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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Parents/Carers News

12 May 2017

A mother faces paying more than £20,000 in damages to a school governor in a landmark libel case over comments allegedly posted on her private Facebook page.

A spokesman for Ms Smith said: “The message which prompted the case was only meant to be sent to a close friend. However, it ended up being posted to all her friends — clearly showing the potential pitfalls of Facebook.”

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11 May 2017

 

'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.

15 December 2016

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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24 November 2016

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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