Kids’ learning curve is steep
Published 12:01 am Wednesday, May 25, 2011
While it was reported Tuesday that several Sultan Middle School students may face criminal charges for allegedly creating a phony Facebook page under their principal’s name, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 27, advocated for allowing children access to the site.
Speaking at a summit on innov
ation in schools and teaching, Zuckerberg said Facebook would challenge the federal law requiring a 13-and-over age limit “at some point,” the Daily Telegraph reported. The widely ignored law falls under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, passed in 1998.
“My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age,” the Telegraph quotes Zuckerberg. “Because of the (legal) restrictions we haven’t even begun this learning process. If they’re lifted then we’d start to learn what works.”
He likely means learning what kind of advertising targeted at tweens works.
But with two Issaquah girls — ages 11 and 12 — recently charged with first-degree computer trespassing and cyberstalking for allegedly posting sexually explicit photos and comments on the Facebook page of a 12-year-old classmate, it’s apparent some kind of education at a “really, really young age” is quite necessary.
Facebook currently closes the accounts of 20,000 underage users a day, the Telegraph reported, while Consumer Reports says that 7.5 million of Facebook’s 600 million users are under 13. Facebook said most of those accounts were either set up by parents for children, or with parents’ knowledge.
Those numbers seem natural, since so many kids are technologically savvy, and so many of their parents are not. But all that tech savviness is still under the operation of a pre-pubescent brain. Harassing teachers and principals and bullying fellow students are not new activities. The permanence and global quality that the internet brings to these age-old activities is new.
Getting children and adolescents to understand the permanence and global quality of their online actions is no easy task — since adults have just as much trouble grasping the concept, as daily stories of their own errors in judgment attest.
We simply can’t have children regularly being charged with misdemeanors and felonies for harassment and cyberstalking. While they understand the technology, they truly do not understand the consequences. They can’t comprehend the effect of their actions on others, and themselves. They are kids, after all. This is not to excuse their behavior, but rather to acknowledge how difficult it is to prevent.
Some required legal and practical training, akin to driver’s ed, might help. But the tech training wheels come off so early these days, when would it start? Is there a preschool that teaches both the ABCs and privacy law?
