The Swedish Media Council has extended their web site with more information in English. The web address is: www.medieradet.se/InEnglish. Here you can find information about the Swedish Media Council in English, articles on the Council’s work and activities, as well as publications that you can download for free.

This year The Media Council for Children and Young People celebrated Safer Internet Day by focussing on children’s own experiences with life online in order to boost their stories and amplify their voices to the surroundings. In this sense attention was directed towards the everyday life of the average child and how to manage privacy while playing, communicating, loving, sharing, getting hurt and making up - online. In other words, it was about privacy according to the children - not just an abstract notion invented by the adults, but about concrete matters which influence their life in both good and bad ways.

The youth panel

A huge capacity in staging SID10 around the children’s own experiences and expressions has been the Danish youth panel, Medierødderne. In the weeks leading up to Safer Internet Day Medierødderne have been very active in order to prepare for Safer Internet Day. Among others, they asked questions to their network of friends to investigate upon the most impeding issues regarding children and young people’s experiences online. The outcome of this short survey supported the international theme as it underlined issues regarding what to share with whom, hence thinking before uploading. Also, two girls from the Danish youth panel wrote a letter to Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly. This was done as a response and comment to the often complicated and by default too open privacy settings on facebook. In the letter they wrote:

In general it is hard to find out how to protect ourselves the best. We want to be the boss of who can see our profile. On Facebook we saw that they recommended that “All” (everyone) should be able to see information about your education, job and family, and that “friends of friends” can see pictures and videos of you (like with minors where the “everyone-setting” is set to “friends of friends”).

Waiting for their voice to be heard in the head quarter of facebook inc., the Danish youth panel made a bunch of short movies about safe and responsible use of digital media. The movies were all, in some way or another, inspired by Medierødderne’s own experiences on the internet. The creativity and originality of the movies were impressing and the stories told were very relevant and informing. Among others, there was a story about the blessing of the internet as it made it possible for ‘boy to meet girl’, the unfortunate episode where a private quarrel escalates on the internet and some very thorough reflections on whether it is a good idea to be friends with members of the family on facebook.

Following, the productions has been shared through online networks and disseminated via the Safer Internet Day 2010 online campaign.

Debate at the Children’s University

The intense and ongoing work promoting awareness of safer internet done by Medierødderne culminated on Safer Internet Day 2010 where a selected amount of the short movies were presented to a huge crowd of children. In collaboration with Children’s University in Copenhagen, the Danish Media Council for Children and Young People invited 80 school children, ranging from 6th to 9th grade, to a debate regarding their online experiences and privacy online. The event was staged around the youth panel, Medierødderne, who was invited to share their knowledge and experiences with the participating school children. In this sense it was not only a debate about children’s use of the internet - it was a debate by children taking their point of departure about what did matter and what was hot or not when it comes to life online. A selected amount of the short movies were presented at the debate and followed up by questions from Medierødderne themselves to the crowd of young people regarding their online experiences and notion of privacy on the internet. The debate was very lively and several findings were disclosed. Present at the debate were a number of journalist who passed on the messages from the children to the public through articles in leading national newspapers.

The successful outcome of Safer Internet day 2010 in Denmark has been supported by an intensive media coverage and thereby assisting in ‘getting the message out’ and amplify the voice of the children to the surroundings. An important tool in this process has been the visual productions which have paved the road towards the public media as well as the national newspapers. Another reason for an eventful Safer Internet Day in Denmark is the increased focus from the Media Council’s safer internet stakeholder group.

Safer Internet Day in Denmark

In Denmark, Safer Internet Day 2010 was celebrated with offline and online events and initiatives. The Danish Media Council for Children and Young People coordinated the day in cooperation with Cyberhus and Save the Children Denmark. The day was promoted widely in Denmark with press activities and increased focus from the Media Council’s safer internet stakeholder group.

The Danish Media Council for Children and Young People
The Media Council for Children and Young People is part of the Danish Film Institute. The primary task of the Council is to classify films and DVDs for children over 11 and 15 years of age. The Media Council for Children and Young People has been acting as awareness centre within the international Insafe network since 2004 under the EU Safer Internet programme. The aim is to provide children, parents and teachers with knowledge and tools for guiding and empowering children in the network society.

Safer Internet Day on the Berlaymont building, headquarters of the European Commission
 

This year again the whole Insafe team has been humbled by the keen interest generated by Safer Internet Day all around the world. This event has become at many levels a center of focus and is definitely a landmark in the internet safety calendar. First taken up within the Insafe network, Safer Internet Day has grown beyond its traditional geographic zone and is now celebrated well over 60 countries all around the world, from Brazil to Japan and Kenya. But despite this general take-up the urgent need for more collaboration world-wide has been underlined, notably in the light of the divergent implementation of safer social networking principles.
 

The resonance in the media was significant, with articles released in the mainstream press in most of the participating countries. Despite this success it is often acknowledged that communictaion via traditional media is not the most efficient way to target young people and that we should focus more on online communication. The Insafe network and beyond managed to leverage the reach of many websites on a national level.


We observed a growing interest coming from social networking sites, a phenomenon which might be related to the topic of this year campaign “Think before you post!”, which managed to echo a current matter of concern. Social networks are often in the firing line when it comes to users privacy and online safety issues. Safer Inetrnet Day participation can only improve matters for all parties.


As already mentioned, the official number of participating countries has grown since last year, passing from 50 to over 60, and we are still counting. 78 organisations (Awareness Centres and SID Committees) created a profile on the SID fair (www.sidfair.org), our collaborative platform for internet safety stakeholders and contributed to the blog.


The traffic on the Insafe portal around Safer Internet Day has tremendously increased, passing from an average of 1,500/2,000 visits a day to 12,128 visits on Safer Internet Day, which is almost double last year (6,593 visits on SID 2009). With Insafe taking the back seat on a national level the real exposure globally will be huge. Reports are coming in from around the world on the success of campaigns on a per country basis and we are starting to see the true reach the day is having.


So its very rewarding to see how successful this event has become. We can build upon this platform for the 8th Safer Internet Day in 2011 which can only become even bigger and better.