Keeping up with kids in a wireless world

By Samantha McAleese, research associate at MediaSmarts and
David Fowler, vice-president, marketing and communications at CIRA.

Speak Up! Your guide to changing the world, online and off

Thanks to the internet and social media like Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok, it’s easier than ever to share your views and encourage others to join you in making change. And, due to research conducted as part of the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge (DERC), we know a lot about how some Canadians are using digital media to get involved in politics. This guide will help show you the ways you can use social networks to make your voice heard and make a difference.

Young Canadians Speak Out: A Qualitative Research Report on Privacy and Consent

Informed Youth Promote Clarity for All

It’s something we’ve all done before: scrolled past a wall of text to click “I Agree” with no idea what we’ve agreed to. Then, when we’re using the platform, messages like “We’ve made some changes to our Terms and Conditions” simply remind us that we probably didn’t read them in the first place. Our world is becoming more and more influenced by the data that’s being collected about us. For young people in particular, this can lead to serious and unexpected consequences that could affect their entire lives.

Internet memories and storytelling: what do you keep?

My middle daughter hates looking over my shoulder when I’m on my Instagram account and seeing that I have many, many unwatched “stories.”

Your child’s first phone: how old should they be?

I remember when the iPad was first released back in 2010. Shortly after it came out, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were spotted at a restaurant letting their daughter Suri, who was four years old at the time, play on their iPad while they waited for their food.

Post-quarantine rules reset

There are still a lot of unknowns about COVID-19, but for now at least, our province has started to open up a bit. Parks and beaches are open, most stores and malls are opening, and we’re even able to get haircuts again.

The Trickle: What to do when your teen is constantly checking their phone

Our older teens, aged 17 and 15, have smartphones. They aren’t big users of social media, but they do get messages from friends fairly often on Instagram, Hangouts and Discord.

Reporting Platforms and Changing the Vibe

Written by Dr. Samantha McAleese

Here at MediaSmarts, we’ve just wrapped up another research project called Reporting Platforms: Young Canadians Evaluate Efforts to Counter Disinformation. This project created space for youth from across Canada to examine and assess reporting processes on popular social media apps (like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube). We wanted to learn more about how young people feel about current efforts to counter misinformation and disinformation and what solutions they might have to address this particular online harm. To do this, we facilitated three focus groups with 36 participants ages 16 to 29, talked to them about how often they see misinformation and disinformation online and what they do about it, and asked them to comment on whether they trust platforms to keep them safe and informed while scrolling and sharing.  

AI is a hot topic

Students and educators are already having to deal with artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications on schoolwork, assignments and lessons. When writing an essay, or when completing a school project, generative AI tools like ChatGPT can maybe speed up the results, save time and craft the correct response. Is that a good thing or are we causing more issues for our futures?

Privacy Pursuit: My Privacy, Your Privacy

In this lesson, students start by considering the permanence of online content. They review privacy strategies and privacy risks and analyze how likely and severe different privacy risks are. They then consider how their actions and decisions can affect others’ privacy and develop a list of “Dos and Don’ts” for managing both their own and others’ privacy.