Online Safety Weekly Update – 28th June 2023 for Schools and Colleges

I read a really interesting article in TES last week which was looking into whether social media drives copycat behaviour and whether this can be blamed for increases in various mental health conditions. In other words, are children ‘catching’ syndromes from the content they’re viewing online?

There has always been a certain level of copycat behaviour amongst all ages (for example, starting every sentence with ‘so…’. Where did that come from?). But due to their age, children and young people can be more susceptible.

Social contagion is described as quote the spread of ideas, attitudes or patterns of behaviour within a group, through a process of conformity unquote and more experts are pointing to social media as an influential factor in relation to various mental ill health disorders such as eating disorders, self-harm and tic-like behaviours.

The article goes into much more depth, including advice for schools and you can read it HERE.

As one of the most popular messaging apps around the world used (in my experience) from Year 3 upwards, WhatsApp continue to add new features to keep users onboard. Two of the newest features are the ability to edit a sent message within 15 minutes of it being sent, and ‘Keep in Chat’.

The first (edit within 15 minutes) is exactly what it says. You can send a message to someone or a group and, if you need to make changes you can do so within 15 minutes. This is good, particularly for someone who may have rushed a reply to something and didn’t critically think about it before pressing ‘Send’, or realises that the message could be taken out of context.

The second, ‘Keep in Chat’ is where someone can select certain messages that they want to keep in a folder called ‘Kept messages’.

There’s more detail to the explanation than I have given above, take a look at the Childnet article HERE for further details, including the positives and negatives to these new features.

Continuing the topic of artificial intelligence, I suspect we’re going to be talking about this a lot more next curriculum year. I’m already thinking about evolving many of my talks to take this into account. As amazing as AI can be it’s the same old thing: where there are positives there are negatives. Already we’re seeing some pretty significant and concerning negatives from image-based abuse to voice scams, where a person’s voice is cloned using AI (some research suggests you only need 3 seconds of a persons voice to clone it). Imagine a child who posts videos onto YouTube, the voice data can be extracted and cloned.

In one voice-cloning scam a parent in the United States received a call from her daughter who was screaming down the phone for help, followed by a supposed kidnapper demanding money. Her daughter’s voice had been cloned. Although an extreme (and I hope very rare) example, we cannot fall behind with this. Legislation and technical tools to combat these issues will take a long time and as always education is the best form of prevention. To read more about the voice cloning scam you can see an article in The Mirror HERE.