 My name is Merlin Horton, I'm the Executive Director of the Safe Online Outreach Society. I used to be a youth outreach worker. I worked for the ReConnect program. I swore when I was a ReConnect worker I'd say it three times every presentation because it was a wonderful program. I turned 40 in the year 2000, so now you know how old I am. And I got too old to be an outreach worker and hang out at the bus and the pool stall, pool hall and the malls anymore. So I had to find a new job. The other thing about me is that I'm a geek. I had my first laptop in 1996. It had, or 86, sorry, I had 4K of memory and we backed it up to a cassette deck. And I was online in East of Mission in my little house with the wood stove in 1995. We were online on dial-up on something called Internet Relay Chat and we had flame wars with people all over the world. At that point they were calling it the information superhighway and I had street kids. So the idea that this new level of community and society was going to have a huge impact on particularly my high-risk youth, but all youth in general became a very strong drive for me and I founded this solos in the year 2002. I don't recommend it. Don't form a nonprofit society. There's no money in it. You work all the time. So there you are. We're a group of volunteers over the last 10 years. We've presented to over 100,000 people in British Columbia, Western Canada and in Europe. And we do presentations for schools and professionals. And we also have some publications in 2007. I was the lead author on best, bridging the gap, best practices to address the high-risk activities of BC youth online. This is a bitly bundle. If you take a picture of that screen you will find the references to everything I'm about to talk to. So I have several academic papers I'm going to refer to. All of them are available on that website on a list and their live links so you can hot link outside of them. Just another little geeky thing for you to play with when you get home. So I will return to that if you like. So I'd like to take a look at the online use of social media by children and youth. Take a look at some basic internet safety messages that we're providing to young people and parents and then some ideas about how to combat cyberbullying. So youth use of the internet is almost 100%. And that's not just in urban large urban centers. That's throughout British Columbia, I don't know if you're aware, but in the past five or six years, TELUS has pushed broadband access into even the most isolated and remote communities, Fort St. James, very small communities throughout the province have broadband access. And the young people I've found in rural settings are as quick to pick up the technologies as those are in urban centers. You can see here that we're a connected nation about this, Faye Mishnah, suggested that about 98% of Canadian youth use it daily. And they acquire the knowledge much faster than the adults in their life. I'd like to introduce you to the participatory format that we use in classrooms at our solos presentation. So I'd like to ask you a few quick questions and I'll give you some feedback on generally what I would find in a grade four class compared to your responses. So can I show my hands here who has an email address? Who has two, three, four, five, six, seven, over ten. Thank you. Most young people in grade four have more than one email address, if not three or four. Most of those are for good reason. I advise young people to have a junk email to address to sign up on. Who has a server-based email address? It ends at Telus or at Shaw, at Unisurf. Okay, what about a cloud-based email? Google, Yahoo, Hotmail? Gmail? Absolutely. Young people as well are moving all their data into the cloud even though they're not necessarily aware of what that idea means or what the security risks are once it's there. So they store data in the cloud. So who goes on Skype? Okay, way more grade four students go on Skype. Grade four students are talking to each other after school on Skype. Not on the phone anymore. I used to go home and sit on the phone all night. But kids are going home to sit on Skype. What about Twitter? Who's tweeting? Excellent, thank you. I am finding an explosion in grade six and seven girls who are using Twitter just in the last two years. I will ask a class of 100 high school students. And one student at least will have more than 300 followers on Twitter. Those are thought leaders within our schools. Those are the young people that we should be targeting to take messages out because they already have the fluency in how young people are communicating. And what else we got? Who's on Facebook? Okay, you got 150, 150, 175, 180, 100, 200, 225, 250, 300, 350, 400, 500. Thank you. Anybody know the maximum number of friends on Facebook? 5,000. Thank you very much. Give them a boy. Take a prize. There you go. I ask kids who's friends with their parents. Anybody here friends with their parents or their kids or their friends with their kids? Absolutely. And just for the young people in the room here, who set up their parents' profile for them on Facebook? Moving on, who downloads music through peer-to-peer networks? Lime wire, BitTorrents. Absolutely. Grade fours are downloading BitTorrents through Pirate Bay. Downloading software, games, very well-versed and all that. And iTunes, which has legitimized downloading music, is used by the majority of young people in some way, shape, or form with somebody's credit card. Gamers. This is an area of vast concern. Okay, who's a gamer? Gamers? Okay, I was at a class last week and I started asking about gamers and all of a sudden the boys in the room got interested. And I said, okay boys, what games are you playing? And I said, you know, who's playing Halo? Who's playing Gears of War? And I had a little boy in grade four jump out of his chair and go, yeah! He's in grade four. The age for Call of Duty is 18. Call of Duty is played by adults who will rather kill kids and blow them up to steal their in-game money than put up with them. We don't let our kids go to bars or discos or strip joints or casinos. But the number of grade four and five students that I have self-reporting, paying Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty, is unbelievable to me. Kids with cell phones, you guys got handhelds? I ask kids if they have cell phones, they say, yeah, but what about a handheld computer, including an iPod touch with Wi-Fi access? Absolutely. Majority of young people now are walking around with a computer in their pocket, stronger and more powerful than the NASDAQ computers of the 1969. Stronger and more powerful than we can even imagine. And that also circumvents that whole thing about, well, do you have a computer in your bedroom? I talked about that briefly in the morning. But with handheld computers and tablets, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you're doing to a computer because young people are accessing from multiple devices. Uploading videos. Who's uploaded a video? Thank you. Lots of people uploading, kids uploading and mashing up videos. And online drama. You're going to hear me talk a little bit about the term cyberbullying today. But I've found that kids aren't necessarily identifying with that very well. I say, who's been cyberbullied? And they'll go, I say, who's had drama online? And the hands go up. We need to understand that there's a continuum of activity online. And I'll get back to that in a moment. And who's seen post-if-you-hate sites or burn pages on Facebook? Who's seen rage-baiting, which is saying something just to piss somebody off? These things are going on. And we need, as adults, caring for our young children to know these ideas. We need to know the language. And a few other quick questions. What have I got else here? I know I love that. Internet services. I ask young people, who did you learn from? And who have you taught? And when I ask them, who did you learn from? They say, well, I learned from myself. I taught myself. And who have you taught? Well, they've taught their parents and their younger brothers and sisters and their teachers. And the big laugh in the room is when I say, who here had to teach their grandma how to email? We have a generation of young people who have been put in charge of technology without eldership. I had people older than me to go to talk to, I grew up on a farm. So I could talk to somebody about horses. Or my aunt would talk to me about dating and sex. Or people were older. Young people now don't have somebody to go to. And it's tough to go to an adult and say, you know, I was on Craigslist yesterday and I saw a whole bunch of pictures of penises, mom. What do I do? Because mom is likely to grab the computer and run screaming from the house. Because it's horrifying. So there's all sorts of climates where young people go. Anybody here heard of ChatRulet? ChatRulet is a website invented by a 17-year-old Russian student. It went viral within three months. You go to chatrulet.com and you allow your camera to be turned on. You can see a camera on the right-hand side of the individual who is here. And then you're randomly connected with anybody else in the world via webcam who you happen to bump into. I have a problem doing research on ChatRulet because the children that you see 50-year-old women sitting there and they bump me. So sexting. Sexting is another element that feeds into cyberbullying. Young people creating sexual images with their technology. Again, I don't think adolescence has changed. There were exhibitionists when I was in high school. The boys used to moon the smoke pit at lunch or there might have been girls who stood on the side of the freeway and flashed their breasts to see if their truckers would honk. Adolescent exhibitionism is a developmental stage. The difference is that taking a picture of it turns it into a digital artifact that has an absolutely different meaning. And this is one of the reasons I love the web because we can show young people. We don't have to tell them. I don't have to say don't send out sexual messages. I can say let's watch this and then have a dialogue about it. Online there's also, and I'll run you through these quickly because I'm running out of time already, but there's also communities online that actually facilitate dysfunctional behavior that I think it's important to know about. Some of them include pro-antirexia sites. Sites that promote anorexia online will give you instructions about the best way to throw up or the best way to purge. There's pro-suicide sites. You can Google Suicide How To and come up with sites that provide information on how to end your life based on your age, your weight, and your access to household items. And there's also things like Gore-Porn Online. Maybe some of you haven't been there to rotten.com, but since 1996 they've been collecting pictures of dead bodies and putting them on their database. Now again, before you think adolescence is different, I had three little brothers. If there was a squirrel run over on the road on the way home from the bus stop, one of my brothers was gonna flip it over and see what looked on the other side. Curiosity is what motivates us. The problem is that young people who are curious find a bottomless database of explicit and extreme images that can be traumatic to view. And there's also gang recruitment online. This is a Facebook page for the independent soldiers. So what do I tell kids? I tell them, treat your username and your password like your toothbrush. We've far too many cases of kids sharing that data. You saw that 9% of nine-year-olds share their Facebook profile and 19% of 18-year-olds share it. That increases as we get older and we can't be doing that. The most common passwords in the world, don't use any of these. The most common password in the world is password. Then let me in and one, two, three, four, five, six. We need to teach kids basics about security risks. Have conversations as a family, FOSSI, the Family Online Safety Institute, has online contracts that you can sign that at least set out the rules. I didn't give my son the keys to my car and said, do what you want. We had a lot of conversations about how the car worked and what time you had to come home and how to change the oil and when to put gas in. We need that. This is a powerful machine. We've been putting internet in children's bedroom and thinking that it was a toy. It's not. It's like a ride-on lawnmower, guys. Are we gonna give a ride-on lawnmower to an eight-year-old and say, gee, let me know when you figure it out and he'll take me for a spin around the lawn? No. We need to know how to use these tools before we put them in the hands of children who are very adept at stretching their bounds. And I like asking kids when I step up, who here paid for Facebook? Kids will all tell me Facebook's free. Facebook's not free. Since I joined Facebook, when I told them I liked Nestle's Quik, The Young and the Restless and Organic Gardening, ever since then, they've been selling my data to people who sell Nestle's Quik, The Young and the Restless and Organic Gardening magazine. It's not free. We have to start getting our kids to be informed consumers of the social network sites they're on and teach them to sign up for virtual identities. We spent our whole life telling kids to be truthful and then they go online and they put their legal name in and their full address and your visa card number. We have to give them permission and say you can protect your identity online. My son went online and I told him to use his first name twice for the first four years he was online. So he was Connor, Connor. You have to use a postal code all the time, so apologies, but he uses V2V1G1, that's the postal code for the RCMP station admission. And he has a junk email for signing up for online accounts. These are nuanced skills that need to be put in children's hands. And please talk to your children about online pornography. The point has come that if you don't want to talk to your kids about sex, there are lots of people online who do. The top searches in 2009 for children. First they search YouTube, Google and Facebook. Boys search sex and porn, fourth and fifth. And girls search Taylor Swift and then sex fourth and fifth. But again, this is a time when young people want information about sex. So we have to make an effort to put medically and academically reliable resources in front of them. And exposure to pornography, the most recent says that the first age of exposure to hardcore pornography is 11 years old. And the images that we're seeing now are in greater quantity than ever before. They are more hardcore or violent. There's suggestions about the psychologically addictive nature of online pornography, and it can negative effect interpersonal relationships with reports of some people even becoming sexually oriented towards video screens and not being able to obtain arousal in the presence of a physical person, but only while watching pornography. There's also kids pressured to camp. And we got, I touched on that with sexting and it takes some of the forms of cyberbullying. So we talk about that a little bit. We talk to kids about child pornography. Don't make child pornography. The University of New Hampshire has come up with an alternate topography that challenges us to think of them as youth produced sexual images. It doesn't change the criminal listing, but it does make it a language that youth better understand better and acknowledge that many of these are produced by youth for experimental purposes. They're experimenting with sexuality, with their identity, with relationships, and the technology is in their hands. And we have to keep telling everybody that everything you post online is permanent and everything you post online is public. When I started online, I thought that it wasn't. Archive.org is one of the reasons everything online is permanent. Since 96, they've been documenting the entire internet. I remember Mark Zuckerberg has come forward now and said you have only one identity on the internet and have more than one identity on the internet lacks integrity. Recruiters are now Google, YouTubing, and Facebooking young people before they get jobs, before they're accepted for scholarship programs. And here's the money shot, right? I'm really glad that nobody was taking pictures behind the A&W in 1977 in Mission, because I was a bad kid. There's no pictures of me like that, but it's not because I didn't do that stuff. And for lots of you around this circle, that's not because you didn't do that stuff either. Young people are in these positions because they're documenting things that all of us may have been involved in. It's just the circumstances have changed dramatically for them. We have to teach kids how to document abuse. How do you do screen captures? How do you take that evidence to a school official or a police officer and come forward? And how do we figure out whether the Nigerian lady is really sending us $3 million on Monday? Snopes.com is a great resource. Put it in the hands of children. So how do I think that we need to combat cyberbullying? Well, first, I think we're in this place because we've had hundreds of years to establish social norms and codes of conducts for sex, for alcohol, for running with scissors, for dating, for day-to-day conduct. And we've had 20 years since the worldwide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. A generation of children, youth and young adults have matured in a time when we've encouraged them to gorge on technology without providing them with expected codes of conduct, without ever being aware, even being aware of the needs for codes of conduct. And I often apologize to them on our behalf. So cyberbullying, a definition, an aggressive, intentional act carried out by a group of individuals using electronic forms of communication. That's the textbook one, but when we go into the classroom, what do we call cyberbullying? Because that gets confusing. That could be passing on someone's secrets. It could be posting pictures of a friend drunk. It could be online harassment. It could be photoshopping somebody's photo, distributing sexual images of a peer. It could be slander. It could be extortion. It could be teasing. I had a kid the other day stand up at the end of a presentation and say, could you tell me the difference between teasing and bullying? That's a great question, right? Why didn't he know that? It could be telling somebody to kill themself. Is that cyberbullying? Pressure to cam with your boyfriend, making anti-female or anti-male comments, sending out your ex-girlfriend's photos to the whole school? Online predators, are they cyberbullying? What about rage-baiting or burn pages or hacking someone else's account or trash talking and call a duty or making a Facebook page for your teacher? What exactly is cyberbullying? We might have taken the definition and made it so wide that it's not usable anymore. If it's all those horrible things, if it's things that lead young people to end their lives and some young person is sitting there in grade six going, well, they just wrote a bad note about me and I'm not thinking about killing myself so maybe that's not cyberbullying. We're not equipping them. We have to give them nuance. So how many kids are a cyberbullied? The difficulty comes in that we don't have the rates that vary between six and 72% because of the changing definition of cyberbullying and how young people interpret it. Negative online communication can contribute to bullying, to disenfranchisement, to homophobic persecution, to discrimination, to mental health issues, to suicidal ideations, but we need to tease these all out and address those as specific issues while we can as well as there being a core issue perhaps of cyberbullying online. It's rooted in discrimination and ignorance and we need to address those instead of blaming the youth or the technology. We already have legal frameworks, I believe, that address most of the activities that occur and exploit young people online. Cyberbullying is different than face-to-face bullying pointed out by Jennifer Schucka and there's a reference in the link again, is that in addition to anonymity and that disinhibition, youth often intend to entertain peers, not harm victims. Virtual bystanders, witness, distribute and comment on events indefinitely as opposed to being a bystander for a single event because it's an artifact, it means that that artifact can be commented on anytime in the future and from any place. And the role between the online dynamics between victim and bully have been found to be very fluid. It's not as blunt as it is face-to-face. Power dynamics, traditional power dynamics of size or popularity are overcome in kind of the democratized environment of the internet. And so ease of use has made aggression and retaliation easier and that suggests that it's contributed to an increasing number of individuals being both bully and victim, which presents us with a particular sort of issues. Parents and educators need first to support fundamental principles of human rights and social justice in order to address this from a holistic point of view and confront bias-based discrimination. Appropriate discipline, accountability or restorative justice, I think bullying is a relationship problem and that given the lack of instruction that we have for young people about the nuance of online conduct, restorative processes will give all parties involved an opportunity to learn and integrate that new knowledge into the wider spread community. They engage youth and keep them engaged during conflicts and it's better than suspensions and expulsions because those young people will still go on to access technology outside of the school or whatever environment they've been sent out of. We have to give kids the tools to say, I made a mistake, I wanna repair the harm and I wanna make up for what's happened. That doesn't necessarily happen when we're looking to blame one individual person instead of seeing it as dialogue that needs to occur. Article 12, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says that we are obligated to include young people in processes that affect their lives and I don't think internet education is any different. I think the need for young people to be involved in driving this work is paramount and digital literacy is not an add-on in a classroom. It needs to be embedded in all subjects. English can utilize messages about credibility of online websites, for example. Geography could use, there's a website called Darfur is Dying. It's a web-based game. You go onto the game and you become a UN peacekeeper. Your job is to protect the refugees and hold off the insurgents. By playing the game, you learn about the effects of poverty, the effects of military oppression, what the geography of Darfur looks like, what the people of Darfur looks like. These environments can be used meaningfully. We just haven't utilized them yet because we've been intimidated by the technology. Shame does not teach and fear does not motivate. I believe we need to include educate and guide and expect respectful behavior. Some of the research I've read was interesting in that they said that when you reported to children that 65% of kids were cyberbullied in their school, they thought it was normal. But if you told them that only 15% of their kids in their school was cyberbullied, they started to think that it wasn't normal to be cyberbullied. We need to look at how their expectations are. And youth can teach each other. I'm moving along. They want information internet safety. Sophisticated questions I get from kids at presentations, you know, what's the difference between teasing and bullying? How do I set up a filter system for my server, for my Xbox game? These are from grade four, five and six students. Their sophistication needs to be matched by adults who have that level of sophistication for this tool as well. We must be safe havens. We must be credible. We must not freak out when they come to us with pictures of penises on their phones. And we must try and have calm dialogue. And educate and support parents. They're very overwhelmed. They need, you know, a parenting is a busy job. But promote free curricula that exists online. There's cyber media smarts, common sense media, kids in the know, cyber smart curriculum. All of these are free resources that exist already. And utilizing safe modes on various platforms like YouTube and Google aren't very well-known tools by parents. There are tools within the online environments that can be used. And we also haven't started to get to the point yet where we start talking to parents about age-appropriate content and age-appropriate access. If our Wi-Fi networks are set up in our houses and go 24 seven, it's no surprise that reports are coming now that most of our high school students are receiving three texts a night and they wake up to return one of them. High school students. I have a high school student. He needs sleep. He doesn't need to be interrupted. I have a game for you if you all want to take the challenge. Here's the new game I've been playing at my house and at business meetings. Everybody takes their iPhone out and they stack them up on the table. Put it in the middle of family dining room table and the first person touch their phone does dishes. Right? Let's take these devices and starts thinking about how we're integrating them into our lives. We never used to sit at meetings before and text under the table what we do now. What do we role modeling for ourselves, for our staff? Right? Go to a business lunch and say if you touch your phone, you pay for lunch but we're all geeks. So in 20 minutes we're gonna take a five minute texting break and we'll all geek out and then we'll sit down and be present. Technology shouldn't be taking over our individual presence. It should be supplementing it. Vanish. Barriers to reporting to adults from the research is fear of losing technology and connection to social life first off. Concern about overreaction or reluctance because they won't be taken seriously or the reports that they make won't be taken seriously and guilt because maybe they're complicit somehow. They might have done retaliate it. They might not be clear that they're a victim. And we have a desire to intervene. Through many online streams we can now see things that our children are doing and seeing and touching almost in no other way possible. There was nobody recording what happened to me in the school bus on the way home when I was in high school. But now we can read every text. Dana Boyd suggests that just because we can see what's going on doesn't mean we need to intervene. Young people need to build resilience and just because we can see stuff going on doesn't mean we have to jump in there with both feet but we do have to have dialogue with our young people. Recommendations, engage youth as experts, get technical knowledge to children as soon as they can hold a mouth. Dialogue about values and instructions on moral codes, issues, and empathy, tolerance as they apply online. Teacher training, engage parents, use the restorative processes when possible and offer solutions to online conflict by viewing them as opportunities for whole schools and communities to learn about changing identities online. Reality is, young people who don't feel wanted in their homes or connected to their communities will seek out one in which they are. I'd also like to point out that I've recently done some research and found that about 75% of homeless youth are also online and have social media profiles or cell phones as well as those adults involved in homeless shelters. Thank you so much for your time. Sorry I talked fast.