The Cyber Effect (18 page)

Ultimately the algorithm could reflect jurisdictional law in the area of cyber-harassment against a minor and be designed to quantify and provide evidence of a crime. One day, it could involve sending digital deterrents to the cyberbully, which is a way to counter what cyberpsychologists
call “minimization of status and authority online.” We can show young people that there are consequences to their behavior in cyberspace.

It's a twenty-first-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem.

Nastiness online is becoming an accepted reality—and something most people have witnessed. The majority of adult social media users said they “have seen people being mean and cruel to others on social-network sites,” according to a report from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. The conditions of the cyber environment can make cruelty a competitive sport—and posts escalate from barbs to sadism very quickly. Envy drives some of this activity. Celebrities are often targets. It took Monica Lewinsky, one of the early social media victims, a decade to emerge from her experience of being shamed and humiliated. Zelda Williams, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of actor Robin Williams, gave up her Twitter account after she was exposed to unimaginably awful tweets following her father's death.

The same year, when American baseball legend
Curt Schilling tweeted his paternal pride that his daughter Gabby had received a college acceptance letter, the celebratory mood devolved into ugliness when Twitter “trolls” engaged in sexually explicit posting about Gabby, who was seventeen years old. Schilling did what probably millions of other fathers can only dream about: He used his fame and popular blog to track down nine of the individuals who had generated the hateful and sexist comments and got them fired from their jobs or sports teams.

If young adults can be so devastated by online attacks—then what about children?

“Trolls” are malicious individuals who search online for unsuspecting people to deceive and trick. Sadistically teasing and taunting children and tweens is a sick sport for them. One common place where they meet up with kids as young as six years old is on Internet gaming sites, where groups use webcams and microphones to communicate while they meet one another online and play. They can be found on popular multiplayer online games like
Grand Theft Auto
(affectionately known as
GTA
), which they play in hopes of winning
the trust of young unsuspecting players in order to trick them, usually making them freak out—while recording their conversations and posting them for kicks. This is damaging for children on so many levels, not to mention that it brings them into contact with these pathological strangers who are manipulating and preying on their innocence—for laughs.

But let's dig a little further into the comprehensive EU study. Children were asked if they had been bothered or upset by anything they'd seen online—or knew about things that bothered their friends.

Bothered
was used to describe something that “
made you feel uncomfortable, upset, or feel that you shouldn't have seen it.” The children were asked to describe in their own words what bothered them.

Nearly ten thousand responses came in. They were diverse and wide-ranging, and changed considerably with the age of the child. Younger children were more concerned about content, such as something they'd seen that was meant for adults. Older children were more worried about conduct and contact, in other words, troubled by something they'd done or witnessed being done online. They worried about how they were supposed to act (conduct) and about people they might meet (contact) online.

The researchers compiled the responses and organized them into types of concerns. Girls tended to be more concerned about strangers they had met online, or might meet. Boys were more bothered by violence they'd seen. Both boys and girls described being bothered by things they'd seen on video-sharing websites like YouTube—violent or sexual images, as well as other inappropriate content. Both boys and girls described being bothered by real violence, as well as gory, cruel, and aggressive fictional violence that they'd seen in other places online—particularly violence against animals or other children.

Okay, let's stop there for a second.
Children watching violence against children?
Yes, you read that correctly. Almost anything can go up online, on any forum or site where video hosting is enabled. Some sites do monitor content, but there is often a latency period, or window
in which unmonitored content can be seen by anyone before it is taken down.

It's bad enough to watch violence against adults or animals, but what is the impact of children seeing violence against other children? There is actually a real-life forensics case that involves this. A two-year-old boy in Britain, Jamie Bulger, was kidnapped in 1993 by two ten-year-old boys in a shopping center while Jamie's mother wasn't looking. The older boys tortured and murdered Jamie; his mutilated body was found a couple of miles away. Here's the piece that connects the act of witnessing violence with behavior: It was reported that the two boys had been actively looking for a young child to torture after they had watched horror videos, specifically the 1991 film
Child's Play 3
. It was claimed that the boys staged Jamie's death, even mimicking some of the brutality in the movie. While this awful and tragic case predated the Internet, we can learn from it today.

Let's return to the study of eight- to twelve-year-olds and what troubled them online. What bothered them most?

Pornography they'd seen.

Yes, that was the most frequently reported concern. As a reality check, in the same study, 5 percent of the nine- and ten-year-olds had seen sexual images online in the previous year. In other words, when they were eight and nine.

Pornography.
This is the elephant in the cyber room
. We aren't just talking about nudity. It's adult pornography and hardcore pornography that is “upsetting, intrusive, or inappropriate.”

Did we need a study to inform us of this?
Have we reached a time in history when we have to ask children what bothers them in order to find out that pornography isn't for eight- to twelve-year-olds? This is a terrible moral blind spot of our society.

As much as I trust empirical science and respect the care given to creating studies that accurately reflect reality—when it comes to the subject of the cyber effects of online pornography on the developing child, I am not sure that we have time for the careful studies that would provide definitive results and information. And even if we did have time for studies, it would be almost impossible to conduct them, due to the ethics of exposing children to harmful material for the sake of a
study. In many ways, we are simply in the dark. And we may be there for the foreseeable future.

But does that mean we do nothing?

It was social psychologist Leon Festinger who created the theory of
cognitive dissonance
. It occurs when our thoughts or ideas about the world clash, and we feel tension and internal conflict, which is unpleasant for us. Seeking internal harmony, we make a choice—often not consciously—to focus on something other than the conflict, which could be irrational and maladaptive behavior. The elephant in the cyber room reflects what I think of as
societal cognitive dissonance
, the experience of knowing intuitively that something, like the Internet, is both good and bad for society—but choosing to ignore the bad effects in order not to feel conflicted. Technology causes this trade-off. We want to reduce tension and internal conflict, and to focus on all the nice things the Internet brings us—Wi-Fi, connectivity, convenience, fun gadgets that enhance status. We decide to ignore the problems and risks.

The bystander effect also applies. We are all witnessing this crime against innocence. Does the size of the crowd online cause each of us to look the other way?

Imagine that a nine-year-old child is wandering around a 7-Eleven—or any regular convenience store of the sort that urban dwellers have come to know and rely on because, well, they are so convenient. In Japan, it's a FamilyMart. In Norway, it's a Narvesen. You can get cash, milk, energy bars, eggs, juice, a newspaper, and a cup of not-so-great coffee there.

Candy takes up an entire aisle. Another aisle has magazines.

When you were a child, you may have visited a convenience store with your friends or parents. You stood and looked at the candy aisle. You may have browsed some magazines—flipping through the pages of
Outside, PC World, Popular Mechanics, Newsweek, Seventeen
, or
Cosmopolitan
with its racy covers.

A nine-year-old child has some grown-up interests. They may still
believe in Santa Claus and fairy tales, but they are also curious about the adult world. It terrifies them a little but also beckons.

Psychologists agree that exploration is a healthy and necessary part of development. Emotionally, a nine-year-old child is developing self-regulation and self-control, beginning to pull away from family and parents by developing closer bonds to peers at school. They are beginning to develop a “self-concept” and self-esteem, usually by evaluating self-worth in comparison with others.

Around the world there are different cultural mores about what is appropriate for a child's eyes, but by and large, wherever you go, adult content—words and images—is kept from children. This is often regulated by the government in some way, the result of laws that have been written, passed, amended, and honed for decades.

In the convenience store, the adult magazines—
Penthouse, Hustler, Playboy
—are kept under opaque cloth or colored plastic so you can't see their covers. They might be kept in a separate room—in the way that adult movies, before the era of Netflix and On Demand, were kept in a different room of a video store that children were not allowed to enter.

Prior to the Internet, it was quite possible that a nine-year-old child would not have been aware of the existence of adult magazines or where to obtain them—and even if they did, obtaining them wasn't easy. Now imagine that nine-year-old child sitting in front of a computer screen. Perhaps the child is clustered with a group of friends, but more likely alone.

Parents would be vigilant in a city convenience store with a child, and keeping an eye out. But at home they are not so vigilant. What is there to be afraid of? Yet within a few seconds of searching on the Internet, a child can come into contact with the adult world in a shocking variety of ways—which can leave them disturbed or, as the EU study says, “bothered.” They might be afraid to say anything to their parents for fear of getting in trouble—or worse, having their devices confiscated.

This is not the same as an issue of
Playboy
hidden under a bed. Such a magazine might contain a total of sixty images or fewer, which would be (relatively speaking) pretty benign. Now in the time it once took to
turn a page, there are thousands of websites with millions of images. There are challenges in quantifying content online, but in early 2016, according to the Internet Filter Review, which is continually updating its findings, there were
4.2 million pornography sites and 68 million daily pornographic search engine requests—or one quarter of all searches. The prevalence and accessibility of this content may be too great to avoid.

Some social scientists have even speculated that the rapid growth of the Internet, and its design, were driven in part by the great human attraction to and interest in pornography. Given the numbers of people who are into it—a
2014
Cosmopolitan
survey of four thousand adult men found that 30 percent of them viewed it daily—we must consider it a relatively normal interest for adults.

What makes you think children aren't seeing it?

I wonder sometimes if the potential threat hasn't been made clear enough to parents: the impact of pornography on developing children. As Michael Seto described, it could be the largest unregulated social experiment of all time.

As a society, we are readily having conversations about the impact of Photoshopped images of women online and the impact on young girls, who tend to think of themselves and evaluate themselves in comparison with the appearance of those unreal and Photoshopped celebrities. Society discusses the impact of concussions on young boys who are playing football (though it took decades). Society discusses and amends the appropriate age to begin driving a car, drinking alcohol, voting in federal and state elections, joining the military, and getting married.

And yet society does not appear ready to have this conversation: What is the effect of explicit and upsetting images of adult sexual practices and pornography on developing children?

While many parents do describe themselves in surveys as concerned about pornography on the Internet, it is enormously troubling to me that not all of them do. For instance, when parents of young children in the U.K. were asked what worried them about raising children in the digital age and were given a list of things that could concern them—the list included children accessing pornography or sharing self-generated
sexts—15 percent of them said, nope, they weren't concerned about that.

Incredibly, as many as 11 percent of all parents surveyed expressed concern that the
technology skills of their under-five-year-olds surpassed their own. It goes without saying that if your tech skills aren't as sharp as those of your five-year-old child, how are you supposed to protect them online? Eight in ten parents feel they do not know enough to keep their three- to four-year-old children safe online, and the same goes for parents of five- to seven-year-olds and eight- to eleven-year-olds.

Kids are curious. And when they become curious about something online, they will find a way to see it and share it with other kids. Older children—older than twelve—may have the self-control and self-knowledge to resist the temptation to see something disturbing. But for a younger child, simply due to where they are developmentally, this is often not possible. Which brings us to the important subject of parental control.