Dr. Erica Brozovsky is a sociolinguist, a public scholar and a lover of words. She is the host of Otherwords, a PBS series on language and linguistics, and a professor of writing and rhetoric at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. You can find her at @ericabrozovsky on most platforms. Photo: Kelly Zhu

The internet is ubiquitous: on our desks, in our pockets, even in the air around us, as radio waves transmit between devices so we can be online on the move. It’s a sprawling web of interconnectivity, linking people and gadgets around the world. When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first proposal for a hypertext project called WorldWideWeb in 1989, there’s no way he could have known the impact his invention would have on billions of people across the globe, which he confirmed in a 2014 Reddit AMA. 

In the 35 years since the invention of the World Wide Web, an explosion of new internet words has emerged. As new technologies develop, we adopt words or create novel ones to fill in the linguistic gaps. For example, to describe one of the advancements of the Industrial Revolution, the word train was extended from its older definitions as a procession or sequence of objects in a row. And the steam-powered vehicle pulling a train of railway cars? That brand new technology needed an innovative name: locomotive. People often incorrectly think locomotives and trains are synonymous, and are similarly mistaken with the internet and the World Wide Web. To keep the transportation analogy going, the internet is the railway system, the data that moves between sites or sends emails is the train, and the World Wide Web is the scenery and points of interest along the route.

As far as names go, internet and World Wide Web make sense. The words visualize interconnectedness. Other internet terms like bookmark, which functions digitally the same way as a tangible piece of material is used to denote a place in a book, and email (an abbreviation of electronic mail), show clear parallels in meaning to their analog counterparts. Websites are locations, or sites, on the web. Domains are subsets of the internet under the control of a single authority, much like a physical territory that a ruler would have dominion over. And if you know that the prefix hyper- means above or beyond, you’ll understand that hypertext and hyperlinks essentially go beyond the constraints of normal text and links. But not all internet words are so etymologically evident, and some even come with stories. Let’s start at the very beginning.

When you access the internet, you open a browser (which first appeared as the acronym BROWSER for BRowsing On-Line With SElective Retrieval) and begin to navigate around, otherwise known as surfing the internet. The term is often attributed to librarian Jean Armour Polly, who wanted a pithy metaphor for the fun and chaos of navigating the online world for her 1992 article’s title. Polly wasn’t the only one with a penchant for riding waves online: a 1991 comic book “The Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy” published by CERFnet depicted a superhero who literally surfed around on a surfboard answering internet cries for help.

Keeping it oceanic, the term phishing is attributed to hacker Khan C. Smith in the mid 1990s, allegedly based on the homophone fishing: trawling for sensitive information from a sea of internet users. The alternative spelling is a nod to phreaking, which was a way of hacking telephones (hence “ph”) to avoid paying long-distance phone charges (remember those?). And speaking of pesky things, the word spam comes from an iconic 1970 Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch wherein a horde of Viking cafe-goers repeatedly sing the menu item Spam, drowning out all other conversation.

That’s not the only internet food you’ll encounter. It seems like every website you access will ask you to accept cookies in order to personalize your experience, but weren’t we all raised not to accept sweets from strangers? So where did the name come from? Programmer Lou Montulli got the idea for the web version of cookies from the Unix data token term magic cookie, which sounds even more questionable to accept. There has been no confirmed origin of “magic cookie,” but three main theories prevail: drugs, fairy tales, and literal cookies. Perhaps it comes from the 1960s comic strip “Odd Bodkins” that uses magic cookie as a euphemism for LSD. Or maybe much like the Hansel and Gretel crumb trail, browsing the internet leaves a stream of cookie data in your wake. Or potentially the connection is less imaginative: cookie jars store cookies the way browsers store information.

When you go to delete cookies on your machine, you’ll also be asked if you want to clear your cache. Cache has been around since the turn of the 18th century as a hiding place for goods and treasures, from the French cacher meaning “to hide.” The word was first applied to computing in 1967 by IBM Systems Journal editor, Lyle R. Johnson. Apparently no one had any suggestions for a substitute for the clunky phrase “High Speed Buffer” so Johnson sat down with a thesaurus and came up with cache. 

Another cache on your device is the download cache. Downloading was originally used in military contexts to refer to unloading people or goods from various military vehicles (and uploading was the reverse). By 1968, the US Air Force extended the meaning to computers, as discussed in a quantitative study that referenced downloading records from the IBM 305 RAMAC computer to the newer IBM 1050, which took almost two weeks.

“While we stare at our phones and computer screens, it’s a nice reminder that the intention behind these technologies was to connect us together.”

Dr. Erica Brozovsky, sociolinguist

Thirty years later, Jorn Barger coined the term WebLog, a portmanteau of web and log, to refer to online personal journals. In 1999, perhaps as a joke, Peter Merholz posted in the sidebar of his own website: “”For What It’s Worth, I’ve decided to pronounce the word “weblog” as wee’- blog. Or “blog” for short.”” And now blog has generated other new words like vlog, blogosphere, and blogger. 

Avatar derives from the Sanskrit avatāra, meaning “descent,” which in Hinduism referred to the manifestation of a deity into an Earthly terrestrial form. The 1985 computer game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was the first application of the concept of an on-screen character as the digital incarnation of the human user. Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash popularized the idea, which continues to be applied across a wide variety of genres: video games, social media, virtual worlds, even Hollywood blockbusters.

Speaking of width, bandwidth was initially very literal in the 1800s (the width of a band of color or material) and then evolved significantly over 200 years. We can follow the logical progression to physics and mathematics (a range of values within a limited band), to physics and telecommunications (the difference between two frequencies which represents transmission capacity) to computers and telecommunications (data transfer capacity) to general life (emotional or physical capacity). It’s curious how the term moved beyond computers and technology back to the human experience.

We’re humans after all, and the internet and World Wide Web are tools for expanding our human experience. While we stare at our phones and computer screens, it’s a nice reminder that the intention behind these technologies was to connect us together. After all, Tim Berners-Lee said the thing he’s most proud of about the World Wide Web is “the wonderful global collaborative spirit of all the people who turned up to help build it and build things on it.”

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The AI wars are heating up. In late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT made headlines for showing us what a new search engine could look like. ChatGPT (which stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”) is a chatbot — one that can process queries and spit out relevant information to answer questions about historical facts, recipes, car dimensions and lots more. As a bonus, ChatGPT lets you word questions in plain English, so you’re not forced to write queries like “how to stop dog pooping everywhere reddit.” The result is, essentially, a search box that you can message back and forth with. It almost makes Google search look a little primitive. Microsoft, the maker of Bing and biggest investor in OpenAI, is okay with this.

ChatGPT, and the latest release GPT-4, provides thorough answers — it can even write your code, write your cover letter and pass your law exam. It also provides thoroughly wrong answers sometimes. It’s worrying how confidently ChatGPT presents inaccurate information. That hasn’t stopped newsrooms from rethinking how many writers they hire nor professors from coming out against the chatbot. (Though not all professors. Some embrace the change.)

The excitement around artificial intelligence is anything but artificial. At least for some. College professors or job recruiters are less than excited to have to discern human words from chatbot chatter. Industry experts are less than enthused for a potential wave of misinformation, signing an open letter that warns of AI’s potential to “flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth.” Those who have signed say “such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.” Issues like this are exactly what Mozilla seeks to address with the Responsible Computing Challenge, ensuring higher education programs emphasize tech’s political and societal impact. And also with Mozilla.ai, a startup with the mission of making it easy to create AI that’s open source and ethical.

As we enter this brave new world where even a friend’s Snapchat message could be AI-written, you might want to know a bit more about chatbots’ capabilities and limitations. Can you spot a paragraph written by AI? Can you tell if your coworker is actually responding to you and not ChatGPT? Do you know how to spot misinformation within a chatbot’s answers because ChatGPT-infused Bing definitely still gets facts wrong at times? It’s not always possible to know if an AI wrote some copy, but sometimes, you can detect language written by ChatGPT and other bots by using a detector tool and watching for awkward language. Read on to learn how.

How to detect ChatGPT text yourself?

You can detect ChatGPT-written text using online tools like OpenAI API Key. The tool comes from OpenAI, itself, the company that made ChatGPT. It’s worth noting that the app isn’t perfect. OpenAI says the tool needs at least 1,000 words before it can sniff out AI-generated content, so something like an AI-generated text message may fly under its radar. Also, even if it gets the 1,000 words it needs, it isn’t always 100% accurate at detecting AI vs human written language. AI-made text that has been edited by a human can also fool the tool

(Update: As of July 2023, a new ChatGPT update no longer includes the use of the AI classifier which Open AI used to detect AI-generated text and, as of early 2024, the company has even taken their original tool offline. The company claims to be working on new, more effective ways of detecting AI-generated text as well as AI-generated audio and video.)

OpenAI’s tool may not be perfect but there are other offerings in the ChatGPT text detection world. The Medium blog Geek Culture lists other options made by folks at Princeton and Stanford. If it’s critical to know if text was written by a bot or a human, testing it on multiple tools might help. ChatGPT is changing quickly so your mileage may vary.

Detecting ChatGPT text: The caveats

It’s important to emphasize that no method of detecting AI-written text is foolproof — that includes options using tools available today. Jesse McCrosky is a data scientist with Mozilla Foundation who warns of AI text detection tools’ limitations. “Detector tools will always be imperfect, which makes them nearly useless for most applications,” says McCrosky. “One can not accuse a student of using AI to write their essay based on the output of a detector tool that you know has a 10% chance of giving a false positive.”

According to McCrosky, it can be impossible to ever have a true AI-detector because it will always be possible for software to write “undetectable” texts or create text with the specific intent of evading these sorts of detectors. And then there’s the fact that the AI tools available to us are always improving. “There can be some sense of an ‘arms race’ between ChatGPT text detectors and detector-evaders, but there will never be a situation in which detectors can be trusted,” says McCrosky.

How to spot misinformation within ChatGPT?

It’s no secret that ChatGPT can (and has) been spreading misinformation and disinformation. Microsoft may be using tools like those from NewsGuard to limit the misleading responses its AI gives, but the issue is still cause for concern. The Poynter Institute has our favorite tips to spot misinformation within ChatGPT: 1) check for patterns and inconsistencies, 2) look for signs of human error and check the context. If a ChatGPT answer repeats something multiple times, has weird errors that a person wouldn’t make or says something that doesn’t make sense in the context of what you’re reading, you might be reading misleading content. Check the source links at the bottom of your ChatGPT responses and make sure you do your own research outside of ChatGPT too. Treat it as a starting point and not the final word.

ChatGPT is fun, but watch out

ChatGPT offers an interesting glimpse into a chatbot answer-filled world, but it also acts as a warning of the downsides too. With great smarts comes great responsibility. As Bing and ChatGPT (and Sydney?) learn how to be a better chatbot, we as the users will have to continue to use ChatGPT detection tools to verify that the words we’re seeing are human-made and that the facts we’re sharing are indeed factual.

Did Chat GPT Write This? Here’s How To Tell

Written by: Xavier Harding
Edited by: Ashley Boyd, Audrey Hingle, Carys Afoko, Innocent Nwani
SEO Insight: Aslam Shaffraz

For further reading on AI, check these out from the Mozilla Foundation:

• Can My Boss Read My Slack DMs—And Other Workplace Wonderings
• The Rise of AI-Made Music: Interview with Justin Bernardez

The post Did ChatGPT write this? Here’s how to tell appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Do you need parental controls? What are the options? Do they really work? Here’s everything you need to know about the wide array of parental control solutions, from OS settings to monitoring apps to network hardware.

Even if you’ve talked to your kids about screen-time limits and responsible online behavior, it’s still really tough to manage what they do when you’re not there (and even when you are). Parental controls can support you in your efforts to keep your kids’ internet experiences safe, fun, and productive. They work best when used openly and honestly in partnership with your kids.

Figuring out what kind of parental control is best is entirely based on your own family’s needs. Some families can get by with simple, free browser settings to filter inappropriate content. Some families need help clamping down on screen time. Some folks are cool with spot-checks on their kids’ devices. Wherever you are in your search, this guide can help you make sense of the wide array of options for managing your family’s devices. Find the answers to parents’ most frequently asked questions about parental controls.

• What are the best parental controls for blocking websites?
• What are the best parental controls for blocking websites and filtering content?
• What are the best parental controls for setting limits and monitoring kids?
• What are the best parental controls for kids’ phones?
• What are the best parental controls for tracking location?
• What are the best network parental controls?
• What are the best parental control options for iOS phones and tablets?
• What are the best parental control options for Android devices?
• Can I set parental controls in specific apps, such as Snapchat and TikTok?
• Do I need to worry about my kid disabling parental controls?
• Will my kid know that I’m using parental controls?

What are the best parental controls if I want to:

Block websites. If you just want to limit what your kids can search for, your best option is to enable Google SafeSearch in whichever browser or browsers you use. First, you need to make sure your browsers use Google as their default search engine, and then you need to turn on SafeSearch. This is a good precaution to take as soon as your kids start going online and you want to make sure they don’t accidentally stumble across something yucky.

Block websites and filter content. If you want to prevent access to specific websites and limit your kid’s exposure to inappropriate content such as mature games or porn, you can use the parental controls that are built into your device’s operating system. Every major operating system — Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s Mac OS, and even Amazon’s Fire — offers settings to keep kids from accessing stuff you don’t want them to see. To get the benefits, you need to use the most updated version of the operating system, and each user has to log in under his or her profile. The settings apply globally to everything the computer accesses. Each works differently and has its own pros and cons. This is the best solution if your kids are younger and are primarily using a home device. Check out each one’s features: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon.

Block websites, filter content, impose time limits, see what my kids are doing. A full-featured, third-party parental control service such as Bark, Qustodio or NetNanny will give you a lot of control over all of your kid’s devices (the ones they use at home as well as their phones). These can be pricey (especially if you have several kids to monitor), but the cost includes constant device monitoring, offering you visibility into how kids are using their devices. These parental controls can only keep track of accounts that they know your kid is using, and for some apps, you’ll need your kid’s password in order to monitor activity. If your kid creates a brand-new profile on Instagram using a friend’s computer without telling you, for example, the parental controls won’t cover that account.

Monitor my kid’s phone. To keep tabs on your tween or teen’s phone, your best bet is to download an app to monitor text messages, social networks, emails, and other mobile functions — try Bark, Circle, TeenSafe, or WebWatcher. These are especially helpful if you’re concerned about potentially risky conversations or iffy topics your kid might be engaging in. Bark, for example, notifies you when it detects “alert” words, such as “drugs.” To monitor social media, you’ll need your kid’s account information, including passwords.

Track my kid’s location. You can use GPS trackers such as Find My Friends and FamiSafe to stay abreast of your kid’s whereabouts. Your kid’s phone needs to be on for these to work, though.

Manage all devices on the network, limit screen time, filter content, turn off Wi-Fi. There are both hardware and software solutions to control your home network and your home Wi-Fi. To name a few popular ones: OpenDNS is a download that works with your existing router (the device that brings the internet into your home) to filter internet content. Circle Home Plus is a device and subscription service that pairs with your existing router and lets you pause access to the internet, create time limits, and add content filters to all devices on your home network (including Wi-Fi devices), plus manage phones and tablets outside the home. Some internet service providers such as Comcast and Verizon offer parental control features that apply to all devices on the network, too. Network solutions can work for families with kids of different ages; however, mucking around in your network and Wi-Fi settings can be challenging, and the controls may not apply when kids are on a different network.

What are the best parental control options for iOS phones and tablets?

If you have an iPhone or iPad, Apple’s Screen Time settings let you manage nearly every aspect of your kid’s iOS device, including how much time kids spend on individual apps and games and what they download. You can even turn the phone off for specified periods, such as bedtime. There are two ways to enable Screen Time: You can either set it up on your kid’s device and password-protect the settings, or you can set up Family Sharing through your Apple account and manage the features from your phone.

What are the best parental control options for Android devices?

Android devices can vary a lot in what they offer, so check your device’s settings to see what options you have. If your kid is under 13, you can download Google’s Family Link to track and control online activity, including text messaging and social media, using your own phone. (You can use Family Link on teens’ devices, but you can’t lock the settings.) You can also use Android’s Digital Wellbeing settings, which are built into the latest version of the OS. These can help kids become more mindful of the time they’re spending online — and hopefully help them cut down. You’ll want to help your kid enable the settings that will be most useful on the road to self-regulation.

Can I set parental controls in specific apps, such as Snapchat and TikTok?

In addition to blocking specific people, most social media apps let you disable features that could pose some risks for kids. For example, you may be able to turn off chat, restrict conversation to friends only, and hide your child’s profile so that it won’t show up in search results. Some apps go a step further by letting users control their own use of the app. Instagram‘s Your Activity feature, for example, shows you how much time you’ve spent in the app and lets you set limits for yourself. YouTube has a similar feature that reminds users to take a break. TikTok even allows parents to set limits and remotely manage their kids’ TikTok account from their phone using its Family Pairing feature. To find out if your kids’ favorite apps offer any types of restrictions, go to the app’s settings section (usually represented by the gear icon). Unless an app offers passcode protection for its settings (and most don’t), your kid can easily reverse them.

Do I need to worry about my kid disabling parental controls?

Yes, kids can undo parental controls. In fact, the directions on how to get around them are easily available on the internet. Depending on your software, you may get a notification that the parental control was breached — or not. Kids can figure out all sorts of ingenious methods to keep doing what they want to be doing — talking to friends, staying up late playing Fortnite, and watching videos you don’t want them to see. If you notice something fishy such as a steep drop-off in your parental control notifications, Wi-Fi or data activity after you’ve turned off the network, or anything else that indicates the parental control isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, your kid may have figured out how to get around it. It could be for another reason, though, since parental controls can be affected by system updates, power outages, and other technical issues.

Will my kid know that I’m using parental controls?

It really depends on the type of controls you install and the devices you have. Some parental controls can be installed without your kids knowing, but Common Sense Media doesn’t recommend it (unless you have a really serious issue with your kid and you need to monitor discreetly). In fact, be cautious with companies that promise covert monitoring, as they tend to prey on parents’ fears. Parental control companies that encourage open dialogue will most likely be more helpful anyway, because at some point you’ll need to discuss what you find. And that’s a lot easier to do if your kid already knows you’re monitoring them. If you decide to use parental controls, talk to your kids about why you’re using them (to help keep them safe) and how your ultimate goal is for them to learn how to interact online responsibly and regulate their own usage independently.

Common Sense Media is the nation’s leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of all kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the 21st century.

The internet is a great place for families. It gives us new opportunities to discover the world, connect with others and just generally make our lives easier and more colorful. But it also comes with new challenges and complications for the people raising the next generations. Mozilla wants to help families make the best online decisions, whatever that looks like, with our latest series, The Tech Talk.

Talk to your kids about online safety

Get tips

The post Common Sense Media’s ultimate guide to parental controls appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Carlos Moreno is an activist, a graphic designer at CAP Tulsa and leads Tulsa’s Code for America volunteer brigade. He has a master’s degree in public policy and is the author of ”The Victory of Greenwood” and "A Kids Book about the Tulsa Race Massacre." You can follow him on Twitter. Photo: Jamie Glisson

As the father of a teenager, I find myself worrying – and not just about their grades and how quickly they’re growing up. Dating? Driver’s permit? I’m not ready for this! I also worry about how my child, through the internet, is experiencing the world at a much quicker pace than I did.

When I was younger, I remember when the video of police brutally beating Rodney King surfaced. I watched the uprising that unfolded on the streets of Los Angeles on the news in real time. I was 15. That’s six years after I, along with my classmates and teachers, watched the space shuttle Challenger unexpectedly explode on television. Both times, I didn’t fully grasp what I’d just watched – my understanding came with help from my family and teachers and with time. 

Now, with the web at their fingertips, children today are being exposed to a Challenger-level disaster in some part of the world in real time, every week it seems. I fear that without context and guidance to keep up with the internet news cycle, teens are becoming cynical, distrustful and isolated. So how can we, as parents, support and empower them to navigate it all?

‘What good is marching in the streets or signing a petition going to do?’

Recently, I visited my teenage child’s youth group at school and asked them how they’re learning about the issues that affect them. I learned that most of the dozen high schoolers I spoke with were getting their information from social media accounts, like @mr_fish_news on TikTok’s news fish. That, or they were too overwhelmed to care. 

Through the internet, young people have access to information unlike any of the generations before them. But politically, my child feels completely helpless. “I don’t have any power or money,” they said. “The rich and powerful make all the decisions, so what good is marching in the streets or signing a petition going to do?” 

I didn’t have a good answer. Keep fighting? Try to avoid doomscrolling? Focus on taking care of those around you? It didn’t seem like enough. 

Learn from news literacy and advocacy organizations 

Through my own work as an activist, I’m reminded that there are always organizations who can help. To learn how I can better talk to my kid about the news, I found the list of resources provided by Media Literacy Now to be a great starting point. 

I also recommend contacting your local library to find out what digital media literacy workshops they might have. There’s also Generation Citizen, which offers resources across the U.S. for what it calls “action civics,” teaching a combination of media literacy and the inner-workings of local government.

In my community, the nonprofit Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice worked to create a safe space where young people in Tulsa can speak to each other after the 2020 protests prompted by George Floyd’s murder. 

Not only can families bring kids to these spaces to process difficult issues among their peers, but parents can also use all of these resources to educate themselves for having tough conversations about how what’s happening in the world is affecting them.

How to talk to kids about the news (and getting involved)

In today’s political and media climate, as amplified by the internet for better or worse, it’s easy to feel distraught. It’s a place I find myself more often than I care to admit both as a community advocate and a parent. 

Still, there are great resources that are made more accessible by the internet – and parents don’t need to figure things out alone. There are organizations that we can learn from and that are constantly working to help meet our children’s needs. This is what gives me a bit of hope.

Here’s what I’ve learned that can help you talk to kids about news events:

1. Ask them what they care about. Your kids will surprise you with what they’re already discussing with their teachers and friends. Make time to talk about complicated issues they care about or that are relevant in their lives. Read a book, search for trustworthy articles online or watch an informative video, then try to understand it together. 

2. Value their voice. The word “advocacy” means “giving voice.” Listen to what your kids want to express. Ask what voices or perspectives are missing from the conversation. Together, explore the voices of those who are most affected by the issue you’re discussing. The internet makes it easier to find connections. This is one way to use it for good.

3. Explore local resources together. Activism is about building power. Go online to find local avenues — a school board, town hall or city council meeting, where teenagers can learn about issues going on in their own community and where they can express their views. Help write emails to the editor of a local paper. Ask for meetings with local elected officials. Trust me, you’ll be surprised that your family has more power than you think!

What we see and hear amid the constant online news cycle can be discouraging. But the internet also makes plenty of resources and guidance accessible, so that parents are equipped to have tough but empowering conversations with their kids.  

The internet is a great place for families. It gives us new opportunities to discover the world, connect with others and just generally make our lives easier and more colorful. But it also comes with new challenges and complications for the people raising the next generations. Mozilla wants to help families make the best online decisions, whatever that looks like, with our latest series, The Tech Talk.

Talk to your kids about online safety

Get tips

The post How to talk to kids about the news appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

As each generation comes of age, they challenge the norms that came before them. If you were to ask most people their go-to way to search, they would mention a search engine. But for Gen Z, TikTok has become one of the most popular ways to find information.

Adrienne Sheares, a social media strategist and a millennial who grew up relying on search engines, had difficulty grasping the habit. So, she spoke with a small group of Gen Zers and reported what she heard in a recent Twitter thread.

Among her learnings: Young people are drawn to content TikTok curates for them, they prefer watching quick videos over reading, and they know misinformation exists and “will avoid content on the platform that can easily be false.” Sheares’ thread went viral. Her curiosity resonated, especially for people with habits very different to those of Gen Z’s.  

As part of our mission at Mozilla, we’re working to support families in having a healthy relationship with the internet. That includes an online experience where young people are equipped to cut through the noise – including misinformation. So we wanted to learn more about how Gen Z consumes the news, and how families can encourage curiosity about current events without shutting out social media. After all, while it may be rife with misinformation, it’s still an essential platform for many teens to connect with their peers.

We spoke with members of Teens for Press Freedom, a youth-led organization that advocates for news literacy among teenagers. We asked Sofia, Agatha, Charlotte, Eloise and Kevin – who are all in their teens – about how they engage with information on social media, their concerns about algorithms and how we can help Gen Zers fight misinformation. Here’s what they said. 

Talk to your kids about online safety

Get tips

Gen Zers are vocal about their values

The way we consume news has become intrinsically social. People start sharing the news they’re consuming because that’s what you do on Instagram and other platforms. People say, “Hey, I’m reading this and therefore, I fit into this educated part of political American life. I have a real opinion that’s very valid.” Everyone wants to feel like they’re part of that group.

CHARLOTTE, CO-FOUNDER OF TEENS FOR PRESS FREEDOM

Agatha, co-director of Teens for Press Freedom, first took notice of how news spreads on Instagram in 2020, when she was 14. 

“There was this post about Palestine and Israel that was incredibly antisemitic,” Agatha recalled. “It was sort of convincing people that they should be antisemitic. That obviously isn’t right. I’m Jewish, and I felt like the post associated Jewish people with the actions of Israel’s government. That felt like misinformation because I didn’t do anything. It seemed to blame people who have never even lived in Israel.”

She started seeing more and more posts with misinformation about other issues, including COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter protests and violence against Asian Americans. “People were sharing them because it looked cool, like they were doing the right thing by spreading these infographics and letting their thousands of followers know about these incidents,” Agatha said.

Many young people want to publicly express their values. However, they run into a problem in the way they do it. 

“People weren’t making sure that the information they were spreading was actually correct and not just something somebody had written, copied into a graphic and sent it out to the world,” Agatha said. 

Charlotte, who co-founded Teens for Press Freedom and is now an incoming freshman at Dartmouth College, said many people fall into a trap of “virtue signaling.”

“The way we consume news has become intrinsically social,” Charlotte said. “People start sharing the news they’re consuming because that’s what you do on Instagram and other platforms. People say, ‘Hey, I’m reading this and therefore, I fit into this educated part of political American life. I have a real opinion that’s very valid.’ Everyone wants to feel like they’re part of that group.”

The infinite feed has shaped Gen Z’s online habits

There’s something about the endless scroll that is so compelling to people.

CHARLOTTE, CO-FOUNDER OF TEENS FOR PRESS FREEDOM

Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010 and Snapchat in 2011. Millennials came of age as those platforms exploded. Gen Zers – those born after 1996, or people 25 and younger, as classified by the Pew Research Center – don’t remember a time when the internet wasn’t a major means of personal communication and media consumption.

Social media feeds favor information presented succinctly, so users can quickly move on to the next post one after another. TikTok, launched in 2016, has “hacked that algorithm so well,” Charlotte said. “Now, everyone’s using it. There’s YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Netflix Fast Laughs. There’s something about the endless scroll that is so compelling to people. That just invites us to spend hours and hours learning about the world in that way.”

Teens today have lived most of their lives in that world, and it has affected how they consume the news.

Short attention spans fuel misinformation

When I’m listening to music, I can’t get myself to sit through a full song without skipping to the next one. Consuming things is just what we’re programmed to do.

ELOISE, ADVOCACY DIRECTOR OF TEENS FOR PRESS FREEDOM

Many teens know how to confirm facts through resources on the internet. That’s thanks to ongoing efforts by educators who include verifying information in their lesson plans. 

Kevin, workshop team director at Teens for Press Freedom, recently saw a post on Instagram purportedly about a California bill that would allow late-term abortions. “I looked it up because I was curious,” he said. He quickly learned that the law doesn’t actually propose that. 

The issue, Kevin said, is taking the time to fact-check. 

“We’re a generation constantly fed and fed and fed and given things to consume,” said Eloise, advocacy director at Teens for Press Freedom. “Our attention spans are significantly lower than generations before us. When I’m listening to music, I can’t get myself to sit through a full song without skipping to the next one. Consuming things is just what we’re programmed to do.”

That may be why many Gen Zers prefer watching short videos to learn information instead of reading articles.

“People feel like reading the news is not something to prioritize when they can just look at headlines,” Agatha said. “A lot of newspapers have an audio link now so people listen to it instead. Or it’ll say five-minute read, and people will take five minutes to read it. But they don’t want to spend 10, 20 minutes informing themselves on what’s happening to the world.”

News events become more engaging on social media with flashy imagery and content that highlights the outrageous. While this means platforms have become a breeding ground for misinformation, there’s also a silver lining: Younger generations have become more motivated than ever to engage in issues they care about.

Teens are aware about the power of algorithms

We find that [algorithms are] kind of abusing our personal information.

KEVIN, WORKSHOP TEAM DIRECTOR OF TEENS FOR PRESS FREEDOM

While many Gen Zers feel equipped to figure out what’s real or not on social media, algorithms that feed users content curated to each individual are hurting their ability to slow down and choose what they consume. 

“A lot of misinformation are half-truths, like it’s almost believable enough that you can accept it without doing any extra research,” said Sofia, a high school junior and co-director of Teens for Press Freedom. “You go to TikTok to be entertained, and if that entertainment is inundated with misleading information, you’re consuming it without knowing you’re consuming it.”

The teens expressed concern about algorithm-based technologies being tested on young people. Kevin sees it as “abusing their personal information.” Being fed posts based on each person’s interests can create a distorted ecosystem of content that includes misleading, even manipulative, information.

“You’re sucked into this world of people you don’t know, and you see all these different ideas and things that are your interests, and you spend hours and hours on there,” Agatha said. “Their ideas sort of become yours. Your opinion then becomes TikTok’s opinion and vice versa.”

Sofia said this has contributed to the loss of productive conversation around politics: “Algorithms are not only creepy. It’s really damaging not just to the individual but to the political situation in the United States. People are only seeing content that aligns with their beliefs.”

Charlotte said, “There’s this rhetoric about how Gen Z is the most informed generation because of social media, and in many ways that’s true. But social media isn’t really the great democratizer. There’s [also] a lot we don’t know because of these algorithms.”

There are ways to help younger generations fight misinformation

Rather than being talked at, [teens] can talk to each other about issues.

SOFIA, CO-DIRECTOR OF TEENS FOR PRESS FREEDOM

While education about trustworthy sources needs to continue through school, the group said we need to expand the conversation to social media. 

“A lot of people our age think that being critical of sources is something school-related,” Kevin said. “People will say something like, ‘I saw this on TikTok, and then you know, very non-reluctantly quote social media as a source of information.”

Applying the process of verifying information on social media means facilitating discussions among people who consume content in similar ways. 

“Rather than being talked at, they can talk to each other about issues,” Sofia said. “If they’re convinced by someone their own age that what they’re experiencing is not something that they alone have to go through, or that they alone have to figure out a solution, that makes the whole thing a lot easier to confront.”

For parents, this can mean finding peer-to-peer resources for their kids like Teens for Press Freedom’s misinformation workshops. Families can also have real conversations with their children about their values and issues they care about, encouraging curiosity instead of avoiding complicated topics. 

Ultimately, adults can use their power to support efforts to make the internet a better place – one where technology doesn’t use children’s data against them. Young people will tell us what they need if we ask. We can’t let algorithms do that work for us.  

The internet is a great place for families. It gives us new opportunities to discover the world, connect with others and just generally make our lives easier and more colorful. But it also comes with new challenges and complications for the people raising the next generations. Mozilla wants to help families make the best online decisions, whatever that looks like, with our latest series, The Tech Talk.

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The post A little less misinformation, a little more action appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

For our new series The Tech Talk, we’re digging into the challenges technology poses for families and exploring all the ways that can empower them. So we looked into digital platforms and found ourselves, as many parents and other caretakers do, in the parental control settings. 

These settings, along with services that promise to shield young people away from “inappropriate” content, can give families comfort in the face of the infinite feed. They let adults limit screen time and restrict mature content (although the way platforms identify what that means is far from perfect). But it is not so simple as setting up the parental control settings and walking away. It’s important for families to both understand kids’ behaviors and explain to them why they’re using parental controls.

The capabilities of these tools, as well as their shortcomings, led us to one question: In a world where technology’s hold over everything we do seems uncontrollable, what does parental control even mean?

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Jenny Radesky, who studies the intersections of child development, parenting and technology at the University of Michigan, takes issue with the phrase itself.

“Parental mediation is [a better] term, parental engagement is another – and probably better because it implies meaningful discussion or involvement to help kids navigate media, rather than using controlling or restricting approaches,” said Radesky, who has contributed to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy agenda on kids’ technology use. 

She pointed to research that suggests letting children manage their own media consumption may be more effective than parental control settings offered by apps. 

In one study called “Coco’s Videos,” researchers designed a video-streaming app for preschoolers. In it, a character named Coco interacts with children as they watch videos. The researchers had the kids use three different versions of the app.

In the neutral version, a child sees a large “home” button after watching a video playlist. That button leads them back to the beginning where they can make a new playlist. 

In the “post-play” version, a child sees the same home button. But this time, there’s a small screen embedded in the top right corner which automatically plays a recommended video. The child can either expand that window to full-screen and keep watching, pause or go back to the home screen. 

In the controlled version, a child is locked out of the app once they’ve finished a video playlist. After three minutes, the app resets and returns to the home screen. 

Researchers found that the post-play version that automatically plays another video, a feature used by platforms such as YouTube and Netflix, “significantly reduced children’s autonomy and likelihood of self-regulation, extended video-viewing time, and led to increases in parent intervention.” Meanwhile, the version that used a lockout mechanism didn’t cut down screen time or the likelihood of parent intervention. 

The study concluded that we don’t need to make additional tools to control excessive media use; we just need to stop creating experiences that encourage it. 

In another study, preschoolers and parents were asked to create a device-based playtime plan together. Researchers observed parent-child interactions and interviewed the parents afterwards. The experts found that children, with parental guidance during the planning phase, moved on to their next activity without their parents having to intervene 93% of the time.

Alex Hiniker, who co-authored both studies, thinks that communication between parents and children about technology can be empowering. But platforms continue to be designed to get as much time and attention as possible. 

“Slapped on top of them are these lockout mechanisms and timers and say, ‘OK, now self-police yourself into not using the super enthralling things that we just put in front of you,’” Hiniker said. “I’m not a big fan of that approach. I don’t really think it’s working for families.”

How well parental control settings and apps work is one question. It’s also worth asking where the balance lies between protecting children online and encroaching on their independence and privacy. 

Parental controls and children’s privacy

Jason Kelley, a strategist for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital rights, worries that parental controls may be normalizing surveillance for children.

“You have to think of strict parental controls in a young person’s mind as essentially a parent sitting and watching them use the internet over their shoulder,” Kelley argued. “This can send a really bad message that safety is only available and possible through surveillance, and that’s simply not true.”

He acknowledged the good intentions behind efforts that seek to rein in social media and other digital platforms that increasingly take up young people’s time. But most parental control tools don’t recognize the different privacy needs of a toddler and that of a teenager, Kelley said, and filtering systems aren’t great at recognizing context. Not only could parental control settings block “thinspiration” posts, they could also restrict posts about body positivity.

“How we protect the mental health of young people online is a reasonable question,” Kelley said. “But there’s also the real question of whether Instagram is worse than, say, ‘Tiger Beat’ magazine. Our culture is set up in a way to make people feel bad about themselves. And Instagram is a reflection of that in some cases. But it’s impossible to eliminate bad things from someone’s online experience.”

Kelley said as a society, we want to instill in younger generations why privacy matters. He also underscored that not all adults act for the best interest of minors. And that risk is clear for marginalized groups. 

The internet has risks, but so do parental controls

It’s important to realize that many kids in the LGBTQI+ community can be made vulnerable by tech monitoring tools, especially in a country where things like conversion therapy are still practiced, said Christopher Wood. He’s the executive director of LGBT Tech, which develops and offers technology resources to support LGBTQI+ communities.

He noted that outside the home, sensitive information about young people can already be exposed to teachers and campus administrators through the school devices they use. Wood said he runs a local LGBTQ+ center in Virginia, where he gets calls from young people getting kicked out of their homes because their families found out their sexual orientation or gender identity — most often through technology.

Recent legal developments, such as Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill and the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling on gender-affirming care for trans teens, heighten privacy concerns. Information exposed by a monitoring tool could land young people, their parents or their teachers in legal trouble, with LGBTQ+ youth at the most risk.

Wood understands the uncertainties families feel about technology and parents’ need to create a safe space for their children on the internet. 

“There’s a push and pull with any child and parent,” he said. “I’m a parent. For me, it’s about creating an opportunity where my child can feel safe to come to me and talk to me if they get into trouble, while also providing the opportunity for them to explore. Technology is only going to become faster, and it will continue to infiltrate more parts of their lives.”

Wood believes that education is key, and not just for kids. 

“Sometimes, I’m like, ‘What are you doing? How are you doing that?” he said of his interactions with his children. “We need to create opportunities for parents to feel educated and feel like they’re not beating their heads against the wall.” 

Researchers like Radesky and Hiniker agree that when it comes to technology and its effects on young people, the onus shouldn’t fall on parents. 

Hiniker said more experts like her are now exploring how platform design can support meaningful relationships within families and give power back to users, including children.

In the “Coco’s Videos” study, Hiniker observed how kids interacted with their parents after watching their videos. In the app, the character Coco reminds the child of their next activity, like sleeping, reading a book or going outside.

“I loved listening to these really sweet moments,” Hiniker recalled. “They’d say, ‘Hey, Mom, it’s time for me to go outside and you need to find my boots for me because it’s raining.’ Kids sort of understood that they’re in control, and it seemed really empowering to them.”

This design is different from our idea of parental controls, Hiniker said, but it could be our best bet in raising children who grow up to have healthy relationships with technology. 

In the end, parents may not be able to find foolproof parental control tools that can shelter their kids from the internet’s imperfections. But families can find comfort in the fact that the best control may be the one young people feel as they learn about the powers of being online – all while knowing that they have whatever support they need offline. 

The internet is a great place for families. It gives us new opportunities to discover the world, connect with others and just generally make our lives easier and more colorful. But it also comes with new challenges and complications for the people raising the next generations. Mozilla wants to help families make the best online decisions, whatever that looks like, with our latest series, The Tech Talk.

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The post Parents want to keep their kids safe online. But are parental controls the answer? appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Technology is easy to blame for the mental health crisis that kids are facing. But according to experts, it’s not that simple.

A rare public advisory from the U.S. surgeon general in December 2021 warned that young people are facing unprecedented challenges that have had a “devastating” effect on their mental health. These difficulties were already widespread before the pandemic started in 2020 — with up to 1 in 5 people in the U.S. ages 3 to 17 having a reported mental, emotional, developmental or behavioral disorder. 

We often attribute the crisis to technology, particularly social media. After all, young people today are spending much of their time glued to screens like no generation before them. One study conducted in 2021 found that teens spent 7.7 hours per day in front of screens for activities unrelated to school.

That may sound excessive, but it’s expected as more and more of life moves online for people of all ages — bringing both challenges and opportunities for younger generations. Even as technology use rises and youth mental health declines, researchers haven’t found a definitive link between social media and mental health. Instead, they’re seeing a lot of factors of modern life, including technology, that interconnect.

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What researchers are learning about social media and kids’ mental health

There’s been a lot of research on the subject over the last decade, but we still haven’t learned anything conclusive.

Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who focuses on how technology affects families and children for the Data & Society Research Institute, said studies generally show a slight negative impact of social media on people’s well-being, or none at all.

“We have this narrative about it being a negative thing, but we’re not seeing it in the data,” Lenhart said.

In a project by the Universities of Amsterdam and Tilburg, researchers have been exploring the relationship between adolescents’ social media use and their well-being. Early data from that project, Lenhart said, suggests that about 70% don’t feel any different after using social media; 19% feel a lot better; and 10% feel worse.

“I think one big takeaway is that there’s a subgroup of people for whom using these platforms is not great,” Lenhart said. More research is now focusing on identifying this group and what their experience is like.

Lenhart said results are showing a model called differential susceptibility, meaning different people can have different responses to the same platform.

For example, a child of color may have a more negative experience on a social media platform than others because he or she faces harassment. A platform could also worsen feelings of depression for someone who’s already depressed.

“It’s not that a platform always makes people feel worse or better, but that it exacerbates their highs and exacerbates their lows,” Lenhart explained.

Experts are concerned that social media platforms are designed with adults as the user in mind, grabbing their attention and keeping them scrolling. Tech companies can do a lot better with content moderation and ensuring age-appropriate and health-promoting content, said Michael Robb, who for the last 15 years has been researching the effects of media and technology on children’s development. He’s ​​currently the senior director of research at Common Sense Media, a U.S. nonprofit that advocates for internet safety for families.

“Expecting that you could iterate and iterate when you’re dealing with a sensitive population without having given real care to what’s going on developmentally can be irresponsible,” Robb said, adding that the concept of “move fast and break things” in the tech space should not be applied to children. 

Lenhart expressed the same sentiment, pointing to Snapchat’s Snapstreaks feature, which encourages two people to send each other a photo or video snap everyday to keep up a streak. 

“I think when they were built, the idea was this was going to be a really fun thing that would be a chance for people to feel connected, get people coming back every day, “ Lenhart said. “But I think they failed to realize that in particular contexts, particularly among young people, peer relationships are very important and intense.”

In some instances, the feature resulted in unproductive behavior and an obsession with making sure to keep up the streaks. People would give other people their passwords before they couldn’t send snaps when they go places without reliable internet or when they were sick.

“It became a thing that was very agitating and disturbing for a subset of young people,” Lenhart said. 

How social media affects people’s well-being could also depend by age, according to a large study conducted in the U.K. from 2011 and 2018. It identified two periods when heavy social media use predicted a drop in “life satisfaction” ratings a year later: 14-15 and 19 years old for males, and 11-13 and 19 years old for females. The inverse was also true: Lower social media use in those periods predicted an increase in life satisfaction ratings. 

The study argues that by looking at the issue in a developmental lens, research could make “much needed progress in understanding how social media use affects well-being.”

A ‘lifeline’ for many young people

During the pandemic, social media has played an outsized role among young people seeking connection and help with their mental health. 

A study from Common Sense Media found that social media and other online tools concluded that they’ve “proven to be the lifeline that many young people needed to get through this last year.”

The study surveyed 14- to 22-year-olds across the U.S. from September to November 2020. More than 85% of them went online in search of health information, 69% used mobile apps related to health issues, 47% connected with a provider online and 40% sought people experiencing similar health concerns. 

From 2018 to 2020, more teens and young adults reported relying on social media platforms for support, community and self-expression, the study found.

Social media can pose real problems among young people, especially if they’re already vulnerable, like those experiencing depression or those who come from marginalized communities, said Robb, who co-authored the report. “But many kids are also using social media and the internet to look up things related to their mental health, or look for other people who may be experiencing similar things.”

He added, “If you’re a teen who’s experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety looking for others who have had similar experiences, being able to take solace in the fact that you’re not alone, or perhaps get tips or advice or other kinds of support from others who are in your community – I don’t want to undervalue social media in those respects, because that’s the other side of the coin that I think does not get talked about quite as often.”

Tips for families

Current research suggests that there’s no clear, direct line between internet use and screen time to mental health concerns with children. Like everything in life, context matters.

“We worry a lot about how much screen time every kid is having, and there are no conclusive studies saying how much screen time exactly is good or bad,” said Melanie Pinola, who spoke to various experts in writing a guide to how and when to limit kids’ tech use for The New York Times. She now covers tech and privacy at Consumer Reports.

She noted that even the American Association of Pediatrics has changed its recommendations on screen time a couple of times.

With a new generation of people who never lived in a world without the constant presence of technology, there’s still a lot of unknowns.

“We’re always learning and trying to adapt to what we know,” Pinola said. 

How to help kids have a better internet experience

While there’s no consensus as to how, exactly, children can be raised to have a good relationship with technology, here are what families can do:

1. Be open

Lenhart suggests parents learn about online platforms and use them with their children. “Have an attitude of openness about them, remembering that even as you limit your child’s use of these platforms, you’re also potentially limiting their access to social connection, learning and relationships, because that’s where a lot of these things happen,” Lenhart said. 

She acknowledged that there’s a lot of good reasons why some platforms shouldn’t be used by children as young as 12 or 13, but Lenhart said ideally, adults should figure it out with their kids. She suggested families ask themselves: Is the platform something that you can use together, or that children can use independently?

2. Find good content

Robb noted that there’s plenty of content online, from YouTube channels to video games, that are great for younger kids. 

Common Sense Media rates movies, TV shows, books, games and other media for age appropriateness and “learning potential.” 

“The PBS Kids apps are a lifesaver,” said Lucile Vareine, who works with Mozilla’s communications team and has two young kids. “We go to the public library to research about animals we just discovered on PBS Shows.”

The Mozilla Foundation also creates a guide that analyzes the online security of different products, from mental health apps to toys and games.

3. Think of your child’s well-being outside of technology

Instead of just dialing down on children’s screen time, Robb suggests focusing on things that are essential to children’s health development. Think about whether they’re getting quality sleep, enough socialization with friends, family time and good nutrition. 

“There are lots of things that are really important that are much better supported by data in terms of kids’ mental and physical health than just how many hours of screen use,” Robb said. “I wouldn’t worry so much, if it’s an hour or three hours. I’d look over the course of the week and see, ‘Is my kid doing the things that I hoped that they would be doing?’”

4. Set boundaries

Pinola said it helps, just like with other aspects of parenting, to set some boundaries. She suggests starting slowly, like having a “no tech dinner” rule.

“When I tried that with my [16-year-old] daughter, it worked,” Pinola said. “Now, we’re actually having conversations over dinner, which is what I was used to growing up. If you start small like that, you start to introduce the feeling for kids that they can be off their devices, and there might be a better experience for them.”

5. Use parental controls with your child’s consent, but give them room to grow

Whether it’s time limits or filters, there’s a lot of tools within platforms that can be used by parents who have younger children. Lenhart recommends using these tools with your child’s knowledge, making sure they understand why you’re using them and having a plan to ease oversight.

“We need to teach them slowly but surely how to manage themselves in these spaces,” Lenhart said. “Giving them opportunities to fail with you around to help pick them back up and talk about it with is good. There can be false starts. But it’s definitely something that we have to do.”

Adults shouldn’t be surprised if their kids can go around these tools.

“Young people are much more adaptive than we would think,” Pinola said.

“When we try to limit their tech use too restrictively or try to monitor them a lot, that can be counterproductive because they are so good at [technology], they’re going to find ways to bypass whatever barriers you put,” she said. “It’s just a matter of balance between you and your child.”

The internet is a great place for families. It gives us new opportunities to discover the world, connect with others and just generally make our lives easier and more colorful. But it also comes with new challenges and complications for the people raising the next generations. Mozilla wants to help families make the best online decisions, whatever that looks like, with our latest series, The Tech Talk.

Get Firefox

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The post Kids are growing up in a very online world. What’s a concerned parent to do? appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Always check the source, then check your source’s sources

Understanding events happening halfway around the world is tricky. Heck, understanding events happening in our own communities can be hard. After all, if we can’t see events unfold before our own eyes, then how can we really know what’s real or not? 

That’s why we need to pick trustworthy news organizations that are able to send people on the ground, speak to vetted experts and produce stories that undergo a thorough fact-checking process. Another thing to consider, as journalist and fact-checking expert Kaitlyn Jakola told Mozilla: the money. Who’s funding the organization? Why do they publish certain stories?

Once you’ve decided that an organization is trustworthy, verify the web address to make sure that it’s not impersonating a real news website. 

Now onto the stories themselves: Consider the sources. “See where else these experts have been quoted before,” Jakola said. “Though keep in mind this can go both ways. There are some people who make their whole career out of making media appearances and not doing any of the work. On the other hand, you have folks like Dr. Anthony Fauci who does the work and has been trusted by journalists for decades.”

Verify videos and images 

From out-of-context media to Photoshopped images to deepfakes, unreliable photos and videos proliferate across social media. BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, who reports on disinformation, has this important advice: Look closer. In videos, zoom into billboards, street signs, license plates and other clues that could hint at whether a certain event really took place at the time and location as stated by the social media account that shared the footage. If anything looks off, take it as a sign to investigate further into the source of the video. Did the person take the video themselves? If not, where did this person get the footage?

The same goes for images. You can use reverse image lookup tools like the Search by Image or the TinEye Reverse Image add-on for Firefox. Even if it’s a real photo, make sure if it’s an image taken at the right time and location.

Remember: If it’s not from a trusted news source, don’t take anything at face value. 

Go past the headline or caption

This may be obvious but bears repeating: Read more than the headline. An article’s title doesn’t tell the whole story. Even trusted news sources write headlines meant to capture attention in crowded social media feeds, so they emphasize the most emotional or outrageous part of a story. This can be misleading, especially if you don’t read the full article. 

Going past the headline and social media caption lets you think critically about the information presented by the story. You should also check the date and the author. When was the story written? Does it have updated information? Is the author a reporter, an opinion writer or a satirist? What other stories or sources are linked to in the piece that provide more context and information?

An internet free of misinformation may be impossible, but taking a few extra steps before hitting that share button can help us get closer. 

Additional resources:

• Mozilla Foundation’s Misinfo Monday series 
• Mozilla Festival’s Misinfocon events
• Pocket collection on how to spot (and fight) Misinformation
• The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org project
• The Washington Post’s Fact Checker
• PolitiFact.com

The post How to make sure you aren’t spreading misinformation online appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

While musing over my recently published article, Why are hyperlinks blue, I was left feeling a bit blue myself. Yes, it could have been the fact that I was evacuated and Hurricane Ida was destroying my home, I’ll admit. Besides that, I was also bothered by the fact that even though I was able to determine that Mosaic was indeed the first browser to use blue hyperlinks, I was not much closer to determining why the hyperlinks themselves were blue. 

Black hyperlinks had been the standard for many years, but why the sudden shift to blue? One can assume that it is because RGB phosphorescent monitors were becoming more readily available in comparison to monotone phosphorescent monitors that could only produce one color. Okay then, with a palette of colors to choose from, why blue? Why not green? Microsoft 3.1 had used green for hyperlinks. Surely there must have been something to support or inspire Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina on April 12, 1993 to make the hyperlinks blue, but what was it?

I simply didn’t know, so I published the article anyway and hoped the internet would do as it always does: thrill in pointing out when someone is wrong, in the hope that someone would know the true answer. 

I published the first article, a hurricane destroyed my home, and now two months later I’m once again sitting in my now gutted home with the miracle of the internet once again restored, and I’m back on the case.

Sifting for the golden nugget

I found myself enjoying my morning coffee, reading through hate mail from my first article, as one does. I sifted through this dung heap as a prospector pans for gold, scanning for the faintest hint of gold to help me continue my journey to the true origin of the blue hyperlink.

Don Hopkins, or a commenter who goes by the same name, knew the answer, and pointed me towards Ben Shneiderman. In short, it is Prof. Ben Shneiderman whom we can thank for the modern blue hyperlink. At the time, however, I didn’t yet know this. I found the professor online, and contacted him, and went about my day. He so kindly reached out to me, and as he spoke, it was an epiphany – all of these disassociated pieces of applications, history and anecdotes suddenly fit together like a marvelous great puzzle. 

Below is the timeline based on our conversation, the documentation Prof. Shneiderman provided to me, and the information I had already gathered in my previous research. I hope that this all together can help prove a direct link between the work Ben Shneiderman and his graduate students were doing at the University of Maryland in the mid to late 1980s and the blue hyperlink found in Mosaic in 1993.

I’m a cyan fan

1985 – University of Maryland: Human-Computer Interaction Lab

Ben Shneiderman developed the highlighted selectable light blue link, which was implemented by graduate student Dan Ostroff. In doing so, they, as well as other students, tested many versions in controlled experiments. 

“Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user’s capacity to read and retain the content of the text… blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds and didn’t interfere with retention,” Shneiderman shared with me.

1982 – HyperTIES

Created in 1982, HyperTIES was an early hypertext authoring system, made commercial available by Cognetics Corporation. After research concluded at the University of Maryland, blue links were then built into HyperTIES. This is the first instance of a blue hyperlink. 

April 1986 – Communications of the ACM

Koved and Shneiderman published their research in Communications of the ACM, an industry magazine. 

Koved, L., & Shneiderman, B. (1986). Embedded menus: Selecting items in context. Communications of the ACM, 29(4), 312-318.

November 13-15, 1987 – The Hypertext Conference, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

At the first Hypertext conference, Ben Shniderman presented in a panel session, “User interface design for the Hyperties electronic encyclopedia.” Of the conference, Professor Shniderman wrote:

“We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which         were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.” 

July 1988 – Communications of the ACM

Ben Shneiderman’s team took on the project of producting a HyperTIES disk for the ACM called “Hypertext on Hypertext”, which contained the full text of eight papers. These papers were published in the July 1988 issue of Communications of the ACM.

The leap to Lee

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote Information Management: A Proposal, in which he discussed many topics. Of interest to the blue hyperlink, he does discuss the work being done at universities centered around human interface design, and a nod to commercial success of a product using hypertext: 

“An increasing amount of work is being done into hypermedia research at universities and commercial research labs, and some commercial systems have resulted. There have been two conferences, Hypertext ’87 and ’88, and in Washington DC, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NST) hosted a workshop on standardisation in hypertext, a followup of which will occur during 1990.

The Communications of the ACM special issue on Hypertext contains many references to hypertext papers. A bibliography on hypertext is given in [NIST90], and a uucp newsgroup alt.hypertext exists. I do not, therefore, give a list here.

Much of the academic research is into the human interface side of browsing through a complex information space. Problems addressed are those of making navigation easy, and avoiding a feeling of being “lost in hyperspace”. Whilst the results of the research are interesting, many users at CERN will be accessing the system using primitive terminals, and so advanced window styles are not so important for us now.”

While still an assumption, it is a fair assumption that Tim Berners-Lee was aware of the blue highlight hyperlink color because he was aware of “research at universities”, “Hypertext ‘87”, and the “ACM special issue on Hypertext,” all instances where the blue highlight color research was presented. Berners-Lee did mention that the “results of the research are interesting.” It is also interesting to note that WWW, the browser he was creating at the time, did not use blue hyperlinks. 

January 16-18, 1990 – Hypertext Standardization Workshop 

Tim Berners-Lee, as well as many others, participated in the hypertext standardization workshop, yet there was no mention of the use of color to denote hypertext in the report. However, readability of hypertext was identified as a research objective in the workshop report (PDF).

“​​Measuring hypertext “readability.” … Hypertext extensions to readability metrics might include measures of the “goodness” of links based on similarity between linked units. Readability measures for alternative hypertext designs for the same text will go far toward making hypertext design an engineering discipline.” (Page 35)

August 1990 – Dynamic Characteristics of Hypertext

Following up on the workshop, I assume this is the resulting paper (PDF) to come out of the hypertext standardization workshop. Published by Richard Furuta & P. David Stotts, this paper argues that dynamic characteristics of hypertext are required to achieve hypertext’s true purpose. In the excerpt below we can see the authors discuss color’s role in hypertex, and the foundations of active, visited and focused states:

“Dynamic representation of context may also be useful. For example, consider the representation of an anchor that changes over time. The anchor may be represented by a highlighted region whose color, size, or location changes over time to draw more attention to itself. Alternatively, the anchor might be represented by a small animation.” – Page 2

Blue’s clues

In the late 1980s, industry workshops and conferences brought people together to share ideas, discuss trends and standardize ways of making the web work. What are the results of this sharing of knowledge? Well, hypertext starts to turn blue. At the time, hypertext was more than what we now know as hyperlinks, but also included user interface elements such as the close icon, navigating back and forth between sections, and printing. As we see above, there were arguments from industry leaders to make hypertext dynamic, so active states must be included as well. 

October 21, 1991 – Macintosh System 7

Apple began adding hints of blue to icons and text background when selected. 

April 6, 1992 – Windows 3.1

Microsoft began using blue for interactions to “highlight” text when selected.

1992 – HyperTIES

Created for the HP LaserJet4 User Manual, even using HyperTies creators began using the darker blue hyperlink on a button as well as the light blue (cyan) for hyperlinks.

December 1992 – Framaker 3.0 (Windows Version)

Framemaker was created for making and maintaining large documents, and is also the first instance I uncovered of the dark blue hyperlink. In 1992, not all versions were in color, but Framemaker v3.0 for Windows did support color monitors. Huge shoutout to Dan Connolly for letting me know about this application, and to a colleague of mine for opening it in an emulator to get this screenshot.

On Wednesdays we wear blue

So what inspired the blue links in Mosaic; whose blue hyperlinks went on to set the industry standard we are following even today? Well, we do know that Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina were inspired by ViolaWWW and decided to create Mosaic after seeing it. Perhaps they were aware of the same inspirations and research as Tim Berners-Lee, or they simply saw the blue trend happening in their industry.

In truth, it doesn’t matter what specific application or article inspired them. The decision to make hyperlinks blue in Mosaic, and the reason why we see it happening in Cello at the same time, is that by 1993, blue was becoming the industry standard for interaction for hypertext. It had been eight years since the initial research on blue as a hyperlink color. This data had been shared, presented at conferences, and printed in industry magazines. Hypertext went on to be discussed in multiple forums. Diverse teams’ research came to the same conclusion – color mattered. If it didn’t inspire Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina directly, it inspired those around them and those in their industry. We can see evidence of this inspiration by looking at the work of Macintosh, Microsoft, HyperTIES, LaserJet, Framemaker and Cello. These companies and products created work before or during Mosaic, and all use blue hyperlinks, selection colors or blue typography. Though this was still a time of experimentation, the visual language of blue for interaction was beginning to be defined years before Mosaic was created. 

I love knowing that the original blue was chosen with care and through testing, that this research and knowledge was shared through a community, and that the spirit of open source sharing still lives on here at Mozilla. I am very thankful to the developer community for their comments which led me to the right people so that I could find the answer to this question which has long plagued my mind and the minds of countless others. I hope that we continue to choose to use the internet as a place for good and communication, and that we use blue hyperlinks to connect with and help one another. 

After Publication

Updated January 12, 2022

After publishing the article, Ben Shneiderman and I continued to connect, in which he informed me that Lee and himself were colleagues who connected several times.

Shneiderman informed me that Lee had cited his work from the ACM for the Macintosh or PC, and that Lee had used the idea of light blue links from Shneiderman’s work. From this we can infer that the blue hyperlink was indeed inspired by the research done at the University of Maryland.

Also, from the comments on my first article, Why Hyperlinks are Blue, the user SeanLuke found bug fixes for WorldWildWeb on the NeXT that hinted at color support as early as 1991.

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Since then, there have been countless discussions about how people have fared with keeping in touch with others during the COVID-19 pandemic — like how families have endured while being separated by continents without the option to travel, and how once solid friendships have waxed and waned without brunches and cocktail hours. 

However, the internet has served more like a proverbial town square than ever before, with many having found themselves using online spaces to create and cultivate internet friends more over the last year and a half than ever before. As the country starts hesitantly opening, the looming question overall is, what will these online relationships look like when COVID-19 is no more? 

 For Will F. Coakley, a deputy constable from Austin, Texas, the highs of her online friend groups she made on Zoom and Marco Polo have already dissipated. 

“My COVID circle is no more,” she said. “I’m 38, so people my age often have spouses and children.” 

Coakley found online platforms to be a refreshing reprieve from her demanding profession that served at the frontlines of the pandemic. Just as she was getting accustomed to ‘the new normal,’ her routines once again changed, with many online friends falling out of touch as cities and towns began to experiment with opening. 

Coakley has not met anyone from her COVID circle in person, and any further communication is uncertain, boding even worse than the potential dissolutions of real-life friendships reported on throughout the year. 

“In a perfect world, we would hope that things opening up would mean that you could start to meet up with your online friends in person. However, many people will experience a transition in their social circle as they start allocating more of their emotional resources to in-person interactions.” said Kyler Shumway, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and author of The Friendship Formula: How to Say Goodbye to Loneliness and Discover Deeper Connection. “You may spend less time with your online people and more time with coworkers, friends, and family that are in your immediate area.” 

Looking back, many social apps themselves similarly spiked during the time of the lockdown and are now seeing use fall. The invite-only, social networking app Clubhouse launched in March 2020. It quickly gained popularity amid the height of the pandemic, having amassed 600,000 registered users by December 2020 and 8.1 million downloads by mid- February 2021.

The original fervor over Clubhouse has waned as fewer people are cooped up indoors. While many people still use the platform for various professional purposes or niche hobbies, its day-to-day usership has dropped significantly. 

Olivia B. Othman, 38, a Project Assistant in Wuppertal, Germany developed friendships online during the pandemic through Clubhouse as well as through a local app called Spontacts. She has been able to meet people in person as her area has begun to open and said she found the experience to be liberating.

While Othman already had experience with developing close personal relationships online, the pandemic prompted a unique perspective for her, encouraging her to invest in new devices for better communication.

Overall, she has fared well with sustaining her online friendships. 

“I have dropped some [people] but also found good people among them,” Othman said.

Othman wasn’t alone in turning to apps for friendship and human connection. Facebook and Instagram were among the most downloaded apps in 2020, according to the Business of Apps.  Facebook had 2.85 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2021, compared to 2.60 billion during the first quarter of 2020. While Instagram went from 1 billion monthly active users in the first quarter of 2020 to 1.07 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2021. And Twitter grew from 186 million users to 199 million users since the pandemic started, according to Twitter’s first quarter earnings report..

Apps such as TikTok and YouTube were popular outlets for creating online friendship in 2020; however, their potential for replicating the emotional fulfillment that comes from interpersonal relationships is limited, as Shumway said, “the unmet need remains unmet.”  

“Many online spaces offer synthetic connections. Instead of spending time with a friend playing a game online or going out to grab coffee, a person might be tempted to watch one of their favorite Youtubers or scroll through TikTok for hours on end,” Shumway said. “These kinds of resources provide a felt sense of relationship – you feel like you’re part of something. But then when you turn off your screen, those feelings of loneliness will come right back.”

“Relationships that may have formed over the past year through online interactions, my sense is that those will continue to last even as people start to reconnect in person. Online friendships have their limits, but they are friendships nonetheless,” Shumway said. 

Zach Fox, 29, a software engineer has maintained long-distance friendships thanks in large part to online gaming, an important social connection that carried on from before the pandemic. 

“We would text chat with each other most of the time, and use voice chat when playing video games together,” he said.

While he is excited about seeing friends and family again as restrictions lift, Fox feels his online friendships just as strong. 

“I feel closer to some of my online friends than I do to some of my ‘offline’ friends,” he said. “With several exceptions, such as my relationship with my fiancée, I tend to favor online friendships because I have the opportunity to be present with and spend quality time with my online friends more often than I can spend time with IRL friends.”

Ultimately, many are finding less anxiousness and more excitement in the prospect of returning to the real world, even if some interaction may be awkward. Both Coakley and Othman stated they favored in-person meetings to online interactions, despite having enjoyed the times they had with many online friends.

“As you make these choices, make sure to communicate openly and honestly. Rather than letting a friendship slowly decay through ghosting, consider being real and explaining to them what is happening for you. You might share that you are spending more time with people in person and that you have less energy for online time with them,” Shumway said.  

As things change Coakley has found other connections to keep herself grounded. Her mental health team comprises a counselor she has sessions with online but has only met in person once. She admitted to being more enthusiastic about her counselor who she meets with in person regularly. 

“I hate having a screen between them and me. It’s more intimate and a shared experience in person,” she said.

Despite not keeping up with her pandemic friends, Coakley does have other online friends that she knew before the pandemic with whom she has close connections. 

“At the very least, my [online] connections with [folks and with] Black women have developed into actual friendships, and we have plans on meeting in person,” she said. “We’ve become an integral part of each other’s lives. Like family, almost.”

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