'You may well have seen news and social media posts about ‘Blue Whale’, the posts urge you to share to protect young people from a viral suicide game.

The ‘Blue Whale’ story is a hoax, or fake news, something which is permeating almost every news area recently...'

This article is produced by Penny Patterson at Havering Education Services explores and explains how the online and paper media exploit parents' fears about the potential dangers of social media.

All parents and adults who work with young people should take a few minutes to read this.

Download the document here

Further reading

here

and

here is a Buzzfeed investigative article on the subject.

This Safer Internet Day we want to empower children to have a positive time online and inspire everyone to ‘Be the change’ and use the positive power of image to help create a better internet. As part of this we are running a national youth photography campaign exploring the power of images in digital youth culture.

Get involved

Keeping Instagram Safe
Instagram, like many social media platforms, isn't immune to ill-intentioned trolling, hate messages, occasional spam comments or worse: full-scale cyber bullying.
"Since the beginning of Instagram, we have focused on making it a welcoming place for everyone," wrote Kevin Systrom, Instagram's chief executive, in a blog post announcing the updates.
Previously, users were limited to deleting comments only after they were made, but Instagram recently appended this and implemented a comment filtration system that automatically sandblasted comments containing certain keywords that users preferred not to see on their comments section.
Since majority of in-app conversations occur on the comments section of each Instagram post, it's only logical for Instagram to fine-tune its control options further.
Instagram has now introduced a feature that turns off comments altogether, slated to roll out "in a few weeks."

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This week Instagram announced three new tools which give users more control over their profiles. These tools allow users to control comments on their posts, edit follower lists on private accounts and anonymously report when they think their friends need help.

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Organisations including the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions will be able to see UK citizen's entire internet browsing history in weeks.

The Investigatory Powers Bill, which was all but passed into law this week, forces internet providers to keep a full list of Internet Connection Records (ICRs) for a year, and make them available to the government if it asks. Those ICRs effectively serve as a full list of every website that people have visited, not collecting which specific pages are visited or what's done on them but serving as a full list of every site that someone has visited and when.

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One in three internet users between the ages of 12 and 15 say they saw "hate speech" online in the past year, according to Ofcom's latest survey of children's media habits.
It is the first time the UK regulator has posed a question about the topic in its annual study.
The NSPCC charity said the finding was "very worrying", adding such posts should not be tolerated.

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