A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
If you have kids, chances are you’ve worried about their presence on social media. Who are they talking to? What are they posting? Are they being bullied? Do they spend too much time on it? Do they realise their friends’ lives aren’t as good as they look on Instagram? We asked five experts if social [...]
Education Minister James Merlino has announced a ban on mobile phone use in all Victorian public schools, effective from term one of 2020. The ban aims to counteract several effects of mobile phone use which schools have been struggling with. The most concerning is cyberbullying, which has been steadily increasing in Australian schools and in [...]
A Department of Education review of smartphone policies around the world has found that students manage to find "workarounds" when devices are banned at school - yet the NSW government has prohibited phones in primary schools. The Department's review of the evidence on phones in classrooms notes that schools across Australia and around the world [...]
The video showed the woman in a pink off-the-shoulder top, sitting on a bed, smiling a convincing smile. It was her face. But it had been seamlessly grafted, without her knowledge or consent, onto someone else's body: a young pornography actress, just beginning to disrobe for the start of a graphic sex scene. A crowd [...]
Hate speech is all over the internet. Fueled by trolls, extremists, false information, and a group mentality, this kind of cruelty against a religion, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender, race -- or anything, really -- has reached a fever pitch. And while some kids will be attacked, and some may be swept up in the powerful [...]
Australia's e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant has called for all students to be taught about cyber safety at school after the latest data showed one-in-five young people are victims of online bullying. One-in-four complaints to the e-safety office involve direct threats of violence or harm targeting a child, she said, adding that four per cent [...]
Leon Jenkins was 43 when he took his own life in July 2018. He livestreamed his suicide on an internet forum where users can freely – and viciously – insult, berate, provoke and abuse each other. The idea is to make people leave the site when they can take no more. Gregory Tomkins and Kevin [...]
New University of Canterbury research into the behaviour of online trolls has revealed the many actors involved and a surprising number of benefits to trolling – and not just for the trolls. When University of Canterbury (UC) doctoral student Maja Golf-Papez left a marketing career in Slovenia to start her research into mischief-making consumer behaviours [...]
The risks associated with social media are regularly reported in the media, and you may have experienced some of them already yourself or with your kids. A new study (Primack et al., 2018) adds important research to the discussion, finding that negative experiences on social media are significantly correlated with increased depressive feelings (a greater [...]
Glued to screens and with nothing else in town to entertain them, Warwick youth carry their problems everywhere and there is no escape. Former Warwick State High School student and young leader Jacob Meiklejohn said many adults did not understand the unique challenges millennials faced in an age of social media. On the National Day [...]
