Jessi Slaughter and the 4chan trolls - the case for censoring the internet
By Peter Farquhar, Technology Editor
From: news.com.au
July 20, 2010 8:19AMTHE case of a US girl who was hounded by internet stalkers into police protection highlights the need for content filtering, an Australian academic says.
Eleven-year-old Jessi Slaughter has been targeted with death threats after her address and phone number were shared on internet forums by pranksters in response to a YouTube video she posted from her bedroom.
Her mother said she hasn't seen her daughter's video and told Gawker she "doesn't go on the computer".
If she had, she would have seen her daughter become something of a minor celebrity on tween gossip site StickyDrama, where she was linked to a relationship with the lead singer of Blood on the Dancefloor and made an overnight YouTube star for her foul-mouthed tirade against her "haters".It attracted the attention of trollers - internet users who deliberately provoke reactions - who then promoted Jessi as a target for hate mail and prank calls.
Professor Matt Warren, the head of Deakin University's School of Information Systems, said as long as parents who don't understand the internet kept giving their children access to it, there needed to be ways to control its use.
"You simply can't have free access to the internet," he said.
"It has to be controlled, censored and people have to be held accountable for their actions on it.
"We punish people who drink, we punish people who speed and we have to implement laws to that effect when it comes to the internet."
Prof Warren said that parents might think allowing children to access the internet in their bedroom was a way of helping them do their schoolwork, but the reality was, a lot of parents simply didn't understand the medium.
"The child isn't ethically aware of what they're doing," he said.
"It's also an education issue with that person and the parents aren't necessarily the ones that should be giving that training, because they don't understand it either.
"Parents will be concerned about their child going out all hours, but they don't care about them staying on the internet all hours."
Prof Warren said educating children about the dangers of the internet should be part of the national curriculum and that cybersafety should be an election issue.
Both major parties have shelved their plans for filtering the internet until after the election, which Prof Warren said was an oversight.
"Governments still don't understand the huge impact of the information age on our society," he said.
"Five hundred million people using Facebook has huge implications.
"Cybersafety and cyberbullying ties into censorship and control, so it should be an election issue. But does it win votes?
"It will just need a government to make a hard decision to say this has to stop."
A pilot study into teaching ethical behaviour on the net has been under way in 150 schools nationwide since last year.
Recommendations on how it fits into the national curriculum will be put forward after the election.
One proposal would see schools given the right to respond to student's activities on the net outside school hours.
Dr Helen McGrath - also a Deakin colleague of Prof Warren's - was a contributor to the Commonwealth Government’s Cybersafety Joint Committee in June last year.
She said it was unrealistic to expect parents to monitor their children around the clock and that the onus was on schools to give kids the tools to protect themselves.
"It's all very well telling an 11-year-old they can't have a computer in their bedroom, but when they get to 14, it's like saying you have to make all your phone calls in front of us," she said.
Unlike her colleague, Dr McGrath doesn't believe content filtering has any role in educating children about the dangers of the internet.
"It really comes back down to making sure they understand what they're getting into," she said.
"You don't take the keys off them when you teach them to drive - we talk about what's safe and what's legal."
Parents concerned about cybersafety and cyberbullying can access a wide range of information and tools at the Government's online safety initiative Cybersmart
http://www.news.com.au/technol.....369199#ixzz0uCdcbaYxThis is definitely down to the parents. This girl is a child and did not act in a way I believe an eleven year old should act like. Something Conroy will jump on the bandwagon for
I am a 50+ year old adult.... leave my Internet alone!
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