by Larry Magid

Except for rare situations where children are taking extreme risks, I’m not an advocate of spying on your kids. But there is a difference between snooping and accessing publicly available information by or about your child. If you can find it online without hacking into their private accounts, so can other people. And if your child is posting inappropriate publicly available content, or if people are saying things about your child in public, you have a right to know about it.

It’s easy to search for your kid on Google and other search engines, though you might get a lot of irrelevant hits if your child has a common name. You can also search for your child’s phone number, e-mail address or home address to see if anything has been posted that contains those strings. But even the most thorough search can’t find everything.

SafetyWeb.com, a new service that launched a couple of weeks ago, might be able to help. For $10 a month, or $100 for a year, the service will monitor your child’s publicly available online content.

The service, based in Menlo Park and Denver, scours social networking, photo sharing and other sites to find out what is being said by and about your kids. While it can’t promise to find everything, it’s remarkably thorough. My kids are now young adults, so rather than track them, I entered by own name and e-mail address and found more than I ever wanted to know about what I’ve posted onTwitter, Facebook and other services. I also found things that others posted about me and discovered accounts that I frankly forgot I had with content that I entered years ago.

For example, several years ago I established a Vox blogging account that I abandoned. Still, there was content there from 2007. I also found the Hi5 account I started when the service first launched and a MySpace account I hadn’t logged into for more than a year. Of course I also found my active Facebook and Twitter accounts with all of the publicly available content.

For each of these accounts, I saw what I had publicly posted and, in some cases, what others had written about me. I also found photos that I had posted on a variety of services, including Flickr and PhotoBucket.

Because the service tracks what your kids are saying and what’s being said about them, it can help alert parents to possible cyberbullying. It also helps parents advise their kids on how to protect their privacy by alerting parents to accounts that are public. If on Facebook, for example, your child is using maximum privacy settings, you might not see any content. That’s mostly a good thing because it shows that your child is protecting his or her privacy.

The site provides resources and advice on sexting, cyberbullying and other potential threats, and advice on how parents can contact services to attempt to have inappropriate postings remove.

Even without signing up for service, you can enter your child’s (or anyone’s) e-mail address to get a tease of what they posted online. You won’t see actual content but you will see the services they subscribe to under that e-mail address and whether they have public or private profiles.

Thanks to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are off-limits to kids under 13. That’s not to say that preteens aren’t using these sites–many are–but they have to lie about their age to sign up.

Aside from being “against the rules,” there are some real problems with younger kids using sites designed for teens and adults. For one thing, signing up requires lying, which is bad in itself. But, as many adults are finding out, knowing how to protect one’s privacy on a site like Facebook can be daunting and most young children are not developmentally ready to use these services. There are other issues as well; including how easy it is for kids to cyberbully each other on social-networking sites.

Finally, sites like Facebook just don’t have the resources for younger children, including the types of videos, games, and experiences that 6- to 10-year-olds find compelling.

Enter Togetherville.com, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that has built what founder Mandeep Singh Dhillon calls a “neighborhood” aimed at “kids and their grownups.” The site is set to come out of beta Tuesday evening.

In an interview (scroll down to listen to podcast) Dhillon called Togetherville “the first platform that really integrates young children’s ability to use the Web with their grownups close by.” Unlike some virtual words aimed at children, Togetherville uses the child’s real identity. Anonymity, said Dhillon is not allowed. The site encourages parents “to create neighborhoods of the real people in their child’s life to be around their kid as they grow up online.”

The free site, which does not display advertising to children, lets kids play games, watch videos, and create and share art. There is a “chat” function but neither kids nor adults can type in text. The only way to say something to another Togetherville participant is to select a prescreened “quip” as the site refers to text that has been approved by Togetherville staff. This greatly reduces the chances of cyberbullying and abuse and eliminates the ability for a child to reveal personal information other than what is already available on the service.

Videos, which can come from a variety of sources including YouTube, are also prescreened by staff to make sure that they are age appropriate.

Finally, sites like Facebook just don’t have the resources for younger children, including the types of videos, games, and experiences that 6- to 10-year-olds find compelling.

Enter Togetherville.com, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that has built what founder Mandeep Singh Dhillon calls a “neighborhood” aimed at “kids and their grownups.” The site is set to come out of beta Tuesday evening.

In an interview (scroll down to listen to podcast) Dhillon called Togetherville “the first platform that really integrates young children’s ability to use the Web with their grownups close by.” Unlike some virtual words aimed at children, Togetherville uses the child’s real identity. Anonymity, said Dhillon is not allowed. The site encourages parents “to create neighborhoods of the real people in their child’s life to be around their kid as they grow up online.”

The free site, which does not display advertising to children, lets kids play games, watch videos, and create and share art. There is a “chat” function but neither kids nor adults can type in text. The only way to say something to another Togetherville participant is to select a prescreened “quip” as the site refers to text that has been approved by Togetherville staff. This greatly reduces the chances of cyberbullying and abuse and eliminates the ability for a child to reveal personal information other than what is already available on the service.

Videos, which can come from a variety of sources including YouTube, are also prescreened by staff to make sure that they are age appropriate.

Listen to my interview with Togetherville CEO Mandeep Dhillon

Video on how to configure Facebook Privacy settings including opting out of the new Instant Personalization program:

At an April 21 developer event, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new program called “instant personalization” with partner sites to bring personalization to other sites throughout the web.

With instant personalization, Facebook users who log into websites like Yelp can click “like” next to a company or service and have that information shared with their Facebook friends from both within Yelp and within Facebook. It also allows partner sites to access information from your Facebook profile, but only information that you already share with the general public. Currently, Facebook is testing this as a pilot program with Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft.Docs.

Zuckerberg also announced a change in Facebook’s privacy policy, allowing application developers to keep user data stored by Facebook indefinitely instead of reloading the data every 24 hours. The audience, made up mostly of application developers, cheered because the change made it easier for developers to maintain access to information they need.

But some users had a different response. A growing number of vocal Facebook users have expressed concern that both the instant personalization and the permanent storage of information by app developers are proof that the company is further encroaching on its users’ privacy. Personally, I would have been more comfortable if the new features were opt-in rather than opt-out. But before you get worked up over them, consider that you don’t have to click “like” on Yelp or any other site. If you don’t click that, you don’t share your preferences.

Opting out of Instant Personalization program (click on image to enlarge)

But if you are really unconformable with the idea, you can also opt-out of the program by visiting the Facebook Privacy Settings Page, clicking Applications and Websites and clicking Edit Settings next to “Instant Personalization Program.” At the bottom of that page you can uncheck the box that says “Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites.”

Optional settings for Applications (click on image to enlarge)

While you’re on the Applications and Websites privacy page, look at your other options.  In addition to opting out of Instant Personalization,  you can edit:

• Block applications
• Ignore Application Invites
• Control Activity on Application and Games Dashboards

Making a public statement

Think of clicking “like” as making a public statement. If I click that I “like” Fuki Sushi  in Palo Alto (which I do), it’s telling other Yelp users that I, Larry Magid, like that restaurant. It would be as if I stood up in the restaurant and announced to all in earshot that I like it. There would be nothing to stop someone in the restaurant from sharing that information with others, even people who weren’t present at the time.

Application developer access to your data

It’s important to remember that the only change in the privacy policy is that developers have permanent access to users’ data. Of course there is always the possibility of abuse. But the only data they are getting is data you made public in the first place. Facebook says that it has a team of people in place to review developer privacy procedures and that they can suspend or remove an application if the developer violates privacy polices.

Too complicated

If all this sounds too complicated, that’s because it is, and that is my biggest complaint about Facebook. I don’t think they’re evil or trying to find ways to misuse personal data, but I do think they’ve created a privacy regime that’s simply too complicated for many people to understand.

Disclosure: My non-profit organization, ConnectSafely.org, serves on Facebook’s Safety Advisory Board and receives funding from Facebook.

by Larry Magid
This article first appeared on CNET News.com

After four years as chief security officer at MySpace, Hemanshu Nigam is leaving his full-time job to start a new firm that advises companies on how to handle safety, security, and privacy. Nigam, who will continue to advise MySpace and its parent company News Corp., hopes to bring his expertise to start-ups, existing Internet companies, and even governments seeking to better understand how to avoid Internet-related problems.

A former sex-crimes prosecutor with the U.S. Justice Department, Nigam also served as director of consumer security outreach at Microsoft and was as an enforcement officer at the Motion Picture Association of America.

During his tenure at MySpace, Nigam was widely credited with helping the company shed its image as a dangerous place for kids. For years MySpace was under pressure from a variety of fronts including Connecticut and North Carolina attorneys general Richard Blumenthal and Roy Cooper, who claimed that the site was a haven for child predators. In 2008 MySpace signed an accord with 49 state attorneys general that lead to the creation of the Internet Safety Technology Task Force which, in January 2009, issued a report that the threat of predators was less than some had feared. I was a member of that task force.

Nigam’s new company, SSP Blue, will focus on safety, security, and privacy by helping companies deal with issues including international hackers, online child  predators, and identity thieves.

Nigam said his advice to companies is to “develop a holistic approach.”

He said that while he was full time at MySpace, he would field questions from other companies with the blessing of his bosses. “Safety, security, and privacy is something that none of us should be competing on,” he said.

“People go online to enjoy and have a good experience…they don’t go online to have trouble so, in many ways, companies have an incentive to provide safety, security, and privacy to their users. It’s expected by users and by advertisers,” he said.

Unsolicited advice for Facebook
I asked Nigam if he had any advice for Facebook (which is not a client) in terms of its current privacy issues. “Many of these issues would not happen if you thought about privacy or even safety and security holistically,” said Nigam. He also said that if he were advising Facebook he would tell them that “things that matter in the privacy world are transparency and control. How much information are you collecting and what types of control are you giving your users to decide what happens to that information?” He would also advise them to be transparent. “Are you setting default settings that your users know about, and are you offering tools that your users are aware they can use to control what’s public and what isn’t?”

See Anne Collier’s comments on Hemu, documenting some of the important work he did at MySpace.

(Disclosure: MySpace and Facebook are supporters of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization I help operate)

Listen to my interview with Hemanshu Nigam

I flew to London a couple of weeks ago with the intention of catching a flight to Spain for a tech conference, but British aviation officials changed my plans by grounding planes because of the ash from Iceland’s volcano.

I was able to use the time to delve into an ongoing controversy between Facebook and the United Kingdom’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the official government police agency charged with protecting kids from Internet crime.

The dispute, which has been covered heavily in the British press, seems silly at first glance, but it represents a very important philosophical dispute on how to best protect kids from online abuse.

CEOP wants Facebook to prominently display an orange button or logo on every page visible to U.K. users so they can easily click to a webpage on CEOP’s site to report abuse to police or get information resources about cyberbullying, hacking, viruses, harmful content and “sexual behavior.”

Several press reports have referred to the CEOP logo as a “panic button.” But in a phone call from Washington, where he was stuck because of grounded planes, CEOP CEO Jim Gamble said it’s not about panic but about a place to report and get safety information. He’s right about that — if someone really were in a life-threatening situation, they would be better off calling 999, the British version of 911.

During my time in London, I met with Facebook’s U.K. policy chief, Richard Allen, who told me that Facebook is willing to make some changes to its reporting system to satisfy CEOP, but that it’s not willing to adopt the CEOP button or redirect all abuse complaints to a police-operated site.

Elliott Schrage, who works out of Facebook’s Palo Alto office as vice president in charge of global public policy, reiterated that position. The CEOP plan, Schrage said, “invites people to feel there is more of a problem than there is.”

He’s right. The CEOP “button” would suggest that Facebook is a dangerous place for kids and that there is an imminent need to report issues to the police. But research has shown there are relatively few cases where kids are being threatened in a way that warrants a police report. Most abuse situations involve peer-to-peer bullying or harassment or inappropriate postings by young people. While police, along with other professionals, can advise kids to avoid such dangers, these reports rarely represent actual crimes.

Schrage says that even when complaints do involve potential crimes, users are better off reporting them to Facebook, which, in turn, can report real crimes to the police.

He said Facebook tested a police reporting system a couple of years ago at the urging of the New Jersey attorney general and found that “there were fewer reports made to authorities because people were intimidated, and as a result, Facebook was a less safe place because there were fewer reports.”

In our phone conversations, CEOP’s Gamble argued that the button serves as a deterrent to crime because it puts would-be offenders on notice that Facebook is cooperating with the police. But I find that argument hard to buy, considering that sexual abuse against children in Britain, the United States and most other countries is a very serious crime. If a long prison sentence and a spot on a sex offender registry won’t deter someone, I hardly think that a website button will.

If you have a security issue at a hotel, you typically report it to hotel security, which will call the police if it can’t handle the problem. And hotel security would certainly be able to deal with common problems like a neighbor playing a TV too loud.

Facebook has announced a number of significant improvements on safety education and reporting programs in Britain, including a redesigned abuse reporting system that will allow users to report directly to CEOP (but not with a CEOP button). It will also provide safety organizations with millions of dollars worth of free advertising.

Although he asked me not to quote him by name, a police official in the U.K. told me that he sides with Facebook on this issue because the company has been very cooperative. “We get a lot out of Facebook,” he said.

Personally, I think Facebook could do a better job in its abuse reporting by putting its own clearly marked abuse report and safety links on each page and, when there is clearly evidence of criminal activity, referring those cases to appropriate law enforcement agencies. It might help to have an independent body analyze or audit how well it handles reports on a global basis.

If Facebook were a country, its “population” of 400 million users would make it the third-largest in the world — behind only China and India. To quote Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

(Disclosure: My nonprofit Internet Safety organization serves on Facebook’s safety advisory board and receives funding from Facebook.)

Larry taking a camel ride after first day of conference

by Larry Magid

I’m in the Kingdom of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf this week, attending an online safety conference sponsored by the Bahrainian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and the Washington-based Family Online Safety Institute.

The conference, which is taking place at the posh Ritz Carlton in Manama, is bringing together Internet safety experts from the United States, Britain and the Gulf states with educators, policy makers, police officers and other stakeholders from Bahrain, including some members of the Royal Family.

Even before the conference started, I got a lesson in the bizarre contradictions of this island nation which is connected by a 17 mile causeway to Saudi Arabia.  Monday night dinner was the hotel restaurant which happens to be Trader Vics – just like the ones in the United States only fancier.  In keeping with the restaurant’s Polynesian theme, the menu had drawings of topless women yet many of the female patrons at the restaurant were fully covered by burqas.   I was told that a lot of Saudis visit Bahrain on weekends to take advantage of more liberal policies regarding alcohol, entertainment, dress code and other amenities.

The Internet growth rate here is astronomical.  In 2007, only 5.7% of the population was online but by 2009 it mushroomed to 55.3% according to Professor Julia Davidson of London’s Kingston University who, along with Elana Martellozzo of Middlesex University, is conducting a research study and review of the country’s Internet use and safety.

Because of that growth, the country’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority decided it was time to examine potential pitfalls of the Internet so the country could properly educate children and others about how to protect themselves. I was invited as one of several speakers from abroad in my capacity as co-director of ConnectSafely.org and founder of SafeKids.com.

The theme of the conference is “creating a national consensus for online safety” and, to that end, much of the discussion centered around the contention that Bahrainian citizens are only beginning to understand both the positive and potentially negative aspects of the Internet.

International speakers on the first day included FOSI CEO Stephen Balkham, UK Children’s Charities representative John Carr, UK Internet Watch Foundation CEO Peter Robbins, International Center for Missing & Exploited Children policy director Maura Harty, AT&T VP Dorothy Attwood and Verizon technology policy director Michael McKeehan.

For example, during a briefing before the conference, officials U.S. and British conference participants us that many people in the country simply are not aware that there are potential dangers for children and adults ranging from cyberbullies to adults looking for sex with children to viruses and other types of malicious software.  The goal of the local telecommunications industry, said one official, has been focused on getting people online, rather that teaching them to use the net safely.

But just as some people are oblivious to potential dangers, others are overreacting.  One Bahrainian government official told the conference that “American statistics on Internet predators are frightening,” which, as it turns out is not the case.  The odds of an American child being sexually molested by an adult or she meets on the Internet is extremely low. Youth in America are far more likely to be bullied online while the overwhelming majority of sex abuse cases involve people the victims know from the offline world.

The conference attracted government officials, law enforcement, Internet safety experts and telecommunication company representatives from several countries, especially the United States and Britain.  One speaker, U.S. State Department representative Stephen Simpson, said that there are now 56 million Internet users in Arab world, representing about 17% of population.  In his address to the conference, Simpson quoted U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s January speech on Internet freedom when she spoke out against government censorship all around the world. Yet, as I was Tweeting during the conference, I received a Tweet from a Bahrainian human rights activist living outside the country saying that the government censored a human rights Twitter page. He sent me a link to that page, but when I tried to access it from the hotel’s WiFi network I got a message that “This web site has been blocked for violating regulations and laws of Kingdom of Bahrain.”

Not surprisingly, people in Bahrain will get the same message if they try to go to a site with sexual images. There’s no need for parents to put filters on their kids computers. The government does that at the server level  for everyone’s computers.

by Larry Magid

This post originally appeared on CNET News.com

In my more than 15 years in the Internet safety field, I’ve seen a lot of programs designed to teach children how to use the Internet safely, but many have missed the mark because they too often focus on children as victims or at least passive consumers rather than as participants in our digital culture. But in this Web 2.0 world, kids aren’t just consuming media, they’re creating it and they have collectively embraced social media as a part of their lives. They don’t go online; they are online–whether on a PC, a mobile device, a gaming console, or whatever comes next.

What’s more, as the Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technical Task Force confirmed last year, the greatest risk to kids–aside from being denied access to technology and social media–is what they do to themselves and their peers. Whether it’s bullying, sexting, or just posting information they might regret later on, kids sometimes venture forth in the digital world without fully understanding possible consequences. Today’s kids may be tech savvy, but they still need guidance from adults to understand how to use this media in ways that are responsible and enriching as well as safe.

That’s why I’m excited about a new curriculum being developed by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that’s best known for its reviews of movies, games, TV, and books designed to help parents select media appropriate for their children.

The goal of Common Sense Media’s Digital Literacy and Citizenship Initiative is to provide curriculum to help middle school teachers, parents, and kids themselves “raise a generation of responsible, smart, and safe digital citizens.”

Kids, this is not your older sibling’s Internet safety class. It’s a whole new approach that’s based not only on an accurate understanding of risk and youth culture, but on a foundation of respect for young people. From what I’ve seen of the curriculum, it doesn’t lecture and it doesn’t try to scare kids. It respects young people as active participants

The curriculum is based on the digital ethics framework developed by the GoodPlay Project, led by Harvard School of Education professor Howard Gardner. Gardner and his colleagues have done pioneering work recognizing that youth are not “passive consumers” of new media but “actively contributing to and defining the new media landscape.” Still, according to a report, “Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Dialogue on the Ethics of Digital Life” (PDF), the project issued in October of 2009, “adults need to help youth think about online life in moral and ethical ways–and to act as moral and ethical digital citizens.”

To that end, the Common Sense curriculum is built around these five units:

• Digital life: “How the anytime-anywhere-everywhere nature of digital media requires responsible choices.”
• Privacy and digital footprints: How to manage privacy online.
• Connected culture: How to build respectful one-on-one, group, and community relationships online and protect against cyberbullying.
• Self-expression and reputation: Who we are in various online contexts and how to protect your reputation in the process.
• Respecting creative work: How to get credit for original creations and respect others’ creative property.

The curriculum has been tested in pilot programs in the San Francisco Bay Area, Omaha, and New York and will be rolled out nationwide in the fall.

To learn more about this curriculum, I spoke by phone with Common Sense Media’s CEO Jim Steyer. You can hear the entire 13-minute interview by clicking here:

Listen now: Download today’s podcast

(Credit: Chesi-Fotos via Flickr Commons)

Recent stories in the press about teenage cyberbullying and real-world bullying are sickening. It’s hard to know how much cyberbullying contributed to her decision to kill herself, but the case of the Phoebe Prince brings tears to my eyes. The South Hadley, Mass., 15-year-old was reportedly the brunt of repeated cruelty at the hands of classmates (six of whom are now facing criminal charges) until she put an end to her life.

There is also the recent cyberbullying case of Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old girl from Long Island, N.Y., who committed suicide last month after being taunted with cruel comments on the Web site FormSpring.me. Some of those comments reportedly even continued after her death.

And there are countless more bullying and cyberbullying cases that don’t make headlines. But even though the overwhelming majority of children are able to “survive” being bullied doesn’t mean that it’s not painful. I still have emotional scars from being bullied when I was a teen.

Cases like these have contributed to what’s starting to look like a bullying panic, not unlike the predator panic of a few years ago that caused people to worry (in most cases needlessly) about their children being sexually molested by someone they meet online. Those were great headlines and sound bites for politicians, but the research showed that it just wasn’t the case for the vast majority of youth. While it is true that kids are many times more likely to be bullied and cyberbullied than sexually molested by online strangers, we need to put this issue into some perspective. Yes we should be concerned, but there is no cause for panic.

Bullying on the decline
As prominent as it is, bullying and cyberbullying are not the norm. Most young people want no part of bullying and consider it reprehensible behavior. Depending on what study you read, anywhere from 15 percent to 30 percent of teens say they have experienced some type of bullying or harassment from their peers.

And when it comes to bullying in general, the trend is moving in the right direction. Rather than an epidemic, bullying is actually on the decline. A study published last month in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that the percentage of youth (a 2 to 17 years old) reporting physical bullying in the past year went down from 22 percent in 2003 to 15 percent in 2008.

A national study of youth commissioned by the Girl Scouts came to a similar conclusion. Young people are actually more responsible, more involved in their community, and more tolerant of diversity than they were 20 years ago. The survey found that 84 percent of youth said they wouldn’t forward an embarrassing e-mail about someone else; 6 percent said they would. That’s 6 percent too many but still a relatively small minority.

Not all surveys have the same results. In February, the Cyberbullying Research Center polled 4,000 teenagers from a large U.S. school district and found that 15.9 percent of boys and 25.8 percent of girls reported having been cyberbullied at some point in their life. Among the boys, 7.1 percent said they had been cyberbullied in the last 30 days and 7.9 percent of girls had been victims during that time period. When combining genders, overall 20.7 percent of teens say they’ve been cyberbullied in their lifetimes with 7.4 percent saying they were cyberbullied in the past 30 days. A survey conducted last year by Cox Communications found that approximately 19 percent of teens say they’ve been cyberbullied online or via text message and that 10 percent say they’ve cyberbullied someone else.

Turning numbers into a positive
There is no question that there is a problem and I certainly don’t want sugarcoat it, but it’s also important to look at it from the positive side as well. It’s worth pointing out that about 80 percent of teens say they have not been cyberbullied while 90 percent of teens say they haven’t cyberbullied other teens.

Posing the issue in the positive is not just a silly math trick–it’s actually a strategy that can help reduce bullying or, at least marginalize those who engage in it.

In a paper (PDF) presented at the 2008 National Conference on the Social Norms Approach, H. Wesley Perkins and David Craig reported on a survey of more than 52,000 students from 78 secondary schools and concluded that “while bullying is substantial, it is not the norm.” They went on to say that “the most common (and erroneous) perception, however, is that the majority engage in and support such behavior.” The reason that this is an important observation is because, as the researchers found, the “perceptions of bullying behaviors are highly predictive of personal bullying behavior.” Even though the “norm is not to bully,” only a minority of young people realize that. If kids think that bullying is common or “normal,” they are more likely to be bullies.

Based on this research, the commonly held belief that we are going through an “epidemic” of bullying or cyberbullying is not only inaccurate, but it is likely contributing to the problem.

A better strategy is to try to convince young people that bullying is not only wrong and and unacceptable but is abnormal behavior, practiced by a small group of outliers. Taking it a step further, how can we marginalize bullies so that they–not their victims–are seen as losers and how can we enlist young people themselves to stand up against bullying when they see it or hear about it.

Adults as role models
Adults need to be good role models. Politicians need to think about this the next time they consider demonizing (as opposed to criticizing) an opponent. Media personalities and talk show hosts need to think about the messages they’re giving to children when they engage in name calling. We all need to be aware of comments we make in the presence of children and even people who comment on blogs need to think about the difference between legitimate criticism and derision. Children learn by observing our behavior, and there are plenty of adults who behave like bullies.

Changing behavior isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible. I’ve been watching episodes of the TV show Mad Men, which is set in the 1960s when it was acceptable to smoke around other people, ride in cars without seat belts, leave trash everywhere, make derogatory comments about minorities, and treat women as inferior beings. We haven’t yet completely eliminated any of those dangerous or antisocial behaviors, but we’ve come a long way. With concerted effort and national leadership, we can do the same with bullying.

This article first appeared on CNET New.com