Facebook: Why a Safety Center, not a 'panic button'

The Facebook news in the US today was its new expanded Safety Center. The news in Britain was that Facebook "STILL refuses to install [a] 'panic button'" on its pages, as the UK's Daily Mail put it. However, Facebook also announced today that its UK users will "now be able to report unwanted or suspicious contact directly to CEOP [the UK's Child Exploitation & Online Protection Center] and other leading safety and child protection organizations via its own reporting system," as CNN reported, so CEOP has come very close to getting its wish.

But this "panic button" concept is really problematic – and not just because of the word "panic," which suggests brains in crisis mode, with all rational thought switched off. Here's why it's problematic:

A single reporting mechanism doesn't cut it. In the offline world, we call 911 (or in the UK, 999) about crimes and medical emergencies. But the social Web – especially a fairly basic social utility like Facebook – is a mirror of its users' social lives and networks, of a full spectrum of behaviors, mostly good and, when bad, definitely not just criminal bad behavior. So if you just consider the really negative behavior that might lead to an abuse report, research shows that it's bullying, not predation, that would get reported far more often. Is law enforcement designed to deal with noncriminal but bad adolescent behavior? Fortunately, the new system Facebook put in place sends only reports of criminal behavior to CEOP.

Would a "panic button" have helped Ashleigh Hall? CEOP reportedly has said that the British teen whose murderer was convicted last month (see The Guardian) may have lived if such a button had been in place in Facebook. Ashleigh was reportedly communicating with someone who she thought was a boy, and fear didn't seem to be involved at the time of that FB communication. It isn't a factor when a child is being "groomed" online (see this).

A crime not involving panic. Ashleigh's case was far from typical of Net-related sex crimes. Presenting research from law enforcement files on Net-related child sex crime cases, David Finkelor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC), said in Washington in 2007, "These are not mostly violent sex crimes ... they are criminal seductions that take advantage of common teenage vulnerabilities" and are characterized as statutory rape. "In 73% of the crimes," he continued, "the youth go to meet the offender on multiple occasions for multiple sexual encounters. The law enforcement investigators described the victims as being in love with or feeling a close friendship for the offenders in half the cases that they investigated" (see this for his "Jenna" profile). Panic buttons in social sites do nothing to mitigate this problem.

Largely the wrong location. The Internet, that is. It's important to remember that the vast majority of sexual abusers of children are people they know in real life, not strangers they meet online, much less predators trolling the social Web. In a much-anticipated 2009 update of its research on Internet predators, the CACRC reported, "There was no evidence that online predators were stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted at social networking sites," and we've seen no reports in this country of convicted sex offenders being arrested for violating parole agreements by contacting minors in social sites. [As for non-Internet-related sex crimes, University of California, Berkeley, law professor Franklin Zimring was recently quoted as saying people are "more likely to get struck by lightning than to get raped and murdered by a stranger," The Press-Enterprise in southern California reported last month.]

Facebook actually tested a similar proposal made by New Jersey's then-attorney general, Anne Milgram, a couple of years ago: the test of a "Report Abuse!" icon involving "at least 1.5 million randomly-selected page impressions" for nearly a year (see MSNBC). What FB found (after running the test longer than MSNBC reported up front, a spokesperson told me today) was that the number of abuse reports was "significantly lower" when there was a special icon in a different location from the rest of the reporting links on a page. Third-party buttons and graphics "intimidate and confuse people," Facebook's European policy director Richard Allen told RedOrbit.com. "We think our simple text link, which gives people the option to report abuse to CEOP as well as to the Facebook team, is a far more effective solution."

A button is not enough. Even the host of Britain's "To Catch a Paedophile," Mark Williams-Thomas, a child-protection expert and former detective, said that "the much called-for report-it button alone does not make using social networking sites any safer, but a coordinated approach providing the additional reporting to CEOP is clearly worthwhile, as is a dedicated phone line for law enforcement." The dedicated line he's referring to is similar to one Facebook has for US law enforcement and part of the safety package it announced this week, including the Safety Center mentioned above and 1 billion public-service ad impressions in the site (which CEOP called "a 5 million-pound [or $7.7 million] investment in education and awareness" in its press release, which was not yet online as of this writing).

Having said all that, everybody can thank all parties to this agreement for an important pilot test we all need to watch. Not before in history has there been a service playing host to the visual socializing of 400 million users in multiple countries, much less developing some sort of reporting system for when something in all that socializing goes wrong – the online version of dial-911 or -999 (UK) but for many more kinds of "wrong" (not just the criminal kind). I don't know about CEOP, but our NCMEC has a CyberTipline.com, a sort of online 911 service, and it still tells people to call their local 911 service in emergencies. Physical proximity is still and always will be a factor when people need help – so just what is the role of a global online service, here? We all – social-Web companies, their users of all ages, parents, educators, law enforcement, risk prevention practitioners, psychologists, etc. – need to figure this out together. It just won't work if the onus is placed only on companies', or law enforcement's, or policymakers' shoulders – not in a highly participatory, grassroots-driven media environment.

But for heaven's sake – or even better, for youth's sake – let's please take the "panic" out of this whole important test. It simply doesn't lend itself to the calm, mutually respectful conversations that help youth develop the critical thinking that protects on the social Web. We had our predator panic on this side of the pond starting in 2006. At the Family Online Safety Institute's annual conference in Washington last fall, the Net-safety field declared it over with a strong consensus that scary messaging is not productive. Why? Because it makes young people less inclined to want to come to us for help. They tend to get as far away as possible from scared, overreacting adults; find workarounds that are readily available to them; and then leave us out of the equation right when loving, steady parent-child communication is most needed. The other reason is, even the research shows fear tactics don't work (see "Let's not create a cyberbullying panic" at CNET).

[Disclosure: Facebook is a supporter of a nonprofit project I help run, ConnectSafely.org, but I so hope you've seen in the above that that's not why I've blogged about this issue.]

Related links

"Why technopanics are bad"

More on why fear tactics don't work

The US's perfect storm of parental concern in 2006: created by MySpace's exponential growth, adults not understanding social networking, news media hyperbole, Dateline's "To Catch a Predator," and a mid-term election (hinted at but not fully described in this Business Week article about MySpace's safety efforts of that time). Now – even after the sanity of the Byron Review and ensuing government-industry-NGO cooperation – the UK is experiencing its own perfect storm, with an election, a tragic crime story, a "To Catch a Paedophile" show, Facebook's rapid growth, and continuing cognitive dissonance over social media. Storms are destructive; these national-level storms in a new-media climate distract us from calmly sorting through complex problems and finding real solutions.

The Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, which put on the Capitol Hill event where Dr. Finkelhor spoke in 2007

Kids experiencing less bullying, sexual assault: Study

Schools, keep up the good work! A new national study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that bullying, sexual assault, and other violence against US children ages 2-17 "declined substantially" between 2003 and 2008, the University of New Hampshire's CACRC reports. The study's lead author, David Finkelhor, credits schools' and other prevention efforts to reduce bullying and sexual assault as part of the explanation for the declines, though adding that "children's victimization is still shockingly high." In the past year, physical bullying decreased from 22% of youth to 15%, and sexual assault from 3.3% to 2%, the CACRC study found. Certainly we all have more work to do – and not just schools: The authors "did not find declines in physical abuse and neglect by caregivers, but [they] did find a decline in psychological abuse. Thefts of children’s property also declined, but robbery was one of the few offenses to show an increase." This page at the UNH site has a link to the full study, "Trends in Childhood Violence and Abuse Exposure," in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Here's coverage today in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; thanks to Cobb County School District risk-prevention specialist Patti Agatston in the Atlanta area for pointing the Journal-Constitution article out. Later added: the Wall Street Journal's coverage.

Major update on Net predators: CACRC study

As scary as some of the reports covering it may make it look, there's a lot of good news for online youth in the much-anticipated new study from UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center, "Trends in Arrests of Online Predators." I hope the news coverage doesn't focus solely on the nearly five-fold increase in online predator arrests since the CACRC's last such study in 2000, but even if it does, that finding points to great preventive police work throughout the US (in 2006, 87% of those arrests involved police posing as teens, not real young people, the study found). Those arrests likely prevented crimes against children, and they're sending the message that cops are out there patrolling "the neighborhood."

But there's a lot of other positive news in the report. For example...

Between the CACRC's last study of Net-related predation arrests and this one, there was only a "modest" increase - 21% - of arrests of offenders soliciting young people, its authors report, "from an estimated 508 arrests in 2000 to an estimated 615 in 2006," at a time when the number of US 12-to-17-year-olds online went from 73% to 93%, or more than 25 million, in 2006, and when their Internet use was getting a lot more social.

Overall sex offenses against youth declined during this period, and Internet-initiated child sexual exploitation constituted only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation.

Despite all the hype about registered sex offenders, only a tiny percentage of the arrests surveyed were of registered sex offenders, which indicates that, while blocking them from sites may reduce, it by no means stops sexual solicitation (and we already knew that a significant percentage of the solicitations come from peers).

Not good news, but a notable finding in the study is that there has been "a significant increase in arrests of young adult offenders, ages 18 to 25," which also challenges the image of "predators" presented in the news media.

What about social networking?

Now let's zoom in on what the authors say about online social networking - not just because it's so important to our kids (and statistically of growing use to us too), but also because of all the hype and news coverage about predators in social network sites since 2005:

"There was no evidence that online predators were stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted at social networking sites.

"The nature of crimes in which online predators used the Internet to meet and victimize youth changed little between 2000 and 2006, despite the advent of social networking sites."

Going even further, USATODAY later cited the view of study lead author David Finkelhor that "ongoing studies show that being on a social networking site doesn't create risk for sexual victimization."

Where the risk is

The key to cutting through all the hype and really protecting kids from online predators is in understanding where the risk really lies. Since social networking hit the public radar screen in late 2005, the misconception has grown that the problem lies in a particular technology or "place" online. Dr. Finkelhor put it this way in an email the day the study was released: "The SNS [social-network sites] issue like the age authentication solution is all about mistaking the problem as one of 'access'," he told me. "It’s not about access. It’s about what kids do when interacting online: behaviors."

As for what those behaviors are, Dr. Finkelhor spelled some of them out in a CBS/CNET interview for Larry Magid, my ConnectSafely.org co-director: talking about sex with strangers in a lot of different places online, especially chatrooms about sex and romance, and getting into sexual relationships with people met online (see also "Profile of a teen online victim" from a talk Finkelhor gave in 2007).

"I think the messages [about online safety] need to warn kids about the very risky things they can do in their adolescent naivete and interest in exploring the world," he told Larry. Finkelhor added a risk-prevention behavior that both the Internet industry and all child safety advocates can help promote: "We also need to encourage other people online, the bystanders, people who know these young people or see these interactions on various sites, to report it, to caution the kids about what they're doing, to intervene, to begin to feel they need to take some action to short-circuit what they're seeing might happen." Watching each other's backs, I'm hearing Finkelhor suggest. One of the country's top experts on online safety is pointing to the need to foster digital citizenship.

Related links

"Social norming for risk prevention"

MySpace's PR problem

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety"

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"