My Voice is Louder Than Hate
My Voice is Louder Than Hate, MediaSmarts’ latest resource, uses digital storytelling and meme making tools to encourage youth to push back when they encounter hate online.
My Voice is Louder Than Hate, MediaSmarts’ latest resource, uses digital storytelling and meme making tools to encourage youth to push back when they encounter hate online.
In this lesson, students consider how we come to hold values and how they affect our behaviour, especially online. They begin by comparing their assumptions about how common positive and negative online behaviours are with accurate statistics, and then consider how believing that something is more or less common than it really is can affect whether or not we think it’s acceptable. The teacher then uses a fable to introduce students to the ways that values can be communicated both overtly and implicitly and students discuss the ways in which their values have been communicated to them. They then turn specifically to the online context and consider what values they have learned about online behaviour and how they learned them. Finally, students consider scenarios that examine ethical questions online and role-play ways of resolving them.
Though we sometimes talk about the online world as being “virtual reality,” the things we do there can have real consequences. When we're using the same screen to talk to our friends that we use to kill aliens or when we can't see the people we're hurting, robbing or copying from, it's easy to forget that what we do online matters. This section looks at some of the reasons why youth might behave differently online than they do offline and strategies for getting them to see the online world through an ethical lens.
Closely associated with intellectual property – but slightly different – is plagiarism.
While youth actively participate in copying, with 95 percent of students in a 2017 survey admitting to participating in some sort of cheating,[i] they have trouble seeing their acts of plagiarism as having a victim. Ultimately, if nobody is hurt then we are unlikely to feel empathy and without that it’s hard to see something as being morally wrong.
One of the biggest ethical decisions young people have to make is how to handle other people’s personal information. Because nearly all of the services and platforms youth use online are networked, every time a friend or contact posts something they have to decide whether and how to share it. As well, youth may inadvertently share others’ personal information when posting their own content.
With younger children, the best approach is to have a clear and consistent set of rules, both at home and at school, about sharing other people’s content.