ReputationDefender recently ran across this clever video that points out the real world consequences of social networking for teens and students. It was put together by a great nonprofit called ConnectSafely.org and is very well done.

ReputationDefender encourages parents to educate their children about online safety and their online reputation. Any readers have online teen safety tips? Let us know in the comments!

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The dean of an Indianapolis, Indiana high school, Roncalli High, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, have subpoenaed Palo Alto based social network giant Facebook for information regarding the identity of a person who setup a false profile on the site.

Someone posing as the dean for the interparochial archdiocesan Catholic high school (the term interparochial referring to the fact that the school receives financial and pastoral support from the parishes that comprise the South Deanery of the Indianapolis Archdiocese), began contacting Roncalli students with inappropriate messages, according to an attorney for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

Although Facebook removed the fake profile from its site after Roncalli officials contacted them about it last month, the lawsuit — which alleges harassment and identity deception against the anonymous troublemaker — was filed Thursday because Facebook’s privacy policy requires a court order or subpoena before it will release any identifying information about a user.

According to the Indianapolis Star, the Archdiocese doesn’t know whether a Roncalli student created the “fauxfile.” Although Facebook has declined to issue a statement on the matter, the information that they release could be as vague as an IP address.

The above article quotes several lawyers with differing views on digital speech. Some say that students posing as school officials online are defaming their administrators and can be held liable while others see the fake profile as parody speech protected by the First Amendment.

This is another example of where the law is behind current technology and only future rulings will decide what is a harmless prank and what is a crime online.

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Mason High School students in Cincinatti, Ohio are dealing with the fallout from pictures of an assistant basketball coach engaged in what appears to be a round of beer pong during a party at his home. This would not be bad in and of itself, but the pictures suggest that there were people under 21 in attendance, and Mason Police are now investigating just what went on and who was there, according to the Enquirer (no, not the supermarket rag).

A private group of citizens calling themselves Citizens for Accountability and Results in Education (CARE), with a long history of criticizing the way the Mason school district has conducted business, presented the potentially incriminating photos to school officials this week. They claimed to have obtained them from an unnamed social networking site of one of the party participants. The photos were eventually turned over to the police.

We’ve covered stories like this before. They are nothing new with the inter-connectedness of the web growing by leaps and bounds seemingly every day. But what stuck out from the article for us was this quote from the coach’s attorney, Patrick Dunphy, to the Examiner:

“Any accusations that my clients participated in or hosted a party for Mason High School students where alcohol was served are absolutely untrue. […] “The accusation that my clients held a party in their home where alcohol was consumed by minors with their prior knowledge are absolutely false,” […] “Mrs. Crotty was out of state on the date apparently in question. […] I caution you that my clients are not public figures and that they will undoubtedly incur damage to their reputation in the community by the reckless reporting of unsubstantiated accusations.”

The attention paid to the reputations of his clients is certainly admirable and justified. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, internet has once again proved to be a powerful reputation engine that can bring about consequences in the real world.

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Quoting from Breitbart.com:

This weekend Amnesty International called on authorities in Egypt to free 16 Internet activists jailed for over two weeks under the charge of “threatening national security.”

Amnesty International believes all 16 to be prisoners of conscience, detained for their participation” in a “peaceful protest in the city of Alexandria on 23 July,” the London-based rights group said in a statement.

Of specific concern to the group are the fates of two activists, Ahmed Afifi and Mohammed Taher. Of them, Amnesty has said: “It is not known where they are held and Amnesty International fears they are at risk of torture or other ill-treatment.”

The detentions arose from the individuals’ involvement in the ‘6 April Youth’ Facebook group. Amnesty International believes them to be prisoners of conscience detained merely for exercising their right to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression. The ‘6 April’ group on Facebook has more than 72,000 members, and earlier this year it called for a day of protest at rising prices.

The arrests took place on Wednesday, after a group of about 30 young people gathered on a beach in Alexandria for a peaceful protest. This wouldn’t be a problem except that public protests are illegal under the state of emergency in force in Egypt for the last 27 years. Amnesty reports that on Thursday the detainees were ordered to be held for 15 days pending further investigation.

“Bloggers continue to face threats and harassment for their work as rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly continue to be restricted in Egypt,” the organization said.

The Facebook group was established in March by 27-year-old Esra Abdel Fattah, calling for the protests against price hikes. She was detained, but later freed after her mother made an appeal to Interior Minister Habib al-Adli.

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Many parents are concerned about defending their child’s reputation in the age of Internet Bullying and Internet Harassment. ReputationDefender has blogged about the new quandaries parents face in the digital age. From privacy concerns, to internet safety for children, to Cyber Bullying, today’s parents have a lot to deal with online.

ReputationDefender is committed to child online safety and protecting kids on the net. That is why we launched MyChild, a service that monitors the online activity of teens and allows parents to keep up with what their child is doing online. ReputationDefender encourages all parents to speak with their children about proper online behavior. Never give out personal information online and don’t assume that something posted on your own blog or facebook account will remain private.

Parents should be proactive about defending the reputation of their children online. Do not hesitate to contact site moderators, admins or other webmasters to report TOS violations and malicious postings.

ReputationDefender ran into this sage advice from Tales of Mere Existence that relates to online bullying and your child’s reputation.

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Regular readers of the ReputationDefender Blog will remember this post about Indian Schools posting student records online for employers and universities to see. Now, a recent article from Australia’s venerable Courier Mail highlights another new policy by school officials to publicly post all student files for anyone to see:

The intranet database, dubbed OneSchool, will profile each of the state’s 480,000 public school students enrolled from Prep to Year 12.

Photographs, personal details, career aspirations, off-campus activities and student performance records are being collected from all 1251 state schools.

Some parents are understandably concerned about this initiative, questioning the rationale behind such a bold new program. They cite concerns about the availability of the information to inappropriate parties such as pedophiles and hackers. One reader commenting on the article suggested that personal information from the politicians who support the measure, along with that of their wives and children, be posted first as a test to determine if it safe before adding school children.

Using more of a stick than a carrot, Education Minister Rod Welford is quoted as saying that parents who refuse to supply information about their children for the database could find their children denied access to public education, and that the program, dubbed OneSchool is “non-negotiable.”

While the centralization of records and databases is a necessary thing in order to facilitate information sharing, it comes with a cost, and the child’s reputation moves online, as well as off. At what point does the availability of information outweigh the security risks inherent in making it more widely available?

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India’s Lucknow University is going to offer a new tool for its students seeking jobs, soon. According to expressindia.com, information that students submit on counseling forms will be posted on a job placement website ostensibly administered by the school itself. In addition to the basic information, the database is going to include educational information, including grades and specialized courses that the student enrolled in.

On the face of it, we like the sound of this idea; putting Internet profiles to a positive purpose. However, there is nothing in the article to determine if the information being placed online is totally opt-in. While it is nice to have your grades available for a potential employer to peruse, what happens if you have a bad term and you get a less than stellar grade in Organic Chemistry one semester? Potentially you could not be hired based on this information, and that’s not so good. Controlling your information online is always a priority in this digital age.

Ultimately, this is a step in the right direction in terms of increasing communication, as Professor Nishi Pandey points out: “The university receives thousands of letters from various institutes and government departments enquiring about the details of students, when they apply for admission or jobs there. Online information of the students will make it easier both for the university and the information seeker.”

Could this be a trend that eventually finds its way to the United States? Only time will tell.

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Regular readers of this blog will recall that we’ve posted a few articles documenting the harmful effects of online hate speech, so if the following story sounds familiar, it should.

CNN is reporting that anonymous, online gossip is taking an enormous toll on our nation’s young people. “Jane,” a college freshman in New York, who asked that her real identity be withheld, has suffered psychologically, emotionally and even physically after her name was linked to salacious rumors on a college gossip site. Anonymous commenters have called the 18 year old student racist, ugly and “overrated.” Jane claims the rumors are untrue, but like other internet nastiness, the meaner the language, the more page views their posts generate and the more damage they cause to an individual’s reputation.

Just how damaging is this digital hate? Jane says that after reading the slander, “she felt like she had been kicked in the stomach.”

[Jane] called her parents in the middle of the night crying. She has lost weight, has trouble sleeping, and has become suspicious of those around her. She told me that it has ruined her freshman year — and will likely taint her entire college experience.

So what, if any, recourse does Jane have? She can hire a reputation management firm to help her craft a more becoming online image, or she can litigate, an option that is too time consuming and expensive for most students.

The CNN piece concludes by documenting the outdated case law that surrounds anonymous online hate. It notes, correctly, that the First Amendment protects free and even unpopular speech and that anonymous speech is also protected. Current case law does not allow for defamatory information to be spread freely, online or in the real world.

To successfully sue the posters, Jane would have to show that they made false and defamatory statements about her (racist and slutty would qualify, I think) published them to a third party (I read them) and that her reputation was damaged (check).

In fact, most jurisdictions also recognize “per se” defamation, where the allegations are presumed to cause damage to the plaintiff, such as attacks on a person’s professional character or standing.

What do you think? Is this harmless online gossip or actionable defamation?

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PC World is reporting that social networking powerhouse Facebook has enacted an online safety agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states, as well as the District of Columbia to better protect children online.

As part of the agreement, Facebook is pledging to implement new safety measures and refine existing ones, as well as affirming its participation on the Internet Safety Task Force that MySpace launched in January with the attorneys general.

The Palo Alto based company will also work to better protect private data placed on its site:

Facebook is also pledging to be aggressive in responding to requests to remove inappropriate content and groups, immediate removal of links to pornographic sites and prominent display of privacy information and safety tips.

ReputationDefender applauds this important development and supports the stated goals of the Internet Safety Task Force. Facebook and MySpace have taken positive first steps to better protect children and privacy online, but users still should be aware of the potential dangers associated with social networking. As regular readers of this blog know, divulging personal information online can have harmful effects in the real and digital world. In order for the increased security and privacy measures adopted by the social networking giants to be effective, Facebook and MySpace users must be aware of the potential pitfalls of posting personal information in very public places.

ReputationDefender looks forward to even more comprehensive privacy controls to better protect children online.

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The San Francisco Chronicle has a hard-hitting piece by Debra J. Saunders that takes the college gossip site Juicycampus.com to task for engendering an environment full of anonymous, damaging speech. Juicycampus has come under fire recently by blogs and the MSM who find nothing redeemable in a site that regularly features “crude language, ethnic slurs and graphic descriptions of probably fictitious sexual encounters.”

The site, which was started by a Duke graduate last August, has spread to over 50 college campuses and has been described by some as encouraging users to anonymously dish digital dirt about their classmates and professors. Some colleges have requested the site be banned and other campuses have issued letters and articles urging the student body to ignore the site altogether.

With tones ranging from silly to nasty, the site takes advantage of an outdated piece of legislation to keep the gossip flowing. The Communications Decency Act, crafted in the early days of the internet, made a gaping hole in digital case law and leaves no one accountable for libelous or defamatory online language. With no one responsible for the incendiary posts, the anonymous culture of internet hate has grown unabated over the past decade. Not the site owners nor the anonymous posters have any claim to the libelous and reputation damaging  content on a given URL. Juicycampus prominently proclaims the anonymous nature of their forums and Saunders calls out their faulty reasoning. Quoting from the piece:

“There is no way for someone using the site to find out who you are,” the site assures users. You can smear others falsely without fear that your true identity will be known . . . Bloggers can point to America’s history of anonymous political pamphleteering as precedent for the free speech rights of anonymous words. But Thomas Paine risked execution or jail if his authorship of “Common Sense” had been known - and he did so for principles in which he believed. Not for trash.

ReputationDefender supports free and anonymous speech and responsible online discourse. It should be noted that neither defamation or libel are covered by the First Amendment and never have been. Spreading lies or rumors does real harm to real people and character assassination is one of the unintended consequences of the digital revolution. Educating students about the negative effects of their online behavior is the first step to stemming the tide of online hate speech. ReputationDefender strongly supports the First Amendment and stands opposed, along with our Constitution, to false and intentionally malicious speech.

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Lori Aratani has a great article in the Washington Post that documents the recent Facebook trend of parents setting up profiles and sending friend requests to their children. The piece received coverage on a number of popular blogs and was dugg over 1,000 times over last weekend, highlighting new concerns over teenage privacy and online parenting. Quoting from the page:

More and more moms and dads are signing onto Facebook to keep up with their offspring. Not only are they friending (or attempting to friend) their sons and daughters, they’re friending their sons’ and daughters’ friends.

Faced with parental profiles, students have several online options: ignore, accept, or grant limited access to their online life. Reactions from students have been mixed, but most feel that parental pokes are an invasion of their privacy. Having mom and dad on Facebook is like “ ‘having them walk into my room’ ” said a 17 year old high school student quoted in the piece. Anti-Parent Facebook groups have even sprung up, with heated comments about virtual progenitors. Most see Social Networking as the domain of the young and view bosses, teachers and parents as an unwelcome intrusion that limit their self-expression.

Others, though, are not concerned with their rents getting digital and have welcomed them as virtual friends. It is important for parents and students to communicate, online and off, and for both groups to set up ground rules for acceptable online behavior. And, as the article mentions, parents should be aware of the privacy function of Facebook; your kid may approve your friend request, but that doesn’t mean you are seeing the whole story.

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Evan Thomas has an insightful piece at Newsweek that compares anonymous online gossip to the Communist Red Scare of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The article’s main focus is JuicyCampus, a gossip site devoted to cataloguing the “juice,” or rumors, at college campuses across America. So where does McCarthy come in?

Part of McCarthy’s twisted brilliance was his ability to manipulate mass media to malign the character of his enemies. According to Richard Rovere, “[McCarthy] invented the morning press conference called for the purpose of announcing an afternoon press conference.” The Wisconsin Senator was able to claim that he had proof that his opponents were Communist Sympathizers and the press ate it up and gave Joe free ink. In the end, though, the “charges were bogus, but the denials and refutations never quite caught up with the initial banner headlines.”

Similarly, anonymous online gossiping sites are, according to Thomas, calling out malicious buzzwords and gaining eyeballs in order to trash reputations and increase page views (some posts have received over 10,000 views on JuicyCampus). And because of the nature of this site, individuals are guilty until proven innocent and rebuttals are often lost beneath all of the “juice.”

Thomas readily admits that his analogy fails on a number of levels; “Unlike McCarthy, who craved publicity, the modern-day campus blowhards thrive on anonymity.” Indeed, it is the anonymous component of speech that so often leads to malicious and incendiary speech. Another key difference between modern character smearing and the Red Scare of last century is the status of those impugned. Targets at sites like JuicyCampus are not Government Officials or members of the Hollywood elite, but instead are everyday students, working toward their degrees. As we mentioned in an earlier post, it seems that one consequence of internet growth is the decay of privacy and notions of private internet lives.

What do you think? Are gossip sites harmless fun and meaningless distractions or is there something base and innately cruel to their business model?

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C.G. Lynch has a well researched piece over at CIO.com today that looks at the need for young professionals to monitor their Facebook profiles in an increasingly wired world. The article, which does mention the damaging consequences of an unprofessional online profile, focuses on how to balance personal and professional networking needs.

As colleagues, customers, peers and upper management jump on the social networking band wagon, early Facebook adopters are posed with a significant question: Who Am I Online? As Alison Driscoll, a marketing copywriter, comments insightfully in the piece:

“My profile is private, meaning only friends can see it,” she says. “But I vacillate on whether this a good or bad idea. I feel like people reading my blog may want to check out my profile without having to friend me. However, I want to friend people who read or follow me, so it’s a catch-22.”

Setting up “Friend Lists” can help demarcate online boundaries. According to Justin Smith, these lists classify colleagues into different categories: “They enable you to add people to lists such as College Friends, Work Friends, etc.,” Smith says. “They set privacy setting per friend list instead of per friend.”

Other suggestions from leading online reputation managers include using Facebook for personal networking and other, professional services like LinkedIn to connect with business contacts.

University of Maryland Professor Chris Dellarocas sees online reputation management appearing in schools in the near future. He says learning to effectively manage public and private avatars “should be taught in high school.” Does that mean that student can look forward to a mid-term of super pokes and zombie attacks? We can only hope.

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We noticed this relevant article from Howard University’s student newspaper, The Hilltop.

The article covers a trend we’ve noticed and discussed, namely the use of social networks by HR departments as a supplemental reference in job applicants. Employers are increasingly turning to public online social networks in order to get a more complete picture of potential employees that might not otherwise be revealed in an application. The Internet is now part of your resume, whether you like it or not.

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The recent vandalism of Robert Frost’s Vermont home raised concerns in the community and online.

Dan Barry has an interesting article in the New York Times that chronicles the recent break in and vandalism of a Vermont Farmhouse once owned by American poet Robert Frost. Like so many news stories of late, this piece also involves social networking and teenage online behavior.

According to authorities in Ripton, Vermont, approximately 30 teenagers broke into the historic house and caused over $10,000 worth of damages.

As Barry notes:

“Mix 30 or more young people with 150 cans of beer, a few bottles of liquor and some drugs, put them in a museumlike, unheated house in the dead of winter, and the ensuing discussions will not center on [Frost’s poetry]. Some played drinking games, some got sick, some did damage, and all followed that snowy path out, bound together by a secret that could not keep.”

Eventually the damage was discovered, along with the identities of the students involved. Middlebury College, which owns the property, dispatched a crew to mend walls and restore the house to its original condition. Several youths, apparently unversed in country things, have been charged with unlawful trespassing and unlawful mischief.

Police and community leaders are shocked at the indifference and destruction wrought by the students. One teen went so far as to request a copy of his mug shot to use on his Facebook profile, which brings clarity to that indifference in the online world. Parents should talk to their children about responsible actions in the real world, but as this and other stories show, it is increasingly important for parents to educate their kids about acting responsibly online.

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