With financial support from the Daphne III Programme of the European Union
Media-related risks
VIOLENCE AND THE MEDIA INTERNET
TV
MEDIA
MOBILE TELEPHONY
VIDEOGAMES
MOBILE TELEPHONY
TELEVISION
CIRCULATION
VIDEOS AND PHOTOS
TEXT AND VIDEO MESSAGES
INTERNET
PHONE CALLS
CHAT, BLOG, FORUM
SOCIAL NETWORK
VIDEOGAMES
CIRCULATION AND EXPERIMENTATION
INTERNET With just “a few clicks� the internet allows us to access information, pictures, videos, chatrooms, blogs... However, not everything we find is always reliable and updated!!
“Dear Linda, I am at the fourth year of high school, I am 6ft tall, I have black hair, green eyes. I am the captain of a water polo team, I play soccer and in my free time I PR for a disco....”
FICTION
REALITY
NOT ALWAYS WHAT IS SAID ONLINE IS TRUE TO REALITY!!!!
PRIVACY Thanks to the internet you can meet people, send and change pictures, pull jokes... Remember that privacy in the virtual world is a fundamental right that is protected by legislation. Once sent, emails, text and video messages cannot be controlled any longer!!!
HOW TO BEHAVE IF SOMEONE BOTHERS YOU? There are different ways to block inappropriate or offending messages received from the internet or on the mobile.
CONTACT THE WEBSITE PROVIDER
CONTACT THE MOBILE OPERATOR
You can visit the Data Protection Authority (Garante per la Privacy) to know what to do.
www.garanteprivacy.it
SOCIAL NETWORKS Websites which allow groups of people to be inter-connected via the internet. In these websites it is possible to talk, to share pictures, videos, thoughts etc. The most popular platforms are: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter,...
USEFUL ADVICE • DO NOT USE YOUR REAL FIRST NAME AND SURNAME, BUT A NICKNAME • PASSWORD AND USERNAME ARE STRICTLY PERSONAL AND MUST NOT BE EASY TO GUESS • PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL DATA, IT IS VALUABLE! • DO NOT GIVE YOUR MOBILE NUMBER OR ADDRESS TO PEOPLE YOU MET ONLINE • CHECK WHERE THE EMAIL CAME FROM
ONLINE REPUTATION Every person has an online reputation
When you share personal information (name, surname, date of birth, school, hobby), or upload photos or videos (holidays, parties, jokes, past-times,...), or you publish messages (thoughts, insults, complaints,...) you must worry about your privacy!
IDENTITY THEFT
MISAPPROPRIATION OF FUNDS
DAMAGE OF REPUTATION
IDENTITY THEFT Identity cloning aimed at creating a new identity Financial identity theft aimed at obtaining loans Criminal identity theft: use of personal data to commit illegal acts in the name of the victim Ghosting: creation of a new identity by using the data of a dead person Cyberbullying – impersonation: pretending to be another person to send messages instead of that person
CYBERBULLYING It consists in acting cruelly towards other people, by sending or publishing offending material through the internet or the mobile
CYBERBULLYING FLAMING: online verbal battles, in general in chatrooms or interactive videogames HARASSMENT, coarse insults via computer and mobile (text and video messages, photos, muted phone calls, e-mails) CYBERSTALKING: especially insistent harassment VILIFICATION: one action aimed at damaging reputation IMPERSONATION: entering the account of another person in order to discredit him/her by sending messages to his/her circle of friends and acquaintances OUTING AND TRICKERY: after a period of apparent friendship, aimed at gathering information, the cyberbully publishes confidential information, pictures EXCLUSION: exclusion from a group, “banning”
Acts of cyber-bullying suffered
Survey on cyber-bullying and use of technologies among young people edited by Davide Diamantini and Giulia Mura (University of Milan-Bicocca) of 2010 on a sample of 862 students.
HAPPY SLAPPING It consists in taking pictures of or filming a violent scene, slapping, kicking, hitting a person and publishing pictures and videos on the internet. Attacks are generally real, sometimes they are pre-arranged and then played out.
Emma attends middle school and had to change her phone number and tell her schoolmates she had lost her mobile phone. Every day, especially in the afternoon and in the evening, she used to receive many text messages from an unknown number. The text messages always concerned how she dressed or her physical appearance, mocking her, insulting her or making fun of her for her non-designer jeans. She always had the impression that she was looked at and judged by someone when she was at school, because the messages were sent by a schoolmate. Emma did not dare say anything to her dearest girl friends and her parents. Luca is 16 years old and many of his schoolmates received offending electronic messages from his email address. They started deleting his email address from their contacts, also excluding him from chatrooms. At the beginning Luca did not understand this, but then he found out that some other schoolmate, whose identity he never discovered, knew his password and sent offending emails from his address, in order to ruin all his friendships and isolate him from the rest of the group.
A British teenager was sent to prison for cyber-bullying. The eighteen-yearold Keeley Houghton had posted on her Facebook personal page death threats against her peer Emily Moore, that she had lorded over and humiliated in the previous four years, when the two girls were schoolmates. At the hearing, public prosecutor Sara Stock reconstructed the escalation of intimidations and insults that Houghton allegedly directed against her victim and ultimately not only did the judges of Worcester sentence her to three months’ imprisonment in a remand home, but the jury also forbade her from approaching in any way Moore for five years. At the reading of the sentence, the respondent (who had declared to be guilty of stalking) burst into tears.
CYBER BULLYING
Young people and adults worldwide can be involved Anyone can become a cyber-bully Cyber-bullies can be anonymous Cyberbullying material can be circulated worldwide Online communications can be especially sadistic Aggressive communications can take place 24 hours a day
BULLYING • Only class and/or school students are involved • Generally only the bully, his/her follower and the bully-victim commit abuse • Bullies are students, classmates or schoolmates, known by the victim • Bullying actions are told to other school students or their friends at the most • Bullying rarely reaches forms of sadism unless when it evolves into underage crime • Bullying actions take place during school time or in the school-to-home trip
CYBER BULLYING
BULLYING
High Disinhibition: cyberbullies tend to do online what they would not do in real live The perception of invisibility of the cyber-bully “You cannot see me!” Lack of tangible feedback on his/her actions, “I cannot see you!” And resulting lack of awareness on the effects of his/her actions Depersonalization: the consequences of one’s actions are ascribed to the “personas” or “avatars” created
Medium Disinhibition: prompted by the dynamics of the class group The bully’s need to dominate interpersonal relations, becoming visible Presence of tangible feedback from the victim to which the bully does not pay attention, presence of awareness but with cold cognition Erosion of the sense of responsibility: “We are joking”, “It’s not my fault”
CYBERTHREATS
DIRECT THREATS Actual threats to hurt someone or commit suicide
DISTRESSING THREATS Online material which gives clues as to the fact that the person is emotionally shocked and could think about hurting someone, him/herself or committing suicide.
STORIES OF CYBERTHREATS
Jeff wrote in his blog “I am retarded for just thinking that things could change. I start regretting being alive. It takes courage to point a weapon to yourself, it takes courage to face death.�
Jeff killed nine people and then committed suicide.
STORIES OF CYBERTHREATS Greg created an anonymous instant messaging (IM) account and sent a threatening message to his elder sister, telling her that the day after she would be killed in school. Greg’s sister confided in her parents who warned the school and the school was “locked down” (a procedure adopted in the USA when an armed person is inside a campus or a school). Greg was then identified and arrested for threats.
Not all threats are however real and credible, sometimes behind threats a joke, a rumour, a roleplaying, a verbal battle, a way to relieve someone’s feelings or a plea for help can hide
INTERNET ADDICTION
We can talk about internet addiction when a person devotes most of his/her time to browsing websites and progressively loses interest in all other activities (studying, sports, socialization in person, hobbies...).
Many commercial websites and social networks are designed to keep users “glued�: their activities are especially designed to push young people to spend as long as possible on a website and go back frequently.
Thank you for your attention
Edited by In collaboration with
This presentation has been produced with the financial support of the Daphne III Programme of the European Commission. Contents are the sole responsibility of Scuola Centrale Formazione and its partners and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Commission.