Communicating Safely Online: Tip Sheet for Parents and Trusted Adults
a. Types of Unhealthy Online Relationships
Online exploitation is when someone uses digital media to find teens and get them involved in romantic or sexual relationships.
Online exploitation is when someone uses digital media to find teens and get them involved in romantic or sexual relationships.
To make a custom search engine you will need to be logged in to a Google account. (If you don’t already have one, go to accounts.google.com to sign up.) You don’t have to be logged in to Google to use it. As well, anyone can use a custom search engine once it’s been created, so a whole class can use search engines made with a single account.
Do you know someone who would like to learn more about using technology in their everyday lives? MediaSmarts is proud to offer a series of free hour-long digital literacy workshops to help empower under-represented populations from communities across the country.
Online news is one of the hardest things to verify. Sometimes early reports that turn out not to be true still circulate on the Internet, and people may spread false reports for commercial or malicious reasons, or even just for “fun.”
MediaSmarts and researchers at University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work conducted this study to examine how attitudes, experiences, knowledge and moral beliefs of young people impact their decisions to share or not share sexts they have received. The findings are significant not only in helping us to understand the motivating factors behind teens’ decisions either to share or not share sexts without the original sender’s consent, but also to inform development of more effective interventions to discourage young people from sharing sexts non-consensually.
Being well-informed – and being careful to only share good information – are essential parts of being an active citizen in a democracy. It’s important to think before you share political information with family and friends – especially during an election.
Here are three tips to help you find good information about health and science topics.
If the source is a person, start by checking that they really exist and that they are a genuine expert on that topic. Both doctors and scientists are usually specialists, so make sure that the source has credentials in the right field. A surgeon won’t necessarily be an expert in physics, for instance, and vice versa.
Here are three tips to make sure you share good information and stop the spread of hoaxes, rumours and scams.
1. Watch for your own bias
One of the hardest things about being a responsible sharer is to be aware of the reasons why you might be more likely to believe something without evidence. Before you share a story, take a few minutes to see whether you’ve fallen into one of these common biases: