The question of whether or not the internet can be properly regulated has never been more pertinent than right now. More and more of us are using the web every day – at home, work and schools – and it has never been more accessible, with WiFi almost everywhere you go, unlimited broadband at home and smartphone technology so popular among people of all ages.
It is often children that are dragged into the “online security” debate the most. Children are regarded as the most vulnerable internet users, and with social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook so popular and addictive, it is unlikely to change any time soon. The issue used to be about how long our kids are staying online, but it has recently become a darker issue, with recent news stories of cyber bullying and teen suicides being on the front pages of the papers and all over our TV screens.
News stories such as the suicide of UK teenager Hannah Smith, who killed herself after being bullied relentlessly on Latvian-based social networking site Ask.fm. In the wake of Hannah’s death, her father has called for tighter restrictions and increased security on social media channels, and the net in general. The UK government has talked tough on the subject, and have been talking to search engines like Google as well as social networking sites about better regulating their sites and search results.
It is difficult not to be disturbed by the internet habits of the current generation. Since Hannah’s death, Ask.fm has seen an additional five million users join the site, with 70 million now a part of the network. The vast majority of the users are adolescents. There does seem to be a subset of teenagers who feel they have the right to abuse people online, and worse than that, there are others who sign up to the site and subsequently invite the abuse. It’s hard to figure out which is more terrifying, and how it could possibly be stopped.
Ban? Filter? Regulate? There are No Easy Answers
The first thought of most people – born out of anger in the majority of cases – is just to ban the sites. Everybody knows that this will do very little except to push these people somewhere else in the online world. Facebook and Twitter have their fair share of abusers, but they have started to regulate their posts and statuses, and it is far easier to block and report users as a result. Facebook now has profanity filters that you can enable to limit the kind of abusive language that shows up in posts.
For the internet in general, you can have a profanity filter implemented into your home, work or school web systems and disable inappropriate content to come through to your computers. The systems moderate text, image and video content and filter out anything deemed unsuitable. They can be downloaded as a WordPress Plugin too, meaning that any comments made on your website will be filtered out too. The same goes for video moderation, where video content that is deemed inappropriate will also be filtered out.
This is certainly a step in the right direction. If Google and the other search engines stick to their word and filter out pornographic and abusive websites from their results, this can only help the situation.
Of course, there are bound to be issues with this. People talk about the “nanny state”, where people have less control over what they see and hear in their day-to-day lives and the tools used to “protect” them actually end up alienating them and forcing them to roll their eyes at how political correct everything quickly becomes. There are also errors that can be made, including with words and phrases that can be taken out of term, causing confusion and frustration among people who are talking about something entirely innocent. You only have to read about the emails from accounts of councillors in Gloucestershire being blocked because of discussions about “Blue tits”, a cute and popular bird (no pun intended).
Some people are just going to have a tough time dealing with regulation and control when it comes to the online world. There has to be a degree of “free speech” involved in the way the web operates, but when we all started to jump online in the late 90’s, we had no idea that the web would evolve in this way. Facebook celebrates its decade anniversary next year. In business terms, social media is still in its infancy. Instagram – who are owned by Facebook – have recently banned certain hashtags in their search function. Twitter – the pioneers of the hashtag – are bound to follow suit eventually.
The whole online security debate reminds me of the story of Nikola Tesla’s discovery of alternating current. He had the idea that he would let the genie out of the bottle and give it away for free. Thomas Edison and his friends had a different idea, and quickly took control of the situation. When the internet arrived, we all had a Utopian vision for it, the same way that Tesla did for electricity. But we are learning now that something that big was always going to become troublesome, and we are at a crossroads now where we have to decide whether free will prevails or whether stricter controls have to be put into place.
The debate will rage on, and there will be no easy answers. All we can be sure of is that something needs to be done to protect the young, who spend the most time online and are by far the most vulnerable.
Photo credit: kid-josh via photopin cc
via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/trends-news/can-fight-online-safety-won-0602931?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=can-fight-online-safety-won
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