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!)

Information overload is a hot topic these days. I’ve really enjoyed recent essays by Aaron Saenz (“Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds”), Michael Sacasas (“Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World“), and Peggy Noonan (“Information Overload is Nothing New“) discussing this concern in a thoughtful way.   Thoughtful discussion about this issue is sometimes hard to find because, as I’ve noted here before, information overload is a subject that bitterly divides Internet optimists and pessimists. The pessimists tend to overplay the issue and discuss it in apocalyptic terms. The optimists, by contrast, often dismiss the concern out of hand. Certainly there must be some reasonable middle ground on this issue, no?

There is, and some of it can be found in a fine new book, Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers.  Powers, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, is a gifted storyteller and his walk though the history of philosophy and technology makes this slender volume an enjoyable, quick read.  He begins by reminding us that:

whenever new devices have emerged, they’ve presented the kinds of challenges we face today — busyness, information overload, that sense of life being out of control.  These challenges were as real two millennia ago as they are today, and throughout history, people have been grappling with them and looking for creative ways to manage life in the crowd. (p. 5)

His key insight is that humans can adapt to new technology, but it takes time, patience, humility, and a little effort. “The key is to strike a balance,” he says, between “the call of the crowd” and the “need for time and space apart” from it. (p. 4) The problem we face today is that all the pressure is on us to be what he calls “Digital Maximalists.”  That is, many of us are increasingly out to maximize the time spent in front of various digital “screens” whether we have made the determination that is really in our best interest or not. It has just gradually happened, Powers argues, because “The goal is no longer to be ‘in touch’ but to erase the possibility of ever being out of touch.” (p. 15)

Echoing the concern displayed in Nick Carr’s new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains [review here], as well as John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox [review here], Powers fears that time for focus and introspection “is lost when your days are spread so thin, busyness itself is your true occupation. If every moment is a traffic jam, it’s impossible to engage any experience with one’s whole self. More and more, that’s how we live.” (p. 13)

Even though Powers clearly leans more toward the techno-pessimist camp in this regard, what I like best about his book is that he generally avoids a preachy tone and excessive hand-wringing.  He isn’t one of those techno-pessimists who adopts a holier-than-thou, the-rest-of-you-just-don’t-get-it attitude. In fact, there’s a great deal of self-deprecating humor in the book as Powers explains how he is struggling with the same issues the rest of us are and trying to figure out how to strike the right balance in his own life.  Importantly, he notes that each of us will strike that balance differently. “[E]veryone has to work that out for himself. We’re all different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all way to balance the outward life and the inward one.” (p. 203)  That is a crucial insight. There’s nothing worse than a techno-skeptic who tells us they have discovered the one true path to enlightenment or happiness — especially when it entails giving up new technologies that can have so many beneficial upsides.  Indeed, Powers argues that “It’s never a good idea to buy into the dark fears of the techno-Cassandras, who generally turn out to be wrong. Human beings are skillful at figuring out the best uses of new tools. However, it can take awhile.” (p. 3)

That very much reflects my own position on this issue, even if I tend to lean a bit more in the “pragmatic optimist” direction whereas Powers is more of a pragmatic pessimist.  Nonetheless, my own struggle with information overload and gadget addiction continues. As I have written here before in essays like, “Can Humans Cope with Information Overload?” I’ve been formulating a variety of strategies to cope and find the right balance. For me, the most successful strategy is what I refer to as “mini sabbaticals.”  I try “unplugging” for short spells each day (turning off email & phone, close web browsers, and just generally get away from my computer and other gadgets). Usually I’m offline for an hour in morning and then also in afternoon, and then a couple hours offline during evening. My wife and kids certainly appreciate it!  But it also helps me spend more “quality time” with books, writing, and other pursuits. And I’ve even started telling people not to expect a quick response from me when they call or write.  When I tell people this face-to-face, their reaction is often one of puzzlement, and in some cases even offense. I suppose some of them imagine I’m just saying this to avoid them (which may be the case!)  But I try to stick with the rule and avoid gadgets and connections for little spurts each day and it has been terrifically beneficial for me thus far.  I am able to read even more than I used to and can focus on getting other things done that are important.

Earlier this summer, I went even further.  During a week-long vacation in Germany, I decided to take day-long digital sabbaticals, only checking emails, Twitter, and RSS feeds after 10:00 at night, if at all. It was terrifically refreshing. Simply not having to carry a smartphone with me all day long was a huge relief.  But ignoring email for days at a time was wonderful too. Of course, things had really piled up upon my return to the States.  But that’s another thing I’ve learned to do to cope: Hit that delete button a little more frequently!  Do I really need to read through the hundreds of emails I get each day?  No, not really. Neither do you, I bet.

In Hamlet’s BlackBerry, Powers offers some possible solutions of his own, but they are generally in the form of practical advice about how to lead a good life. “The best solutions serve as a kind of bridge to the tech future, one that ensures that we’ll arrive with our sanity intact.” (p. 155) To find those solutions, he draws upon the wisdom of the ages from figures as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Thoreau, and Marshall McLuhan.  For example, from Thoreau he borrows the notion of finding or creating “a zone of inner simplicity and peace” to create “Walden time” or “Walden zones.”  This could take the form of daily digital sabbaticals, or an area of the home that is free of technology at all times.  I already use variants of this rule in my own home.  Many years ago, my wife and I instituted “Media-Free Mondays” in our house so that the kids understand at least one night every week will be free of TVs, computers, video games, etc.  We use the time to play board games, do arts and crafts, or play outside more.  In other words, Mondays are the Thierer family’s “Walden Zone.”  Again, every family could come up with their own variant of the Walden Zone rule to fit their needs.  At the end of his book, Powers says that his family unplugs their modem each Friday night at bedtime and doesn’t turn it back on until Monday morning — a weekend “Internet Sabbath,” he calls it.  That seems a bit extreme to me but, again, to each his own.

I should be clear that I am not quite as pessimistic as Powers about the impact of technology on humans.  I’m not persuaded by his argument that information overload is having as deleterious of an impact on creative thinking and that “the best human creativity… happens only when we have the time and the mental space to take a new thought and follow it wherever it leads.”  And I think he goes much too far when he makes pronouncements such as “We’re living less and giving less, and the world is the worse for it.” (p. 210, italics in original.)  In both cases, I think there are plenty of counter-examples and positive trends that can be cited that prove such sweeping generalities are off the mark.  Yes, it’s certainly true that many people are struggling from data deluge and that it has complicated their lives in many ways. But the presence of these new tools and the rise of information abundance have alleviated many of the problems that previous generations lamented.  Indeed, for many centuries the primary problem we humans have faced was information poverty. We were starving for informational inputs.  That problems has been largely alleviated and instead replaced by concerns about information overload.  But my point is always a simple one: Isn’t abundance a better dilemma for society to face than scarcity?  As I told Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal recently, I’ll take information overload over information poverty any day!

Nonetheless, the struggle with information clutter will continue.  Assimilating new communications and entertainment technologies into our lives has always been challenging, but, thanks to excellent advice like that offer by William Powers in Hamlet’s BlackBerry, I am optimistic that we humans can do so sensibly and be happier — and wiser — for it in the long-run.

Other Views / Additional Reading:

• official website for the book
• a review of the book by Laurie Winer in The New York Times
• a review by David Harsanyi that appeared in The Wall Street Journal
• Jennifer Howard’s review of the book + Carr’s “The Shallows”
• a review by Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor
• a review from the Good Experience blog
• my essays on “Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists,” an earlier piece on information overload, and my reviews of related books on this subject by Carr, Lanier, Siegel, Keen, Helprin, Baron, and Shirky.
• NPR radio spot on the book
• and two videos embedded below, one from a bookstore appearance by Powers and the other is an interview with the PBS “News Hour”

Over at MediaFreedom.org, a new site devoted to fighting the fanaticism of radical anti-media freedom groups like Free Press and other “media reformistas,” I’ve started rolling out a 5-part series of essays about “The Battle for Media Freedom.” In Part 1 of the series, I defined what real media freedom is all about, and in Part 2 I discussed the rising “cyber-collectivist” threat to media freedom.  In my latest installment, I offer an analytical framework that better explains the major differences between the antagonists in the battle over media freedom.

Understanding the Origins of Political Struggles

In his many enlightening books, Thomas Sowell, a great economist and an even better political scientist, often warns of the triumph of good intentions over good economics. It’s a theme that F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman both developed extensively before him. But Sowell has taken this analysis to an entirely differently level in books like A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, and The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy . Sowell teaches us that no matter how noble one’s intentions might be, it does not mean that those ideas will translate into sound public policy. Nonetheless, since “the anointed” believe their own intentions are pure and their methods are sound, they see nothing wrong with substituting their will for the will of millions of individuals interacting spontaneously and voluntarily in the marketplace. The result is an expansion of the scope of public decision-making and a contraction of the scope of private, voluntary action. As a result, mandates replace markets, and freedom gives way central planning.

Sowell developed two useful paradigms to help us better understand “the origins of political struggles.” He refers to the “constrained” versus “unconstrained” vision and separates these two camps according to how they view the nature of man, society, economy, and politics:

The Unconstrained Nature of the Cyber-Collectivist Vision

Sowell’s taxonomy provides a useful frame of reference for today’s debate over communications and media policy. The unconstrained vision crowd here might best be labeled “cyber-collectivists.” This collectivism is not necessarily the hard-edged Marxist brand of collectivism of modern times. It is more the collectivism of Plato’s rule by “philosopher kings” as much as it is modern European “social democrat” collectivism. It generally rejects outright State ownership of the means of production, although there are some exceptions. (Free Press founder Robert McChesney, for example, would go much further than most other collectivists in having the State intervene and directly control or even own media and communications outlets and infrastructure).

Like their many “unconstrained” intellectual predecessors, what unifies the cyber-collectivists is the belief that the State should have a hand in guiding market outcomes toward a “fairer” end. The cyber-collectivists, for example, get indigestion over unequal patterns whether we are talking audience shares or technological diffusion. They are quick to allege “market failure” when some of their preferred media voices only capture miniscule audience shares (even when it’s just the result of consumer demand in action). And when some people or communities gain access to a network or new technology quicker than others, they are often quick to conclude some nefarious plot by greedy capitalists must be to blame.

Of course, in reality, this is just the way things in a free society have always worked. “Liberty upsets patterns” the late Harvard University philosopher Robert Nozick taught us in his 1974 masterpiece “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” What Nozick meant was that there is a fundamental tension between liberty and egalitarianism such that when people are left to their own devices, some forms of inequality would be inevitable and persistent throughout society. Correspondingly, any attempt to force patterns, or outcomes, upon society requires a surrender of liberty.

All of this is equally true for media and communications policy. Just as there will never be perfect equality of outcomes in the provision of homes, cars, or incomes, there will never be perfect equality of tech gadgets or audience shares for media speakers / outlets.

Speech Redistributionism

The cyber-collectivists are not content with that, however. Just as they call for a redistribution of wealth to rectify the supposed injustice of unequal incomes, so too they call for “something to be done” to “balance” outcomes and ensure “fairer” outcomes. We might call this “media redistributionism” or even “speech redistributionism.”

Consider, for example, a proposal set forth by Cass Sunstein, the prolific University of Chicago law professor (and now Obama Administration official). In his 2001 book Republic.com, in which he suggests that government should consider requiring “electronic sidewalks” in cyberspace to encourage more balance on Internet websites. The state would impose the equivalent of “must carry” mandates on popular or partisan websites, forcing them to carry links to opposing viewpoints. In the name of “media access” or “fairness,” Sunstein and others are apparently willing to let the state impose tyrannical mandates on private website operators, forcing them to open their private property to use by others. Essentially it’s a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet Age.

Elsewhere Sunstein has argued in favor of greater “public interest” regulation to actually change public attitudes and tastes, claiming that there “is a large difference between the public interest and what interests the public.” [See: Television and the Public Interest, 88 California Law Review 499, 501 (2000).] He and many other cyber-collectivist scholars claim that they have a better idea of what interests the public. Essentially, the public doesn’t know what’s best for them, so someone else must tell them—and potentially even force supposedly better choices upon them. For example, Ellen P. Goodman of the Rutgers-Camden School of Law, and currently an adviser to the Federal Communications Commission, believes that, “a proactive media policy must not only correct a poorly functioning market, but also provide diversions around existing media markets and tastes. Proactive media policy can do this by changing consumer wants.”

The thought of having government “change consumer wants” is positively Orwellian and raises the obvious question: according to who’s tastes and values? The viewing and listening public has a broad array of interests and desires that cannot be easily gauged by congressional lawmakers, and certainly not by five unelected bureaucrats at the FCC. As media scholar Benjamin Compaine has correctly noted, “[i]n democracies, there is no universal ‘public interest.’ Rather there are numerous and changing ‘interested publics.’”

And, more practically, how should such goals be accomplished in an age of information abundance? The sheer scale and volume of media activity taking place across an unprecedented variety of communications platforms makes it difficult to imagine how a scarcity-era regulatory regime will be applied going forward. Are we going to have speech patrols standing on every cyber-corner policing the Net for “fairness” violations or determining what is and isn’t “in the public interest”?

Opportunity, Not Outcome, Is What Matters Most

Those of us who subscribe to a more “constrained vision” understand that what is really important is equality of media opportunity, not equality of media outcomes. A focus on the latter is both foolish and destructive. It is foolish because media equality is an impossibility absent extreme measures, which in turn explains why it is destructive. We would need totalitarian government controls on media outputs and consumption in order to achieve anything remotely close to “balance” or “equality” in terms of media results. What counts most is that people have a chance to be heard, not whether millions are listening or whether there is a perfect distribution of digital technology.

Again, that is not enough for the unconstrained visionaries who guide the cyber-collectivist movement. They want action and they want results and they want them now! And, they will always remind us, they have the best of intentions, so we should just trust them. The problem is, intentions + action = control. When they say “something to be done” that is usually code (excuse the pun) for heavy-handed government action to control the messy, un-patterned outcomes of a free marketplace.

And so we arrive at the critical difference between the cyber-freedom and the cyber-collectivist movements: Those of us who adhere to a more constrained view of nature, society and economy (i.e., the cyber-freedom movement) believe that liberty is the default position and that it generally trumps other values. Supposed “market failures” (or “code failures,” as the case may be) are ultimately better addressed by voluntary, spontaneous, bottom-up, marketplace responses than by the coerced, top-down, governmental solutions that the cyber-collectivists call for. Moreover, the decisive advantage of the market-driven approach to correcting code failure comes down to the rapidity and nimbleness of those response(s). Finally, and quite importantly, we in the cyber-freedom movement are not so quick to cry “market failure!” and call in the code cops. We understand that those messy, un-patterned market outcomes are the result of an evolutionary process or trial-and-error and that society and economy benefit from the resulting learning process.

Sure, there may be times when governments may need to intervene at the margins, but we would counsel against abrupt and incessant interventions to correct every supposed “market failure” or “unfair” outcome. After all, those interventions will simply beget more and more interventions to correct the inevitable failures of, or dissatisfaction with, previous interventions. There is simply no sugar-coating the reality that, no matter how well-intentioned, more and more media control is the inevitable prescription.

In my next installment in this series, I will detail the cyber-collectivist blueprint for radical media redistributionism by outlining this movement’s goals and its proposed methods of control.

David Leonhardt of The New York Times penned an interesting essay a few days ago entitled, “Do Video Games Equal Less Crime?” reflecting upon the same FBI crime data I wrote about earlier this week, which showed rapid drops in violent crime last year (on top of years of steady declines).  Crimes of all sorts plummeted last year despite the serious economic recession we find ourselves in.  Downturns in the economy are typically followed by upticks in crime. Not so this time.  Which leads Leonhardt to wonder if perhaps exposure to violent media (especially violent video games) could have played a positive role in tempering criminal activity in some fashion:

Video games can not only provide hours of entertainment. They can also give people — especially young men, who play more than their fair share of video games and commit more than their fair share of crimes — an outlet for frustration that doesn’t involve actual violence. Video games obviously have many unfortunate side effects. They can promote obsessive, antisocial behavior and can make violent situations seem ordinary. But might video games also have an upside? I’m willing to consider the idea.

Go Back to the Greeks

What Leonhardt is suggesting here goes by the name “cathartic effect hypothesis” and debates have raged over it for centuries.  Seriously, the fight goes all the way back to the great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. And, as with everything else, Aristotle had it right! Well, at least in my opinion he did, but I am a rabid Aristotealian.  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.” (See Part IV of Aristotle’s 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.

Of “Tragic Wonder” & Balanced Passions

Again, what Aristotle believed was important about such tales was precisely that they help give rise to a heightened sense of “tragic wonder” that helped us purge away or balance out similar passions brewing in the human psyche. [For a broader discussion of the catharsis debate from Plato and Aristotle on down to the modern “media effects” psychologists and social scientists, see Marjorie Heins’s brilliant 2001 book, Not in Front of the Children: ‘Indecency,’ Censorship and the Innocence of Youth, p. 228-253.]

One might just as easily apply this thinking to many of the most popular video games children play today, including those with violent overtones. That’s exactly what Gerald Jones does in his book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence:

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.

Judge Richard Posner used similar logic when penning the 7th Circuit’s 2001 decision in American Amusement Machine Association v. Kendrick, which struck down an Indianapolis ordinance prohibiting anyone who operated more than five arcade games on their premises from allowing an unaccompanied minor to play games that would be considered “harmful to minors.” In the Kendrick decision, Posner noted that “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.”

Don’t Be the Boy in the (Intellectual) Bubble

Posner’s opinion for the court was a blistering tour-de-force that included a review of violence in literature throughout history. “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,” he noted. “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,” he argued. “People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.” This is a different sort of construction of cathartic effect hypothesis. In essence, Posner is explaining how exposure to violently-themed media helps to gradually assimilate us into the realities of the world around us.

Such thinking will undoubtedly remain controversial—perhaps even outlandish—to some. But the history of art and entertainment has always been filled with its share of controversies in terms of its impact on culture and society. Indeed, one generation’s trash often becomes a subsequent generation’s treasure. Sculptures, paintings and works of literature widely condemned in one period were often praised—even consider mainstream—in the next.  As The Economist magazine editorialized in the summer of 2005: “Novels were once considered too low-brow for university literature courses, but eventually the disapproving professors retired. Waltz music and dancing were condemned in the 19^th century; all that was thought to be ‘intoxicating’ and ‘depraved’, and the music was outlawed in some places. Today it is hard to imagine what the fuss was about. And rock and roll was thought to encourage violence, promiscuity and Satanism; but today even grannies listen buy Coldplay albums.” I’ve written more about such “moral panics” here in the past.

Humans Adapt

Here is the important point: somehow we get through it. We learn to assimilate culture into our lives that previous generations feared or loathed. 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.”

If you subscribe to the cathartic effect school of thinking, however, you typically do no fear social or technological change as much because you realize that human adapt. We learn to cope with cultural or technological changes, and in many cases we are actually made better off as a species because of those changes.

Can It Be Proven One Way or the Other?

But is there any hard evidence to prove or disprove the cathartic effect hypothesis? The problem is, as I have noted here before repeatedly, we must never forget the first iron law of statistical analysis: Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Whether we are talking about those artificial lab experiments or the real-world data sets, we cannot lose sight of the fact that just because B follows A it does not mean A caused B. That is particularly the case when it comes to human behavior, which is complex and ever-changing.

That being said, I’ve also suggested that, at some point, a consistent trend in real-world crime data must suggest that at least the opposite is not the case. Thus, when it comes to the supposed relationship between violent media and real-world violence, I have to believe that if there was anything to the thesis that a correlation exists, we would have to see it manifest itself at some point in crime statistics. But we have now experienced roughly 15 years of steady drops in all categories of criminal activity, especially juvenile violence, while at the same time witnessing a fairly steady increase in exposure to video games and violently-theme media in general.

Incidentally, Leonhardt’s New York Times article cites a recent study by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in May 2009 entitled, “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” which tried to use some hard data to evaluate the cathartic effect hypothesis. Dahl and DellaVigna found that:

exposure to violent movies has three main effects on violent crime: (i) it significantly reduces violent crime in the evening on the day of exposure; (ii) by an even larger percent, it reduces violent crime during the night hours following exposure; (iii) it has no significant impact in the days and weeks following the exposure. We interpret the first finding as voluntary incapacitation: potential criminals that choose to attend the movie theater forego other activities that have higher crime rates. As simple as this finding is, it has been neglected in the literature, despite its quantitative importance. We interpret the second finding as substitution away from a night of more volatile activities, in particular, a reduction in alcohol consumption. The third finding implies that the same-day impact on crime is not offset by intertemporal substitution of crime. An important component of these interpretations is the sorting of more violent individuals into violent movie attendance. These findings appear to contradict evidence from laboratory experiments that document an increase in violent  behavior following exposure to movie violence.

Of course, it’s just one study, so I’m not ready to rest my entire case upon it (or even dozens of other studies like it).  But I do think they’re on to something.

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.

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.