Interesting video! I’m about halfway done but I’d love to start a discussion about this topic + video here. I’ve seen people saying this is “the best video on internet safety out there” and I’m not sure if I agree with that but it is pretty grounded and comprehensive.
In all honesty, I have no intention of watching that. An hour and eighteen minutes is a relatively short feature film, like Universal horror flicks from the 1940s. A lecture that long without a human-written transcript is intolerable.
Having skimmed the machine transcript, I disagree with Li’s basic premise. How can online safety be slowly dying when it was stillborn? The internet has never been safe. It wasn’t when I first got online in the mid 1990s. If it seems more dangerous, I think it’s because people aren’t using basic precautions like not using one’s official name online, not providing personal info or photos, and not using the same alias and password across multiple services. As for online cultures encouraging eating disorders? Diet culture was a thing long before internet access became ubiquitous, and we let doctors encourage disordered eating because we think fat people are grotesque.
Also, when I was a kid in the 1980s we were taught not to believe everything one sees on TV, especially if it looked like somebody was trying to sell something. That lesson is no less applicable to the internet. You can’t believe anything you see on a screen.
The video is specifically about online safety education actually, which probably should be specified in the title!
The internet was never safe, but the thesis of the video is “because we’ve had the internet for so long now, online safety education should be great, but it sucks. Why is that? What do people need to know?”
I was in elementary school in the early 2010s and was also taught not to believe everything I see on TV and online, and I was told not to put my real name/face on the internet, but as Li points out, it was backed up by rare, extreme examples of “someone will track you down and kidnap you if you do this” instead of the actual real potential dangers.
Completely off topic. But I am finding the current trend of longer and longer video essays tiring. I get that it was funny when hbomberguy made a 4 hour video about plagiarism, but that shouldn’t be the default of the medium.
I guess they at least know their audience is only putting them on in the background. But at that point, you should be recording podcasts.
It’s no wonder all the video essayists are burning out from youtube when filming elaborate sets that people only see on a second screen in the best case scenario.
i love li! i thought it was a good solid video. i appreciated the emphasis on being realistic and specific about consequences; i think that’s hugely important with kids in general, is to communicate Why a safety guideline exists and what the potential consequences of breaking it are. especially with teens, who are really contrary and (as they mention) eager to dismiss hyperbolic warnings as over-the-top fearmongering.
i did think the subject of facebook felt conspicuously missing in terms of contextualizing the normalization of kids sharing TMI online, although it’s not necessary to make their point!
facebook i think had a really big cultural impact on sharing personal information online! “it’s different if it’s facebook” was i think the attitude for a while, even though… you know… facebook is part of online just like the rest of online, haha. and using facebook as a login on other sites helped spread that i think. i know i and plenty of other people my age were really excited to sign up for a facebook account at age 13 - and i know some people whose parents were against it because they didn’t like the idea of kids putting their real names + ages + photos + locations online in the way facebook encouraged.
i guess it would be kind of a tangent, though, and facebook + privacy is a whole other can of worms as well as being not super relevant these days so much as the specific behavior of posting your name + age + face + location.
i don’t have much insight on the education angle personally; i don’t remember getting any “online safety” type instruction in school specifically, and my parents told me i “wasn’t allowed” to do online social stuff but also gave me infinite unsupervised internet time in which i of course went on the neopets boards lol.
I think video essays and podcasts are a waste of time and bandwidth. I’ve never watched a video essay or listened to a podcast wouldn’t have been better as a blog or a book. Maybe it’s because I can read faster than these people can talk.
I understand not liking long video essays, but I think that asking for a video about a topic as complex as the degradation of online safety education and how that has led to more harm to children to be short is kind of just asking for trouble. With an emphasis on trimming things down comes the loss of important context, nuance, and information. This is exactly why TikTok is as rife with misinformation as it is – in an attempt to make information fit into a short video, they cut important content. I think the video’s length is extremely necessary, and it doesn’t draw itself out unnecessarily, either.
If it matters to anyone, in the time since this comment has been posted, the video has non-auto-generated subtitles now. When it comes to longer videos, you sometimes need to wait a short while after the video’s initial release for subtitles to be added, as it’s a rather time-intensive process. It’s been less than 2 days, and the subtitles have now been added, which is quite a short turnaround time in my experience.
Anyhow, addressing the video itself:
I’ve been a subscriber to Li for a few years now, so, when I saw that she was making a video on this subject, I was hopeful that she would give this topic the nuanced coverage that it deserved. I was a participant in the survey that she sent out, to this end. I watched the video almost immediately upon its release, and this video certainly did not disappoint. I think this is the first video that has covered the topic of kid’s online safety that simultaneously:
And she does all of this while also discussing a lot of things that I’ve straight-up never heard discussed before, because they’re too “uncomfy” (re: children pretending to be adults).
I dunno if it’s the best internet safety video out there, but it’s definitely the best one that I’ve had the pleasure of watching so far. I’ll be adding this video to my site’s video essay rec page, for sure.
YES I agree. That and the rise of “life update” style of social media; on Instagram, people post what they’re actually doing, they tag their school and use local hashtags. Obvious safety issues with that aside, at the very least I feel it could be useful to teach kids the value of separating online identities.
I also liked that this was touched upon too; the agency and choices that children can and do make online, even bad ones. If we view all children as pure innocent beings who could never make a bad decision on purpose, we are neglecting the real experiences of children who, often, are already being neglected in other ways (that then causes them to act out eg. by pretending to be an adult online for sexual reasons), and then they cannot get the help they need navigating difficult situations. Harm reduction, and all that.
for what its worth i love long video essays and documentaries :) im glad that there are so many options to turn on as background noise when im doing something else, or to engross myself in at the end of a long day. I think a lot of what i would consider decent internet safety guides online are all written, which isnt how everyone learns best.
I do appreciate an essay in audio format that I can listen to while commuting.
I’m not about to start reading blog posts while cruising up the highway or walking around the street with an apple vision strapped to my face reading a post on the way to the mall.
But yes, I want a text version to back it up to easily reference it later
You know, now that you bring it up. I’m surprised we haven’t seen a high profile car crash involving a driver wearing an Apple Vision while driving yet.
If the technology didn’t fizzle out after the first week it was bound to happen 
This was all in joke, but you can see where it could head 
The tech might be called “Apple Vision”, but the users are still Glassholes.
Yes, but that was something that used to mainly affect adults. With children having access to eg. Instagram, this has become a problem in children and young adults in a way it never really was before. Eating disorders have skyrocketed. This is a genuine issue that I haven’t seen any real solutions for.
also important to note that while pro-ana, #edtwt, and other pro-eating disorder subcultres are certainly born from the more broadly-present “diet culture” they are not the same thing!
since you didn’t watch the video and don’t use social media, @starbreaker , i assume you are unaware: there are subcultures on every social media site which center specifically around encouraging eating disorders, especially anorexia, including detailed discussion of methods for hiding symptoms from doctors (/teachers/parents/etc), how to get out of hospitalization/rehab as quickly as possible without actually recovering, how to trick your body into thinking you’ve eaten, what vitamins you should take to mitigate non-weight-related symptoms (hair loss, teeth rotting, fainting, etc) and other things of that nature.
it is much easier to hide from parents than anything that existed prior to the internet - especially for kids with smartphones - and has significantly contributed to a dramatic rise in eating disorders in young people!
Like hell. Are you telling me you never had your parents give you shit for not eating “enough” or eating “too much”?
I didn’t want to starve myself as a teenager because of Instagram. I wanted to starve myself because the adolescents I was expected to accept as my “peer group” used the shape of my body as an excuse to shame me for not being just like them, and home was no refuge.
I’m not saying it’s not a genuine issue. But I think that blaming social media for this is akin to thinking that the tail wags the dog. All of this that we don’t like seeing on social media? It’s already in the zeitgeist. Social media is just a way for impressionable people – not just people, but grown-ass adults – to mainline this shit.
Back in the day, if you wanted to see white supremacist material online you had to look for sites like Stormfront. You had to choose to go there, and anybody with access to your browser history who could understand what they were seeing there could hold you accountable. These days, just being on a site like Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, or even the Fediverse can expose you to this shit if you aren’t relentless of your use of filtering tools to “curate your experience”. Regardless, I don’t believe that these platforms can expose you to something that doesn’t already exist in the wider culture. I don’t think the facts justify blaming social media; it’s a symptom, not the disease.
Our culture and our society are the disease.
I’m tempted to take offense at your assumption, but it’s not unreasonable. It’s merely mistaken. The corporate media was reporting on this twenty years ago. Kids not being safe on the internet because the parents are clueless was moral panic fodder back in 1995; I recall an article in a New York newspaper called Newsday breathlessly reporting that some kid had wandered into an AOL chatroom called “TV chat” and finding it full of people talking about cross-dressing when they thought people would be talking about Barney and Friends. Not to mention the suicide of a person who spent most of their waking hours on MUDs and IRCs using the alias “Sabbath”.
This sort of material was on the internet long before social media was a thing. If somebody wanted to, they could have found it on forums, in AOL chat rooms, in Yahoo! or Google searches, or lots of other ways. They were doing studies on this back in 2010, and if I wanted to do a more thorough search I could probably find even older sources.
I don’t want this video to be shorter. I want it to be a blog post. Or, at the very least, for the video to link to the presenter’s notes. There must be some preparatory material for a video this long, show notes and such.
Not that I would want to read something like this in the car, at least not while I’m driving. I don’t even want to watch or listen to it in the car; the car stereo is for listening to heavy metal at unreasonable volumes while you’ve got the cruise control locked at the speed limit and you’re just chilling in the right lane of the highway knowing that Johnny Law won’t ever catch you riding dirty.
The only part of this that’s new is the growing number of people figuring out that we as a society seem to have no notion of how to teach young people to use the internet safely and responsibly, or how to use it without being used. Then again, it seems we can’t even reliably teach kids how to read any longer, let alone not make of reading for school such drudgery that they stop reading for fun.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are some young whippersnappers on my lawn and I’ve got some clouds to yell at.
Above conversation is interesting to me. There’s actually a transcript.. Lectures are often several hours long. I think these kinds of videos are best to listen to while doing something else anyways, but I have also been enjoying long videos/podcasts long before it was a trend.
Anyways, I have had this video in my recommendations for a while. I actually like long videos, essays, etcetera, but I haven’t watched this one because I think it will probably present information I already know/am aware of (for reasons I’ll mention below). I’ve skimmed the transcript though.
Anyways, to go back to the topic, internet safety is important to me because it’s common to see people my age (and even young children) joke about having unhealthy relationships with adults when they were 12. Also, I have very young siblings, so I’m always pushing internet safety on them but you know kids make mistakes and there just aren’t sites like Poptropica or CoolMath or GoGirlGames in excess anymore.
The creator probably mentioned this, but I think Facebook is a really big part of no one believing in online safety. It wants to share every aspect about your life to the public, and this philosophy was carried over to their Instagram handlings after they bought it. Instagram will show people you know to anyone who follows you, and it is a bizarre invading platform.
Also regarding some points above, it’s not social media’s fault eating disorders exist, but as someone who was on that side of social media as a very young teen, plenty of people got really into the throws of their disorders because of instructional pro-anorexia posts or dieting culture that encouraged eating way under maintenance (basically pro-anorexia to me), and it was easy to find anorexia forums via social media especially. People would go there and for starving/purging tips. It was a bad time. I think those communities have a right to exist, but it was far too easy to find them back then. Now they’re not as easy to find using Eating Disorder labels, but well, I know if you just go into random girly tags you’ll see some idiot posting pro-ana stuff in the open because of lack of moderation on these platforms.
Her online safety point is also very correct. I was taught a lot about online safety as a child- not using my real name, never giving my address or location,e tc et. But that stuff is not taught in a lot of schools anymore. Parents also don’t know about it because a lot of the people they see online are influencers using their full names and sharing their locations. Disheartening. I think the only answer is corporations actively moderating or having stricter rules for 13-17 year old users, but this will never happen.
Kids are also very smart and I think parental controls can often make things worse (at least very obvious ones). Put a parental control on browser and they’ll just download a new browser. Have YouTube autodirect to YTKids, and they’ll watch it on another device. And if all of that works, other kids at school may expose them to something awful anyways. It really is on the corporations end to actively combat a lot of this, and for schools to emphasize internet safety to them.
Infuriatingly, it’s almost discouraged in schools, depending on where you are.
I was left out of so many social events- both school sponsored and not!- because I didn’t have instagram in high school. If I wanted instagram, I would either be able to be anonymous online OR use my full name and link myself to my school pages. Schools encourage tagging their sports events and homecoming weeks etc etc. And, well- if instagram is the internet, and all of my teachers are encouraging me to put my name and face and talk about my school on instagram, why NOT do that in other places online?
I think trying to avoid the massive amount of real-life linked socialization that goes on via social media is a futile effort and honestly instead of a blanket ‘please dont put your real information online oh my god’ lesson, a lot of kids and teens need to learn separation of identity!!! Especially with how prevalent linkedin (ugh) is in a lot of industries; it’s stupid and hypocritical for these very basic ‘internet safety’ lectures to focus on never putting your real information online, and then for those very same teachers to espouse the joys of putting everything you do academically/professionally online as soon as possible.
If a teenager wants to talk about school events and post about a new job and post funny videos of their friends online, they should at least be very aware that they can and SHOULD make a separate account without any identifying information for things they might not want employers to see…
But then it sort of ties back into the surveillance culture we have, where I know a lot of people who have the mindset of “these companies/my employers/my school/etc have all of my information anyway, and if i’m not doing anything wrong there’s no reason to hide”, or “who cares if my information is known by a creep, there’s no point in trying to anonymize myself because it will never work”. in this way i think we’d need a wider societal shift towards the importance of privacy that I’m not sure is really happening right now in the united states lmao.
I honestly don’t think that shift will happen until some poor innocent gets murdered by the government over something they posted online, and even then it might be too little, too late.
I’m just glad I’m not a teenager or a young man these days, dealing with the seeming obligation to exist online under my official name just to participate in something resembling a “normal” social life. Not to mention the knowledge that everybody at your school is jacked into Instagram and most likely thinks nothing of posting embarrassing photos of you to their feed.
If young people nowadays are reluctant to hang out in person, I think it’s precisely because everybody seems to be recording shit with their smartphones and uploading it to their socials. The only way to not be recorded, it seems, is to not exist. Or at least not be known to anybody or involved in anything. But if young people today are anything like kids when I was a kid, that might just make you a target, too.
I wonder now long it will take before concepts like honne and tatemae (true feelings vs public persona) get trendy on TikTok. Society seems to demand so much more of individuals than it offers in return; it’s a miracle more people don’t become recluses.
That was a good video and it made me reflect on my own experience growing up using Skype and Discord as a teenager.
I was surprised by the part about how useless and even harmful parental control software can be. I only ever had to deal with it in school and I mostly forgot about it after that, but I remember that it wasn’t very effective and there were multiple occasions where I was able to search up and see explicit stuff with basically no effort. I fell for the “we need age verification” meme for a little while, but I’ve changed my mind on it lately and now I feel like it would be a terrible idea no matter how it was implemented.
In the video, it was also mentioned how online safety education often catastrophizes the danger of the Internet when the reality is much more subtle and insidious, which also aligns with my own experience. When I was growing up and interacting with adults on the Internet as a teenager, I found that they just didn’t care that I was a minor and treated me like an adult, not that they were intentionally malicious. It’s really odd to think back to that time now that I’m well into adulthood. Although I wouldn’t say I was ever “groomed,” it’s still baffling to me that so many adults had no issue just casually talking to minors in any context, but then again most of them weren’t much more mature than the average high schooler anyway.
Another part of the video that stuck out to me was the part about violent and gory media, which I think is something that isn’t discussed enough in mainstream discourse about online safety, at least in the US. It feels like every discussion about child safety revolves solely around NSFW media even though, as someone who has been exposed to both at a young age, I can confidently say that gore videos were infinitely more damaging to me. Most of my exposure to that stuff was from other people my age, too, which is another point brought up in the video. Other minors can be just as dangerous as adults on the Internet, which is another reason why an age verification system isn’t a silver bullet to erase all the danger of the Internet.
The biggest technical issues I see with online safety, the things that might actually be good targets for legislation, are algorithms in general (but especially the way they work nowadays), lack of privacy and anonymity, and generally the way that information moves at light-speed and is constantly shoved in your face rather than requiring you to actually look for it. Other than that, though, it’s more of a societal problem rather than a technical one and there’s no easy solution.
