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 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.]