 Dr. Rachel, thank you so much for taking the time to answer some questions we have regarding social networking and cyber security. And first we'd like to know what your experience with Bebo, which is one of the most popular social networkings in the UK and all over the world. So can you highlight on your experience and the challenges you face? Well, on the social networking site, traditionally what we understand, the risks online are that you may have predatory males, predatory males talking young girls and boys, you may have people bullying one another. There are concerns about inappropriate content that young people create videos when they're bullying one another or slapping or hitting each other. So there are a plethora of issues that we have to combat and we take a three pronged approach. Number one is that I chair the European Commission's social networking task force. I work with the industry to develop a set of good practice safety guidelines. So we as industry develop them in partnership with child protection experts and law enforcement. And the idea is if you think about a social networking site as a location, we need to make sure that we have good practice recommendations about, for example, making sure that internet safety advice is easily accessible, that it's prominent, that it doesn't just reside in the terms of service, that secondly that it's easy to report instances of abuse. So there are range, there are seven principles and industry work for nine months to develop these principles and the European Commission held an event on February the 10th of this year to an invited industry to sign up to the implementation. So that has happened and we are now in the process of evaluating, assessing how well people have implemented the safety features on their site. So we develop the principles and then we encourage each company to write about how they've implemented those recommendations because we as industry recognize that perhaps sometimes we're not really good at telling people all of the good things that we do and people assume that industry's not doing anything, that they're not being responsible. So these self declarations, if you Google EU, safer social networking principles, they'll come to the EU, the European Commission's homepage. There you will see not only the document of principles, but every company that signed up to those principles, their self declaration, they declare how they've implemented those. So that's a really significant step forward and it's something that I think could be replicated in non-EU countries. Secondly, we decided, well, you know what, let's just check and make sure that in a transparent way that people have implemented what they've outlined in their self declarations. So that process is taking place now. There's a team of expert researchers that devise a methodology, we've consulted on that and they will start the assessment in about mid to end of October. So by internet safety day, which falls every year in February, the commissioner, and I think it may still be Vivienne Redding, will be able to announce the results of that assessment. So industry is doing a lot. So if you think of that, that's from one, that's the location, that's how you engage industry in developing good practices to secure the location. Secondly, we have very close relationships. We have to think about the offenders, those people who exploit our services, be it for hacking, spam, predatory mails, bullying. We need to think about making sure that young people can report easily on people on every single page. Every single user's page is a report abusing, except you're wrong because you're not likely to be reporting yourself. But in every other user's page is a report abusing, so you can report to our abuse management team and they will respond. We've got clear policies, procedures and protocols about how we respond. So in the instance of somebody says somebody mean, something mean, or they post an inappropriate video that they've taken of you, you can click on the report abuse. Our systems capture the information of the subject of the report and the person who is reporting. So it's very easy for our abuse management team to then just go to the pages and see what's happening and take an action. The actions can be a warning to say, you know, come to our attention that your behavior is inappropriate. With a cease and desist, you know, do not do this again if you do. Your account will be deleted. If the activity is a little bit more egregious, we'll delete the account. If it's very serious and it's potentially illegal, then we'll report it to the police and work with them so that they can facilitate the investigative process. They give us the right documents, requesting IP addresses, etc. So that's the kind of work that we do at law enforcement. And then one of the key things that I think is often neglected is understanding the criminal act. A criminal act involves exploiting a young person, you know, in the instance of a social networking site. So the question is, why is this young person vulnerable? And being a forensic psychologist, I spend a lot of time profiling at-risk young people. And very often the profile of an at-risk young child is somebody who may have a mental health issue. It could be acute, it could be chronic. Or it could be very easily, you know, middle class, family, they're well functioning, but the child is going through some acute issue in school, maybe a bit of bullying, maybe they've been excluded. There's something that's bothering them and they need help and support. And in the time that I was researching for my PhD, I spent time posing as an 8, 10 and 12 year old online to see how I could understand the grooming practices. And typically these guys will say to you, oh, you're so lovely. Can you send me a picture? You sound like a lovely person. And very quickly the conversation evolves into, you know, I feel like you're my soul mate. I love you. Tell me what's bothering you. I'll be there for you. So these young people are getting what they think is half in support and love. But of course this is a ploy by the individual. My thinking, what I was trying to communicate today is that the experts at giving mental health, social care, support and advice are organizations that we have in the real world and I've been spending the last 18 months evangelizing to them saying you really should have your presence online. You should be accessible 24-7 to these young people. And it's very difficult as a young person if you've got an issue with your body image or you might be self-harming. You may not necessarily know the name of the organization that's going to help you. So what we've done on Bebo is create the Bewell platform and encourage all the support organizations to set up their presence within Bewell. So you as a user, when you're feeling unwell for whatever reason, know that you can go to Bewell and find the support that you need. And that's a fundamental shift in how we empower young people. So it's not only about educating about the fact that there may be predators and that you need to keep your password secure. It's that holistic approach to helping young people and by ensuring that they seek out early from the right experts and support organizations and from one another by putting the Bewell platform we're hoping to normalize and destigmatize early health seeking. And that's a change. So you don't have to feel as a teenager, as teenagers often do, they think this stuff is only happening to me. I'm so isolated and alienated. So what we're trying to do is increase their health literacy by getting them to engage in discussions about this so that if one young person is feeling a bit down, another young person will say, hey, you know what, I was feeling like that the other day, you should go along to the Bewell place. They really helped me. So I think that's... We were talking today in the session about how our thinking has evolved over the last 13 years. And for me, that's one of the big things in understanding. We really do need to take a more holistic approach. So I'm interested to know how children relate to virtual and real worlds and whether they consider them as one world and they don't differentiate between them or do they live two different worlds? I think you've hit the nail on the head. Originally, when the internet started up, we had this whole thing about the internet space being hyper real and everyone's anonymous talking to each other. Fundamentally, what's happening nowadays is for young people who've grown up and they've never known anything other than a world with the internet in it, to them, there's no distinction because they go to school in the morning, they come home and they're talking to their friends on social networking sites or they're IMing them. Exactly the same as I did when I was a kid. I walked to school with my best friend, sat next to her all day, came home. When I was on the phone, the landline drove my mother insane. So it hasn't really changed that much. It's just the mechanism of communication that has changed. And also, instead of being one to one, it can now be one to many. So whole gang of friends can talk. I think our fear of the negative downside sometimes paralyzes us in terms of conceptualizing what it could be. And increasingly, education ministries are realizing we really need these young people to grow up and be proficient members of the knowledge economy. For them to do that, the skill set that they need, precisely the sort of skill set that they acquire on a social networking site, when governments try to replicate social networking sites, which are essentially, one could say, an online collaborative environment, because they don't have the money and the amazing designers, etc. The things that they come up with, often they attempt to replicate the Facebooks, but it doesn't work really well. So what we're seeing increasingly is that ministries of education are thinking, well, actually, maybe, our understanding tells us that informal education environments are actually where a lot of young people, especially those who may not be taught the class, really acquire knowledge at a rapid rate. And they're thinking that perhaps they should harness these sorts of networks. So in answer to your question, I don't think that for many young people there's a very clear distinction, except perhaps when they're playing online games, I think they acquire the critical skills earlier to be able to determine what is real and what is not real. But as in any human behavior, you cannot count for those people that there will be a subset that maybe cannot differentiate very easily. And that may be because of some learning issues or mental health issues or their cognitive processing, information processing. But I would say in general, it's safe to say that people see the distinction. Plus, you know why? Because there are consequences. If you're mean to your friend online, he'll just go and suffer. You know what I mean? So the consequences of their behaviors are very real to them. So that makes it very real. When you talk about the psychology of the child, how does cyberbullying impact this psychology? And is it an everlasting impact or is it just for a short time and then he can get over the impact of cyberbullying? I know these are kind of perennial questions. And I think when we differentiate between bullying in the real world, cyberbullying has kind of overshadowed real-world bullying. And we have, and I don't know if it's a coping mechanism that we have that we think, oh my goodness, cyberbullying is somehow different and alien and it's anonymous and it's 24-7. You know, fair enough. But the reality is that if you're bullied in the real world, even if the bully isn't there with you, it's still going on in your head, the humiliation. It's not as if real-world bullying that happens between 1 and 2 p.m. at lunchtime and your money is stolen, you know, the effects stop. You're like, oh, it's my question. I'm not affected anymore. So I think we sometimes have disproportionate responses or we don't think, we don't apply the same logic to real-world as to online. Out of the skates it makes the issue more difficult to understand because we go off in tangents. The reality is human behavior, bullying behavior is not a good thing. It requires us as a society to make sure that we have proper education in place to teach young people about, treat others with respect and also troubleshoot, also make sure that we equip them for when they do behave badly to one another because they are human. That they know to apologize, to own up to it. I think that oftentimes you have to take responsibility. That's the root of the issue and we need to focus on that rather than distracting about, oh, it's 24-7, it's anonymous or whatever. So I'm not sure that that is helpful. It distracts us from the real core issue, which is how do you educate young people to behave in a civilized and proper fashion? Something I would really want to know from you, how can we encourage children's curiosity while not endangering their security online? Can we do this? And if yes, how? I think we can do that. One of the fundamental things is that for parents to recognize that children grow up online are the political and economic context within which we operate and we're sending kids to school to acquire the skillset that they need to become proficient members of the knowledge economy. That requires them to have access to the internet. And for parents the dilemma is that they know their kids need to access the internet and maybe they don't really understand fully what's on there. They always is upon a parent to actually get on to the computer and familiarize themselves with it or go to their local education, adult education learning resource or go to their friend or sit down and ask their kids there is a responsibility in parents to acquire that knowledge and to do that. In the same way as when your teenager starts going to sleepovers or discos or whatever it is parents generally assume the role of I must drive them to this destination and get them back. It's just part of parenting. And I think the critical thing is also to have open lines of communication. Your child sees something negative online. In my experience of researching thousands of young people over the course of the last six or eight years their biggest concern is that if they tell mom or dad that they saw something bad online mom and dad will freak out go ballistic and ban them from using the internet. So if you're a young person you're not going to tell your mom or dad. So there's a fundamental educational role that we have to stay to parents to remain calm. You must make it so that your child understands it no matter what happens to them online and no matter what they do online they should feel that they can come and tell you and you'll respond in a calm supportive manner. Now that might sound easy to say but that is a fundamental message and I think that if we could communicate that to parents that would be a really singularly important message to get to them. In the session today we discussed the concept of child friendly zones and for some people who don't know what this concept stands for can you just give us a brief on what it is and then what's your take on it are you with or against it? That's a really good question and I think we had some discussion around filtering solutions so a parent could decide to create an attempt to use a filtering solution to create a child friendly zone which is one of the products that was mentioned basically contains a blacklist of sites that the young person shouldn't be able to access and you then can tailor it so the child can only have access for 30 minutes or maybe an hour so you're excluding them from being able to access negative content and you're controlling their access so that kind of can create a child friendly zone. From an industry perspective a company can decide to create a section of its service or maybe devote its entire service to a particular age group and target them in those instances they may augment the safety features that they've implemented on the site and do things like for example one of the things we do on Vivo is that we have a platform, an open media platform and we invite professional content providers to upload their content however we make it clear to them that they have the facility to age target and also label their content so in exactly the same way as you see in a cinema or TV content that's age targeted and also you know something that says you may see mild violence in this so we feel that that's a way to empower young people. Similarly some companies decide ok we'll show certain content at certain times of the day and then after 11pm there's more adult content or content that may not be appropriate for an 11 year old so there are a variety of techniques that can be used in addition also some service providers decide ok we'll allow people to chat with young people in the same age group we're going to moderate that chat but the chat can only take place at certain times of the day so that kind of day partying and allocating time and resources so that you ensure the content is appropriate for young people you can also go further and have a full editorial control so only content that has been pre-approved appears on the site from a social networking perspective there are a number of sites out there where one in the UK, which is where they it would seem from their safety practices that they moderate the communications and the other ones go still further where the young person can only choose from a certain pre-ordained set of statements so that they can interact with one another so you can take it from that level all the way up to a far more liberal approach social media are very full of false identities so how do you think this can endanger children online and if children take part in presenting false identities for themselves online what's your take on this I'm glad you brought that point up in the first five or six years of the whole thing of getting internet safety advice out there so from 1996 up to 2001 we, and even beyond that our safety advice to young people was do not give out personal details online so in other words, if you're not giving out your personal details, my name is Rachel I live inside, you have to be duplicitous to a certain degree so we ask children be duplicitous but also be able to detect when somebody else who is also being duplicitous is really a bad person right, cognitively that's way too demanding for an adult, not to mention a child so I think that originally our messaging was maybe flawed and that presented problems and on a social networking site typically young people are communicating we've had research independent research research finding some different parts of the globe young people communicate with the friends that they've spent the day in school with that's who they're communicating with so the idea that there's lots of anonymous communication happening is very much a web 1.0 kind of thing, the majority of the time the majority of young people are communicating with their friends however they do meet people that they don't know in the real world especially if they're online gaming or their friend introduces them it's perfectly possible to create friendships online and for those to flourish what we focus on is that sometimes there may be users with ill intent and part of what we need to do is to educate young people about those sorts of issues so your point specifically was what about fake identities generally what we find, what the research findings show is that people present themselves maybe more like cool because I'm going here, I've been partying here's me having fun here's me having more fun so maybe it's not a fully accurate but I mean then you come to a philosophical question who is me, who am I so generally they're communicating with one another and you can't really communicate with your friends unless, how are they going to know it's you if you have to have it now what does happen on occasion is that to bully another person I might take a photo of you put it up on Facebook and pretend to be you so that creates a lot of anxieties and one of the workarounds for that for example is to create a you can report the abuse to the abuse management teams and also though fundamentally I think this is an issue that needs a multiple response if you focus simply on the internet company if it's obvious that there's a breach of the terms of service i.e. if that person is defaming harassing and abusing and it's clearly evident from that so an observer can see that then we'll take action but often times somebody may take over somebody else's page and then say something like I know what you did last night which may mean that person had behaved really badly or it could mean that they behaved really well and won an award if an abuse management team is looking at that it's really really difficult to make a decision because you don't know the contextual information you don't know the context within which I know what you did last night or hey I know what you did last night we don't know what that is so one of the fundamental issues is that we need to get anti-bullying experts and teachers and parents and young people to understand I think for adults there is a separation between the real world and the virtual world so they think this scary thing has happened on this anonymous platform and I must you know essentially we advise them yes reported to the service provider but also this bullying has happened between this child and her friends so then you need to think about what are the ways you as a parent will help and support your child with that sort of an issue and whether or not you have recourse to the school to help you and support you in that particularly in the UK for example have an anti-bullying policy that young people sign off to so if you bully and other people either online or offline you will be subject to penalties within the school be that detention or something else so it needs what we need is a safety net to prevent harm to young people it isn't just one actor that has whole responsibility for addressing these issues that includes industry law enforcement parents teachers the child, him or herself and her peers and also perhaps alluding to an earlier discussion making sure that the support organisations because not everybody has incredibly supportive parents or they may be distracted we need to make sure that safety net also includes support mental health anti-bullying organisations who will deliver the support this person needs when they need it my final question would be that one of the statements that were said in the session that as a parent I would not lend or I would not leave my responsibility as a parent to a software that filters online content so what's your take on that statement are you with it or against it and also highlight on filtering softwares I agree that I wouldn't agree I wouldn't solely rely on a filtering solution to protect my child online there needs to be open lines of communication if you think of what was there before the internet and the concerns we had people sometimes refer to TVs as a babysitter so I certainly wouldn't solely rely on it I think filters are good for very young children because it makes sure that they're not shocked by content but that must always be supplemented by having open lines of communication with your child and say no matter what you see no matter what you do someone tell me and I'll help you and I'll support you and if there's a virus on your computer I will help you and also perhaps explanations about this is just my personal view we need to think as a society how we address the issue of what they might encounter and what's the best advice to give to a parent and maybe parents there are a lot of networks of parents online who share with each other in different situations so one child seeing an image of pornography because of the personality of the child a parent will respond in one way and another child in the same family who sees it because of their personality and their circumstances their age, their cognitive development will require maybe a different response the worst response is oh my god I'm going to ban the internet and then we need to rely on psychologists and support organizations to give us some insight I'm very interested about how you address these issues with young people thank you so much for this lovely interview and all these thoughtful insights we appreciate that very much thank you, it's been my pleasure