Presentation at Hong Kong Child Safety Conference Feb 11 2012

1. Online Child Safety
An ICT Practitioner’s Perspective
Charles Mok
Internet Society Hong Kong
Feb 11 2012

2. Online Child Safety 1.0 -> 2.0
• Web 1.0
– Top-down content-based
– Crime, illegal content, pornography
– Solutions: primarily by filtering
• Web 2.0
– User-created content, social media
– “Peer-related harms”
– Filtering is not “enough”
– Children/youth: from potential victims to possible
aggressors/predators

3. Our Net Today
Today’s Internet Typical Risks
Social media services Privacy concerns
- Facebook, Twitter, Weibo,
etc. Human flesh search
- Forums such as HKGolden
- YouTube etc. Cyber-bullying/harassment
Smartphones and Tablets Intellectual property
violations
The Ubiquitous Net
- Faster, wider, everywhere Other crimes

4. How bad things really are?
• Some think that the Internet has made
everything worse.
– E.g. The Police keeps reporting that the number of
Internet related crime is rising every year
– But what does that prove?
• Nothing, except more people use the Internet
• The Dilemma of the Digital Native vs. the Digital
Immigrant
– A matter of power balance and different vantage
points
– By whose standards?

5. Myths? Reality?
• Example: number of actual confirmed cases of
child sexual abuse declined between 1990 and
2005 by 51% in the US*
– Growth in young people’s use of the Internet has
not coincided with any rise in sexual abuse against
young people
* NCANDS/Finkelhor & Jones 2006

6. Can we accept that…
• …young people today are smarter than before
• …not all young people are equally at risk
• Not to understate the problems either
– Reach of the Internet
– Speed and irreversibility, just to name a couple
• How do we tackle the problem areas / individuals but
not overstate the issue or adversely affect the proper
and positive use of the Internet by the rest of the
majority?

7. “Teach Your Children Well”
• Students “given a greater degree of freedom
to surf the Internet at school are less
vulnerable to online dangers in the long-
term.”*
* UK government watchdog Ofsted (official
body for inspecting schools)

8. “With Great Power Comes Great
Responsibility”
• “As a society, we have spent too much time
focused on what media are doing to young
people and not enough time asking what young
people are doing with media. Rather, we need to
embrace an approach based on media ethics, one
that empowers young people to take greater
responsibilities for their own actions and holds
them accountable for the choices they make as
media producers or as members of online
communities”
- Prof Henry Jenkins, USC media scholar

9. Possible Way to Go
• Media Literacy and Digital Citizenship
– Rights and responsibilities of using the Internet
– Our general studies subject is already out-of-sync at
its start?
– Does teachers, parents, and other stakeholders truly
understand what to do to help children?
– The very nature of the Internet calls for citizenship
• Bottom-up
• “No one owns the Internet” (we all own the Internet)
• Internet governance model is based on multistakeholderism

10. The ICT Industry Perspective
• 1.0: Passive
– Driven by liabilities and short-term cost
considerations
– Corporate social citizenship is almost by nature
passive and even forced by regulations
• 2.0: More active
– Reputation risks (partly as a result of social media)
– Short- to Long-term cost consideration, partly due
to more regulatory requirements
• Evident in intellectual property regulations

11. What are the Gaps?
• Understanding what online child safety is
– Regulation vs Education?
• Dr Fu mentioned Multistakeholderism
– Experience from IGF Rio de Janeiro
• Roles and engagement of:
– Parents and Teachers
– Policymakers and Government
– Industry
– NGOs
– Last but not least: Children themselves!

12. Thank you!
Charles Mok
Internet Society Hong Kong
mok@isoc.hk
Facebook: Charles Mok B
Twitter: @charlesmok
Sina Weibo: charlespmok
www.isoc.hk