This book investigates regulatory and social pressures that social media companies face in the aftermath of high profile cyberbullying incidents. The author's research evaluates the policies ...companies develop to protect themselves and users. This includes interviews with NGO and social media company reps in the US and the EU. She triangulates these findings against news, policy reports, evaluations and interviews with e-safety experts. This book raises questions about the legitimacy of expecting companies to balance the tension between free speech and child protection without publicly revealing their decision-making processes. In an environment where e-safety is part of the corporate business model, this book unveils the process through which established social media companies receive less government scrutiny than start-ups. The importance of this research for law and policy argues for an OA edition to ensure the work is widely and globally accessible to scholars and decision makers.
Objectives
Adolescents who deal with more emotional problems have been found to seek escape online, and struggle with excessive internet use (EIU). Poor social relationships have been linked with ...emotional problems. The current study investigated positive family and school relationships as protective factors against emotional problems and a preference for online social interaction (POSI), both specified as mediators of the association of family and school relationships with EIU. Cross-cultural differences in the model were tested.
Methods
A multi-group SEM was tested on representative samples of 4104 adolescents (
M
age
= 14.40 years,
SD
= 1.65, range 12–17, 50% female) from four European countries from Southern, Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe (Italy, Norway, Czech Republic, and Serbia, respectively).
Results
Results suggested consistent associations across countries. Positive family relationships and positive school relationships were associated with lower EIU, with 63–64% of the effect of family, and 91–93% of the effect of school relationships mediated by emotional problems and POSI.
Conclusions
Positive family and school relationships protect adolescents against excessive internet usage, regardless of culture and indirectly—through emotional problems and POSI.
The present research examines how children's time spent online is associated with their perceived life satisfaction accounting for their age, gender, socio-economic status (SES), emotional problems, ...country, and family environmental factors. This article is based on the data of the large scale cross-sectional
survey from 16 European countries with nationally representative samples of children aged 9-17 (
= 11,200,
= 13.3, SD = 2.36; 50.6% boys, 49.4% girls). The results indicated that the time children spent online appeared to have no considerable negative effect on their self-reported life satisfaction (SRLS). Comparatively, the positive effects of children's SES and family environment accounted for 43% of the overall 50% of the variance in children's SRLS scores. Considering that children's SES alone accounted for 42% of the variance, children's emotional problems, country of residence, and enabling parental mediation accounted for the remaining 3, 4, and 1% of the variance, respectively. In line with previous studies that urge caution when discussing the negative influence of time spent online on children's mental health and overall wellbeing, the current findings suggest that social-ecological characteristics and how children use the Internet, need to be examined further.
This article focuses on the privacy implications of advertising on social media, mobile apps, and games directed at children. Academic research on children's privacy has primarily focused on the ...safety risks involved in sharing personal information on the Internet, leaving market forces (such as commercial data collection) as a less discussed aspect of children's privacy. Yet, children's privacy in the digital era cannot be fully understood without examining marketing practices, especially in the context of "big data." As children increasingly consume content on an ever-expanding variety of digital devices, media and advertising industries are creating new ways to track their behaviors and target them with personalized content and marketing messages based on individual profiles. The advent of the so-called Internet of Things, with its ubiquitous sensors, is expanding these data collection and profiling practices. These trends raise serious concerns about digital dossiers that could follow young people into adulthood, affecting their access to education, employment, health care, and financial services. Although US privacy law provides some safeguards for children younger than 13 years old online, adolescents are afforded no such protections. Moreover, scholarship on children and privacy continues to lag behind the changes taking place in global media, advertising, and technology. This article proposes collaboration among researchers from a range of fields that will enable cross-disciplinary studies addressing not only the developmental issues related to different age groups but also the design of digital media platforms and the strategies used to influence young people.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing reliance on digital technology to carry out social, entertainment, work and school activities increased, which may have affected the ways in which parents ...mediated their children's digital technology use. Given the prominent role that digital technology will have in the future, it is important to investigate parent and child characteristics which impacted parental mediation of children's digital technology use. Therefore, the present study aimed at analysing the frequency of parental mediation strategies (i.e. active and restrictive) during lockdown, their determinants, and how the two strategies affected children's digital skills and time spent online. Data were collected from 461 parent and 461 child participants. Results showed that almost half of parents (46%) practiced parental mediation with the same frequency, while the 42.6% applied it more often. Active mediation was predicted by parental worries about online risks, while restrictive mediation was predicted by time spent online by children, parental worries about online risks, parental negative attitudes towards digital technology and parents' digital skills. Children developed more digital skills when their parents applied higher levels of both active and restrictive mediation, and they spent the lowest amount of time online when their parents employed higher levels of restrictive and lower levels of active mediation. Practical implications for families and children's wellbeing are discussed.
•During lockdown 46% of parents practiced parental mediation with the same frequency, while 42.6% reported an increase.•Frequency of parental mediation was related to child's time spent online, parent's worries, attitudes, and digital skills.•Children developed more digital skills when their parents applied higher levels of both active and restrictive mediation.•Children spent the lowest time online when their parents engaged in higher restrictive and lower active mediation.
This study relies on content analysis of US print and TV coverage to analyze how cyberbullying has been framed in US mainstream media from 2006 to 2013 (total of 775 newspaper articles and TV ...transcripts), primarily in terms of who and what causes cyberbullying (causal responsibility) and which individuals, institutions, and policies are responsible for taking care of the issue (treatment responsibility). An analysis of issue frames is presented too. Findings show that the TV coverage is more episodic in nature-triggered by individual cyberbullying incidents-than the print coverage. Episodic frames attribute causal responsibility to individuals rather than institutions or broader social forces. Results show the overall debate on cyberbullying is narrow, focused on incidents that resulted in suicides, and subsequent blaming of individuals involved. Such framing can have implications for audience's support of punitive policies, inability to comprehend complexity of the issue and moral panic around children's use of technology.
This study examines non-editorial news coverage in leading US newspapers as a source of ideological differences on climate change. A quantitative content analysis compared how the threat of climate ...change and efficacy for actions to address it were represented in climate change coverage across The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today between 2006 and 2011. Results show that The Wall Street Journal was least likely to discuss the impacts of and threat posed by climate change and most likely to include negative efficacy information and use conflict and negative economic framing when discussing actions to address climate change. The inclusion of positive efficacy information was similar across newspapers. Also, across all newspapers, climate impacts and actions to address climate change were more likely to be discussed separately than together in the same article. Implications for public engagement and ideological polarization are discussed.
There is a paucity of research that examines the effectiveness of social media companies' anti-bullying tools from the children's perspective. This article relies on two datasets from Norway: A ...small-scale exploratory survey and focus groups with children at one school in Norway; and the EU Kids Online survey with a nationally representative sample of Norwegian Internet-using children, to examine whether children and young people aged 9-19 are aware of and whether they use social media companies' mechanisms against cyberbullying (e.g., various types of reporting, blocking, and companies' safety and help centers). We also examine the extent to which children find these tools to be helpful and the underlying reasons for such perceptions of the effectiveness of social media companies' mechanisms. The study further inquires into children's perceptions of company responsibility for providing assistance in bullying incidents. While the majority of children in both samples know how to use basic tools such as reporting, the levels of awareness of various companies' advanced tools as well as the use of these, are relatively low. Children also have mixed perceptions as to whether companies are able to assist. Results are discussed from the framework of children's rights, offering policy recommendations.
Despite public discourses highlighting the negative consequences of time spent online (TSO) for children’s well-being, Norwegian children (aged 9–16 years) use the Internet more than other European ...children and score higher on self-reported life satisfaction (SRLS). To explore the possibility that TSO might contribute to high life satisfaction or other underlying explanatory factors, we investigate the relationship between TSO and SRLS in Norway while also accounting for how individual, family, school, and broader social circumstances influence this relationship. Countering prevailing discourses, we find a positive relationship between TSO and SRLS, which remains positive and significant even after a wider range of variables are accounted for. By explaining the circumstances under which TSO has a positive effect on SRLS, this article provides evidence of the complex role that digital technology plays in the lives of children. It also provides a critique of the often simplistic arguments found in public discourses around children’s digital media use.
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