Wednesday, December 09, 2009

MTV's Take on Online Safety

MTV has released its A Thin Line campaign to stop the spread of digital abuse. Interestingly, in the "about us" section, it specifically mentions "forced sexting" as opposed to sexting in general. An interesting distinction considering even voluntary sexting covers its own risks such as unwanted forwarding of the picture (more than a third of teens report getting pictures meant for someone else according to the infamous sexting study by CosmoGirl) and even charges of child pornography.

Meanwhile, MTV has released its own data about digital abuse in youth and young adults through age 24. While I wish they reported the age categories separately, some interesting findings include:
  • 1/4 of respondents state they know about an incident where somone took a picture or video of another doing "embarrassing or private things without that person knowing" and then shared them without permission.
  • 18% received naked images of another on their cell or over email
  • 11% were "pressured" to send a naked pic or video of themselves
  • 3% reported posting naked pictures of themselves

While interesting, I look forward to a more thorough analysis of the data. Stay tuned!

4 comments:

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jeff said...

When growing up, we'd say "I"ll call you later", or "I'll think about it". Today, teens talk in real-time, on cell phones. It happened last night at a high school hockey game(awesome!), where a friends' son literally talked/typed to everyone in his class, in the span of twenty minutes! Point being, growing up we had a certain amount of time to consider our actions and responses during peer to peer interactions. Teens today really don't have that luxury. Do you think that contributes to sexting or developmental problems for teens?