An Internet safety study (PDF) just released by Cox Communications shows that teens may be a bit more safety conscious than previously thought.
The survey, which was done by Harris Interactive, asked 655 13- to 18-year-olds about their online and cell phone behavior, specifically addressing issues of cyberbullying and sexting. The study was in partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and "America's Most Wanted Host" John Walsh.
For the purposes of the study, cyberbullying was defined as "harassment, embarrassment, or threats online or by text message," while sexting referred to "sending sexually suggestive text or e-mails with nude or nearly-nude photos."
(Credit:
Cox Communications Teen Online & Wireless Survey)
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of teens (72 percent) have a social-networking profile, while 73 percent use cell phones and 91 percent have an e-mail address.
What they know vs. what they do
The study raises an interesting contradiction. 59 percent of the teens say that posting personal information or photos on public blogs or social-networking sites is either "somewhat unsafe" or "very unsafe." Only 7 percent say it's "very safe," while 34 percent say it's "somewhat safe." Yet, when asked about their own behavior, 62 percent of the kids post photos of themselves, 50 percent share their real age, 45 percent the name of their school, and 41 percent the city where they live. When it comes to more private information, only 4 percent post their address, 9 percent "places where you typically go," and 14 percent post their cell phone number.
The study's executive summary explains, "Though they are aware of the risks, many teens expose personal information about themselves online anyway."
That revelation appears alarming but after looking at other research about teen online risk, I actually find it reassuring.
What kids say they know about online risks appears to be what adults have been telling them for years. But when you look at the real risk factors, their behavior isn't nearly as dangerous as even teens say they think it is.
An in-depth and academically rigorous 2005 study from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center found that posting personal information online does not, by itself, correlate with risk. As all of the studies show, millions of kids engage in this practice and very few encounter any serious problem as a result. Let's face it, the whole premise behind sites like Facebook and MySpace is to share that type of information and despite some of the hysteria, there have been very few reported problems of young people being victimized as a result of them putting this type of information online.
Of course, nothing--including attending school--is 100 percent safe, but the 34 percent who said that posting personal information online is "somewhat safe" are getting it right.
Cyberbullying and sexting numbers not as bad as thought
The cyberbullying numbers are also quite reassuring, especially when you compare them to some earlier studies.
The summary points out that "Cyberbullying is widespread among today's teens, with over one-third having experienced it, engaged in it, or known of friends who have who have done either." But that one-third is cumulative of bullies, people who have been bullied and even people who know someone who's been bullied.
The survey found that approximately 19 percent of teens say they've been cyberbullied online or via text message and that 10 percent say they've cyberbullied someone else. The largest group, 27 percent, say they have "seen or heard of a friend who was bullied" online, with 16 percent saying they've "seen or heard of a friend who's bullied others online or by cell phone.
Of course any amount of bullying is unacceptable but the numbers from this survey are lower than several previous studies.
There is also good news about sexting. The most widely quoted study on sexting from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reported (PDF) that 20 percent of teens "say they have sent/posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves." But the data from the Cox survey showed that while 20 percent of teens "have engaged in sexting," that number, too, is cumulative. Only 9 percent "sent a sext," while 17 percent received one, and 3 percent forwarded a "sext." Again, that 9 percent number is too high but it's less than half the 20 percent figure commonly used. And 90 percent of the kids who sent sexts said that nothing bad happened, even though 74 percent of the kids agreed that sexting is "wrong." Twenty-three percent felt that it's OK if both parties are OK with it and only 3 percent said "there is nothing wrong with it."
This survey, said Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use Executive Director Nancy Willard, "clearly demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of young people have not engaged in risk-taking online behavior or been harmed online. Also, it appears that teens are sensitive to the potentially damaging implications of the material they post online."
While the news from this survey is mostly good, there is still a significant minority of teens who are harming others, being victimized by other teens, or putting themselves at risk. That's why it's important for parents to talk with their teens about appropriate use of the Internet. Don't scare them or shut down their use, but do remind them to mind their manners, think before they post, and seek help if someone is bullying or harassing them.
Teens in Tech, a blogging network that's written by young adults, announced Friday that it has acquired Youth Bloggers Network for an undisclosed sum. According to a post on the Youth Bloggers Network blog, both companies "decided that by joining forces, our projects could help each other vastly." Going forward, the combined company wants to create unique Wordpress themes, e-books, coupons, and a variety of community features "to slowly transform Youth Bloggers Network into a social network for young and teen bloggers."
Kardia Health Systems, a company that was formed to commercialize the Echocardiography Information Management System from the Mayo Clinic, will launch an online reporting system for vascular laboratories this weekend. The Web-based platform will allow doctors to communicate with patients and other practitioners over the Web detailing a patient's vascular information and past procedures. The company claims users will be able to focus more on patient services by deploying the platform.
GetJar, an independent mobile app store, announced Friday that it has topped 400 million mobile app downloads since its launch in 2004. Over the past month alone, it has witnessed a 200 percent increase in downloads over the same period in 2008. The company claims that based on its download figures, its app store's popularity is second only to the Apple App Store. GetJar's store provides apps for over 1,300 different handsets.
ConnectedVentures, owner of online comedy site CollegeHumor, has acquired sports satire site SportsPickle, the company announced Thursday. The terms of the deal were not disclosed and there is currently no word on whether SportsPickle will remain a separate entity or be rolled into CollegeHumor.
Representatives from Piczo, a social network geared toward teens, have confirmed that the site will be rolling up into Stardoll, another social site that focuses on virtual doll accessorizing.
They'll be combining with a third site called Paperdoll Heaven to form what's called the "Stardoll Network." Then, presumably, they will have access to a stronger lineup of common advertisers.
Financial terms have not been disclosed. But to put things into perspective, Piczo says it has 30 million registered members and 10 million monthly unique visitors. Stardoll is slightly smaller. But with the biggest social sites now numbering well over 100 million members, there's no surprise that smaller players are consolidating in this difficult (to say the least) financial climate.
What's interesting is that Piczo used to be one to watch: before it was overtaken by MySpace, it was the No. 1 social site for teens in the U.K. But about a year ago, it began to hit visible trouble stemming from tepid traffic and rumored layoffs.
Universal Music Group has licensed its music videos to Kiwibox, a social-media site for teens that relaunched in August after quietly existing since the late '90s.
Under the terms of the agreement, Universal's music videos will begin being distributed on the "KiwiboxTV" video portal before the end of the year. Universal's labels and artists will receive a cut of ad revenue in compensation.
"Music remains one of the most important outlets of teen expression, and Kiwibox has long been a leader in promoting artists to its rapidly expanding community, " CEO Lin Daisaid in a statement. "This (Universal) partnership validates our long-standing relationship with the music industry and commitment to providing valuable content for teens."
Kiwibox's slant is that it encourages members to create videos, articles, and other content for the site; the best creations are featured in an online "magazine."
Universal appears to have embraced a wide distribution strategy when it comes to social media. Its catalog is already available on a number of social networks and youth-focused sites, including Imeem, and its U.K. arm sponsored an original series on AOL's Bebo. The company has taken a stake in social site Buzznet, and joined other major labels in backing MySpace Music.
Today in teen news: Kiwibox, a social network and editorial content site geared toward the Miley Cyrus set, announced Monday that it's exited beta and launched "Kiwibox 2.0." In the new launch are sleeker drag-and-drop profile pages, a new casual-gaming section, more video content aggregated on "KiwiboxTV," and more editorial content contributed by members.
As with many teen-oriented sites, Kiwibox members earn "points" for completing activities on the site--writing articles for its weekly online magazine, filling out certain profile criteria--which they can then redeem for real-world prizes like iPods. Right now, Kiwibox has about 60 pieces of original content per day,
Something you probably didn't know: the oddly named Kiwibox first launched in 1999, meaning that it's been around since before many of its young members could read. The good news is that it's stayed afloat. The not-so-good news is that its membership count is still only 1.8 million, enough for an active user base but still a fraction of the size of much younger sites like MySpace or even smaller ones like Piczo.
After the relaunch, Kiwibox hopes to rev up its numbers with an impending marketing campaign as well as content partnerships that will syndicate its own content across the Web and bring in new third-party content. There will be technological partnerships as well, including a deal with a video partner to create a branded player.
CEO Lin Dai is confident it'll succeed, too. "We know the content plus social network model really works," he said in an interview with CNET News.com last week.
It's no Facebook, but social site MyYearbook can still play with the popular kids: the site has announced $13 million in Series B venture funding. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners with existing investors US Venture Partners and First Round Capital chipping in as well. Norwest's Sergio Monsalve has joined the site's board of directors.
Founded in 2005 when co-founder Catherine Cook was a sophomore in high school (the two other co-founders are her older brothers Dave and Geoff, who serves as CEO), MyYearbook focuses on a decidedly younger demographic than Facebook and even News Corp.'s MySpace, which is frequently considered to be a teen hub. The site currently has a major partnership, for example, with the Teen Choice Awards hosted by youth sensation Miley Cyrus. Not exactly a pick for the over-21 crowd.
With the new funding round, MyYearbook has raised $16.8 million total. The purpose for raising so much wasn't directly addressed by the site, with a release ambiguously saying that it will be used to "develop new services for its members and continue to drive revenue." Right now, per Hitwise, the site pulls in about 10 million unique visitors per month, and 2 billion page views. That's still small compared with Facebook and MySpace, but nothing to sneer at either.
Rumors swirled last year that the site was going to be acquired by InterActiveCorp; they weren't true, stemming from a misunderstanding after the site gave a "mock pitch" to IAC czar Barry Diller at a conference.
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have reputations as time-sucking procrastination tools, but a new study from the University of Minnesota says au contraire.
Social networks build beneficial technological, creative, and communication skills, the study says, leading the researchers to actually describe social networks with the adjective "educational." Who knew?
"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher from the school's College of Education and Human Development, said in a release Friday.
Data from the study came from teenagers ages 16 to 18 in about a dozen urban high schools in the Midwest.
"Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout," Greenhow continued. "They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology."
As an added bonus, social networks may be part of the reason that low-income students are largely just as technologically proficient as their peers, contradicting parts of a 2005 Pew study that detailed an economic "digital divide." According to the new study, a full 94 percent of students use the Internet, 82 percent use it at home, and 77 percent have social-networking profiles.
The "digital divide," obviously, goes far beyond Facebook profiles, and social networks come with a whole host of new problems like cyberbullying, but at least there are signs that it could be leveling the playing field a bit.
Sprawling new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp on Tuesday announced that it has acquired StarNet Interactive, an Israel-based company that operates GirlSense, a social site for teen girls. More specifically, GirlSense describes itself as "online dress-up games for girls with fashion sense."
Terms of the deal, which is part of IAC's Consumer Applications and Portals division, were not disclosed.
Other teen-oriented properties in IAC's arsenal, with which GirlSense will likely be intertwined, include virtual world Zwinky and profile customization site Webfetti. GirlSense counts its registered users at 13 million.
"Part of our growth strategy includes acquisition of products and companies that complement our core competencies," John Park, president and CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals, said in a statement Tuesday. "Adding Girlsense.com to our existing teen-targeted product portfolio provides us with broader teen mindshare and access to the coveted tween demographic."
The ad-supported GirlSense--advertisements are currently served by women's-focused ad network Glam Media--is also aligned with IAC's broader restructuring.
Late last year, the company announced that it would be splitting into five separate corporations as an attempt to center its operations on ad-supported media rather than retail or financial services. And after lying low through the spin-off process and a boardroom battle, the Barry Diller-helmed IAC appears to be back on track with its historically aggressive acquisition strategy.
Last week, IAC's Ask.com division acquired the parent company of Dictionary.com.
NEW YORK--A coalition of law enforcement authorities and representatives from social-networking site MySpace.com gathered Monday morning to unveil an extensive new plan for ensuring the safety of minors on the Internet.
Under the agreement, MySpace has pledged to work with the attorneys general on a set of principles to combat harmful material on social-networking sites (pornography, harassment, cyberbullying, and identity theft, among other issues), better educate parents and schools about online threats, cooperate with law enforcement officials around the country, as well as develop new technology for age and identity verification on social-networking sites.
"Today's announcement is a landmark step forward in providing new protections for teenage members of social-networking sites such as MySpace," Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, said at the press conference here.
The new Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking, led by attorneys general Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, consists of Nigam as well as the attorneys general of 49 total U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The group has released a "Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking," which it hopes will achieve industrywide approval from other social-networking sites and Internet providers.
The lone state missing from the task force is Texas. North Carolina's Roy Cooper, speaking on behalf of the coalition's executive committee--Cooper, Blumenthal, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and Marc Dann of Ohio--would not comment on the reason why. The members of the executive committee were joined by Anne Milgram, attorney general of New Jersey, as well as Steve Cohen, a representative for New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said later on Monday that his office declined to participate because he didn't consider the proposed safety measures to be strong enough.
In the press conference, the attorneys general acknowledged that existing standards of law enforcement simply don't suffice in the rapidly changing climate of the Internet. "You're in an area where what you are looking at today will not be what you're looking at in six months," Cohen said. "There is an exponential change that goes on with each passing week and month, and you really do need to bring together the best minds and the best ideas."
The task force aims for cooperation from other social-networking sites, namely Facebook, which reached its own agreement with Cuomo's office over sex offender data on the site in October. "We are calling on Facebook and other social-networking sites today to adopt these principles, to put these safety practices in effect, and to join the task force," Cooper said. "We think it's critical that this be industrywide.
When a member of the audience asked why reaching an agreement with MySpace had taken this long--the site was founded in 2004--Cooper said that it had been an ongoing process. "We recognized pretty soon that this was going to be a problem and we began pushing legislation, we began exploring litigation, (and) we've been in discussion with MySpace for about two years," Cooper said. "We talked to other social-networking sites. It has taken us this long to culminate in this agreement." He added that the negotiations significantly improved when MySpace was acquired by the News Corp. division Fox Interactive Media in 2005.
Indeed, MySpace's dealings with law enforcement officials have been ongoing. Last spring, a group of eight states' attorneys general wrote an open letter to the site expressing concern about the numbers of registered sex offenders with profiles on the site. After initially asserting that federal and state laws prevented it from meeting the attorneys' requests, MySpace eventually unveiled a preliminary plan for compliance.
The attorneys general confirmed in Monday's press conference that they wanted to avoid legal action against MySpace and social-networking sites in general. "Litigation is costly, time-consuming, (and) uncertain in its result," Blumenthal said. They also acknowledged that law enforcement officials still don't see eye-to-eye with social-networking sites on a variety of issues, namely the feasibility of identity and age verification. The attorneys general believe it's technologically possible; Nigam and the rest of MySpace say it needs more development.
"We are not papering over or concealing our continued differences," Blumenthal said. "This process of discussion has been difficult, daunting, but also extraordinarily educational."
It may be too soon to say Flip.com has completely flopped, but Conde Nast has indeed flipped its strategy.
The teenage girl-centric site, which the company's CondeNet Web unit launched last February, has been morphed from a standalone social network to a set of distributed Web applications designed for existing social networks' developer platforms. It'll first go live on the Facebook Platform, according to Conde Nast.
In essence, the magazine-publishing giant realized that capitalizing on the popularity of existing social networks was probably a better strategy than trying to create its own.
The original Flip was centered around shared "flipbooks" that members could create using photos, videos, and other content--and as many predicted, it didn't gain a whole lot of momentum. Currently, it has only 300,000 registered users, and TechCrunch noted that traffic measured by ComScore has been plummeting.
The Flip home page will remain, but the majority of its features will be tweaked into applications suited for Facebook and its brethren. But this niche might not be any more open: companies like Slide and RockYou have already made it big as widget creators--not to mention the overwhelming glut of other applications that can make it extremely difficult to rise above the noise. Flip's new strategy will have to offer something really new.
