Online Communities Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

First and second-graders, even third-graders who haven’t gotten to be Facebook regulars yet, can now Have Fun Online Together and Share Proud Moments With Friends through their Togetherville social network accounts.

“What we want to do is build good digital citizens,” says Togetherville founder and CEO Mandeep Dhillon.

God help us.

With the brewing controversies about Facebook and privacy, not to mention news stories about the dangers of cyberabuse, the last thing parents might want to do is let their children get into online social networking.

But Togetherville Inc., a Palo Alto startup that finished a test run last week, hopes to alleviate those fears with a social-networking service tailored to children ages 6 through 10.

The free service creates a secure network that gives children access to the benefits of social networking while giving parents oversight to make sure their kids are shielded from potential dangers until they are old enough to handle the Web.

No offense to Dhillon and his investors, but are we really ready to offer up a new generation to be “shielded from potential dangers…” by the operators of a social network while they are having fun sitting in front of a small screen all day sharing proud moments with their friends? Did Alice just fall down the rabbit hole?

On Togetherville, no one who is not authorized by the parent can contact the child. Nor can anyone outside the network gain access to a child’s information or postings, including through search engines.

There are adult Facebook members who are pressing for that same level of privacy. Parents create the account using their Facebook login information, but the Togetherville site operates in a separate world outside of Facebook.

However, children can exchange text messages with other friends in their Togetherville “neighborhood” and with authorized grown-ups through Facebook Connect. The text comes from a pre-written selection of “quips” like “Cool,” “Random” and “What planet are you from?”

The kids can create digital greeting cards, play games and watch approved video. But they can’t share links to outside sites or, for now at least, photos.

Dhillon said the company is working on generating revenue by buying and sharing virtual goods.

It is not Dhillon’s fault, I suppose, that Togetherville is launching into the world at a time when faith in Facebook is not exactly on an all-time high. If there are parents of 6- to 10-year-olds ready to believe that their children can be shielded from potential dangers once tethered to Togetherville, they must surely have spent the past few years in Wonderland with Alice.

Social networks unquestionably have benefits. Just don’t try to convince people right now that those benefits come without perils and frustrations. If they are shielded from dangers, are 6-year-olds ready for the frustrations? For instance. A few months ago, Facebook decided it didn’t want me to have access to my Friends any more. Oh, they can send me messages, and presumably if they haven’t hidden me they get my status updates. I get a few of their status updates too. I just can no longer access my Friend list because it has disappeared somewhere. Have you ever tried to find a real person involved with Facebook? The people behind the software are utterly unreachable.

This is the world to which 6- to 10-year olds will now be introduced. Fully shielded from danger, their parents are told…

Social-networking site Togetherville is designed for youngsters ages 6 to 10.

Occasionally this space has received comments one would deem offensive (especially if one could remember the days when people apologized for saying damn in polite company) but they are all there, at the bottom of assorted posts. T/S has a “Call out” mechanism for making comments more public. I have occasionally called out comments which strongly oppose a post, but not included the gutter language. The truly offensive just lie there, hopefully unnoticed.

There has to be a limit. Lawyer/journalist Peter Scheer argues for the preservation of some degree of civil discourse in an op ed piece that appeared in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Some people have no choice but to live in a cesspool. (Consider the young protagonist in “Slumdog Millionaire,” leaping into a pool of human waste in order to escape a locked latrine.) But news organizations are not among them.

The cesspool that many newspapers occupy is the comments sections of their Web sites. This is the space, typically following a newspaper’s own stories and editorials, where readers have their say. If postings to that space are completely unfiltered, it is sure to be stuffed with the rants and invective of people who have too much time on their hands. Reading online comments sections, one can easily get the impression that bigots, psychopaths and conspiracy theorists make up a majority of newspapers’ online readers. (Note to publishers: This is hardly a desirable demographic to show to advertisers.) In reality, such commenters are relatively few in number, although they are, regrettably, loud and prolific.

Sociologists will someday figure out whether these readers are bona fide nut jobs or just average Americans transformed by the anonymity, and access to a broad audience, that the Internet makes possible. Not all newspaper publishers give free rein to miscreants in their comments sections. Among those who do, however, a commonly heard rationale is that they are forced to stay their hand because of legal constraints. In this they are mistaken. Misconception No. 1 is that newspapers, by actively moderating online discussions, and by editing (and selectively deleting) comments, assume liability for defamatory comments posted by readers. Although traditional print publication of “letters to the editor” does carry some of these risks, online publishers of user-generated content enjoy a degree of legal protection bordering on complete immunity, thanks to a 1996 federal law, the Communications Decency Act.

Facebook, Twitter, etc are, as far as I can tell, wayy outside the parameters of this act. Except for the time a True/Slant post of mine was blocked from Facebook by some anonymous person who objected to the mention of dogs and research in the same paragraph, presumably believing I was supporting cruel and unusual treatment of animals — you had to read the article, which the objecter did not — censorship seems rare on those sites. Not so obscenity and vulgarity and the randomly bizarre.

I am Facebook friends with my grandchildren — the only line of intergenerational communication open to those of us who draw the line at texting. But I try not to look at their pages. My college freshman granddaughter, in fact, recently asked for my Twitter name so she could follow me, but suggested I wouldn’t want to follow her. The brave new world is populated with abbreviated obscenities and codes which might totally replace English; oh, me. But back to the Communications Decency Act.

Section 230 of the act protects newspapers that operate their reader comments sections as a cesspool, permitting readers to post whatever they wish, no matter how libelous or harmful. Injured parties can sue the authors of those online comments, but not the newspaper. The newspaper is shielded, even if it has been given notice that statements in its comments section are false and it refuses to remove them.

But newspapers are equally protected if they act responsibly, screening comments or editing them. The act was intended to give news organizations a perverse incentive to refrain from editing user-generated comments. As long as editors don’t alter the meaning of a comment completely (say, by changing the comment to say the opposite of what was posted), the newspaper will be protected.

Reader comment sections have huge potential. The opportunity to debate both other readers and the journalists responsible for the paper’s news stories and editorials can reflect democratic self-government at its best. However, this ideal can be realized only if editors take seriously their responsibility to edit.

Misconception No. 2 is the belief that to regulate readers’ comments, enforcing rules of civil discourse on a newspaper Web site, is to engage in a form of censorship – and that censorship by a news organization, if not strictly illegal, is at least hypocritical. But this concern confuses censorship with editing. Although the online venue may remove the need to edit comments for length, it does not diminish the obligation to edit for substance.

Ah, substance. And propriety. And civility. And good old-fashioned print newspapers some of us still read over breakfast coffee. My age may be showing here.

Online comments need editing.

Tag: Online Communities

Gutter talk in cyberspace: how free should speech really be?