• Burden the free speech rights of adults by imposing age verification mandates on many sites used by adults, thus restricting anonymous speech and essentially converging—in terms of practical consequences—with the unconstitutional Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA;
• Burden the free speech rights of adolescents to speak freely on—or gather information from—legal and socially beneficial websites;
• Hamper routine and socially beneficial communication between adolescents and adults;
• Reduce, rather than enhance, the privacy of adolescents, parents and other adults because of the massive volume of personal information that would have to be collected about users for authentication purposes (likely including credit card data);

• Would likely be the subject of massive fraud or evasion since it is not always possible to definitively verify the parent-child relationship, or because the system could be “gamed” in other ways by determined adolescents;
• Do nothing to prevent offshore sites and services from operating outside these rules;
• Present major practical challenges for law enforcement officials in the face of such evasion by both domestic users and offshore sites;
• Could destroy opportunities for new or smaller website operators to break into the market and offer competing services and innovations, thus contributing to consolidation of online content and services by erecting barriers to entry; and
• Violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, since Internet activity clearly represents interstate commerce that states have no authority to regulate.

My friend Anne Collier of Net Family News, one of America’s great sages on child safety issues, has produced a terrific list of reasons “Why Technopanics are Bad.”  Technopanics and moral panics are topics I’ve spent quite a bit of time commenting on here. (See 1, 2, 3, 4.) Anne is a rare voice of sanity and sensible advice when it comes to online child safety issues and I encourage you to read all her excellent work on the subject, including her book with Larry Magid, MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking.  Anyway, here’s Anne’s list, and I encourage you to go over to her site and contribute your thoughts and suggestions about what else to add:

Technopanics are bad because they…

• Cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.
• Cause schools to fear and block digital media when they need to be teaching constructive use, employing social-technology devices and teaching new media literacy and citizenship classes throughout the curriculum.
• Turn schools into barriers rather than contributors to young people’s constructive use.
• Increase the irrelevancy of school to active young social-technology users via the sequestering or banning of educational technology and hamstring some of the most spirited and innovative educators.
• Distract parents, educators, policymakers from real risks – including, for example, child-pornography laws that do not cover situations where minors can simultaneously be victim and “perpetrator” and, tragically, become registered sex offenders in cases where there no criminal intent (e.g., see this).
• Reduce the competitiveness of US education among developed countries already effectively employing educational technology and social media in schools.
• Reduce the competitiveness of US technology and media businesses practicing good corporate citizenship where youth online safety is concerned.
• Lead to bad legislation, which aggravates above outcomes and takes the focus off areas where good laws on the books can be made relevant to current technology use.
• Widen the participation gap for youth – technopanics are barriers for children and teens to full, constructive participation in participatory culture and democracy.

Online child safety — especially the fear of predators lurking on social networking sites (SNS) — continues to spur calls by state and federal lawmakers for regulation.  At first, some federal lawmakers advocated outright bans on SNS in schools and libraries via the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA).  Meanwhile, state and local lawmakers — specifically state Attorneys General (AGs) — have been even more vociferous in their calls for regulation in the form of mandatory age verification for social networking sites, which would cover a broad swath of online sites and activities according to their definitions of SNS. But the question that ultimately gets lost in this debate is: Just how much risk do social networking sites really pose for teens?  Which risks are real and which are overblown? And what’s the best way to deal with the risks that we find to be legitimate?

Nancy Willard devotes her life to answering those questions. Willard is one of America’s leading experts on online safety and risk prevention. She runs the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use and she is the author of two outstanding books, Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats and Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens.  In my opinion, Willard’s general approach to online child safety is the most enlightened, level-headed, and likely to be effective. That’s because Willard focuses on putting fears in perspective, identifying the actual risks that kids face online, and devising sensible strategies to deal with risks and problems as they are discovered. Her approach is holistic and built upon sound data, targeted risk-identification strategies, and time-tested education and mentoring methods. For my money, it’s the most sensible approach to online safety issues. In fact, when other parents ask me for “just one thing” to read on the topic, I usually recommend Willard’s work — especially her amazing book Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens. And her background in early childhood education, special education for “at risk” children with emotional and behavior difficulties, as well as experience in computer law, means she is uniquely suited to be analyzing these issues.  In sum, this is woman we should all be closely listening to on these issues.

Recently, Willard has been responding to criticisms that state AGs have leveled against the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) and its final report. [Disclaimer: I was a member of the ISTTF.] I’ve already outlined the ISTTF’s work at length here, but the three key takeaways from the report were that:

1. the risk of predation on social network sites has been over-stated; the data suggest that cyber-bullying is the bigger problem on SNS;
2. there is no silver-bullet technical solution to online child safety concerns, and mandatory age verification, in particular, would not make kids safer online but could even create bigger problems in the long-run;
3. education and empowerment are the real keys to keeping kids safer online.

The response from some state AGs to these findings was quite hostile, with some arguing that the ISTTF did not take online risks seriously enough, or that we relied on “outdated and inadequate” data in reaching our conclusions.  Willard addresses those arguments in a new white paper: “Research that is ‘Outdated and Inadequate?’ An Analysis of the Pennsylvania Child Predator Unit Arrests in Response to Attorney General Criticism of the Berkman Task Force Report.”  In this study, she analyzes data from arrest records from Pennsylvania’s Child Predator Unit to determine exactly how these individuals were operating online. Although it’s just one state’s worth of data — that’s all that seems to have been made publicly available in a single database at this time — it can give us a clue to what might be going on out there. The results are illuminating.

Here’s what Willard found:

The search yielded 143 responses. As noted by the Attorney General, 183 predators had been arrested. All of these arrests were described in the press releases dated from March 21, 2005 to January 13, 2009 – thus allowing for a full analysis of the arrests of sexual predators in the state Pennsylvania for the last 4 years by the Attorney General’s Child Predator Unit. The analysis of the arrests that involved predatory actions, excluding the arrests for child pornography, revealed the following:

• Only 8 incidents involved actual teen victims with whom the Internet was used to form a relationship.
  • In 4 of these incidents, teens or parents reported the contact. The other 4 cases were discovered in an analysis of the computer files of a predator who had been arrested in a sting operation. Five of the cases had led to inappropriate sexual contact. The other situations were discovered prior to any actual contact.
• There were 166 arrests as a result of sting activities where the predator contacted an undercover agent who was posing as a 12 – 14 year old, generally a girl.
  • The vast majority of the stings, 144, occurred in chat rooms. Eleven stings occurred through instant messaging. Nine of the arrests failed to specify the location, but the description bore significant similarity to the chat room incidents. One involved an advertisement that had been placed on Craig’s List.
  • There were only 12 reports of predators being deceptive about their age.
  • The descriptions of these chats incidents bear out what the research reviewed by the [ISTTF’s] Research Advisory Board found – that online predators are rarely deceptive about their interests.

Specifically,”Because the attorneys general have been focusing their attention on the social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook,” Willard made sure to give “special attention to any case that mentioned any activity occurring on either of these two sites.” Here’s what she found in that regard:

• One of the incidents involving an actual teen victim, communications took place on MySpace. This was a rearrest of a person who had already been arrested through a sting.
• A police officer who was arrested for sexual abuse of many teens with whom he had interacted with in the line of duty also had a MySpace account with friendship links to teen girl, but there was no assertion that these communications had led to sexual activity.
• One predator in a sting provided the agent with a link to his Facebook page.
• In 5 of the stings that took place in a chat room, reference was made to the fact that the predator had either looked at the teen’s MySpace account or suggested the teen look at his profile.

Importantly, Willard points out, “Despite the establishment of one or more public profiles on MySpace [by the PA Child Predator Unit], there has apparently not been one successful sting operation initiated on MySpace in the more than two years during which these sting profiles have been in existence.”

From these findings, Willard concludes that:

The insight gained through an analysis of the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s press releases on arrests for online sexual predation provide strong support for the validity of the conclusions of the Berkman Research Advisory Board and demonstrate the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and researchers to address the actual risks to young people from sexual predators online.

In other words, the Pennsylvania data seem to confirm that predation is not as serious of a risk on SNS as some AGs had claimed. “It appears that chat rooms are far less safe than social networking sites and that there is limited inclination and ability of predators to use social networking sites to contact potential teen victims,” Willard notes. Consequently, she argues:

Attention must be paid to the obvious risks related to chat room communications, as well as the risk factors that are being manifested by the young people who may still be frequenting these chat rooms, especially the chat rooms where sexual relations are being discussed. It appears that rather than seek ways to discourage teens from participating in social networking sites, these sites are destinations that should be encouraged as much safe than the alternatives. A focus must be placed on improving the protective features of chat rooms that are frequented by minors.

We need to know more about which chat rooms are in question and why some youth visit those chat rooms. More importantly, how can we develop sensible messages for youth about the dangers of chat rooms that are targeted to adults and adult sexual activity?

But it is vitally important not to lose sight of the big picture here. As Willard summarizes it:

The incidents of online sexual predation are rare. Far more children and teens are being sexually abused by family members and acquaintances. It is imperative that we remain focused on the issue of child sexual abuse – regardless of how the abusive relationship is initiated.

Indeed, volumes of research on child abuse, child predation, and child abduction all point to this same conclusion: Your kids are actually more at risk from known acquaintances — especially family members — than they are from random strangers (including random strangers they might meet online).

Of course, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to develop sensible educational messages for youth about proper online behavior and how to report legitimate problems or troubling interactions that they experience online. Again, Willard has done this elsewhere and many of us (including those of us involved in the Berkman Center task force) have long been pushing for increased resources for online safety education and media literacy efforts as the first, best step towards improving online youth safety. We need to get AGs and other policymakers to work together with us to get this important task started — now!

Finally, Willard correctly notes that the AGs and other law enforcement agencies need to be willing to release more data like the Pennsylvania AG did such that further analysis of this problem is possible. If the AGs’ primary complaint with the ISTTF report was that the data we used was somewhat dated, then the best solution to that problem is for the AGs and other law enforcement agencies to open up their records to the child safety community so that risk researchers like Willard can get a better feel for what’s going on out there and devise strategies to deal with it.  Unfortunately, there’s still too much horn-locking going on between these communities and, sadly, I think some AGs are using this issue to create an atmosphere of fear for political gain. We need to find ways to communicate actual risks — such as those that kids would face in some specific, adult-oriented chat rooms — without going overboard and making parents and the general public think that there’s a bogeyman on every cyber-corner of the Internet.

[ Further reading: As usual, my friend Anne Collier over at Net Family News.org has done a much better job summarizing an issue than I have. Read her discussion of Nancy Willard’s paper and its implications here.]