There has been a rash of irresponsible decisions by parents and national media in forcing national exposure on children who are clearly below an age for any reasonable definition of consent. An oft-stated argument is that the exposure was about “something with which there is nothing wrong” and therefore exposure is okay.

That is wrong and a dangerous view of privacy. I think every adult can ponder this for 60 seconds and come up with parts of their life with which there is “nothing wrong” but they would not want subjected to national exposure.

Further, that view gravely misunderstands privacy and the right to consent.  Privacy is not something to be granted only if you prove you deserve it; on the contrary, there should be a strong reason to violate it.

Finally, privacy is contextual and different levels of exposure are not the same thing. Being a transgendered kid in a school is a significantly different experience than having national media articles about your transgendered experience as a six-year-old be the defining features of your online presence.

An example that particularly outraged me was the Time magazine cover last year that showed a mom shown breastfeeding her almost-four-year old kid –in a very unnatural position set up to maximize exposure—with her name printed on the cover–and the kid looking directly into the camera, along with the awful headline “Are you Mom Enough?”

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with breastfeeding a kid that age—though, historically speaking many cultures wean children around two or three years of age. Women want to breastfeed in public? That’s fine too, and if anyone is disturbed they can look away. It’s their problem. Time Magazine wants to do a story on lengthier than usual breastfeeding? Go right ahead–and please talk about lack of maternity leave for new parents (US is the worst among most developed nations) which makes it hard for most women to breastfeed at all.

But when a four year old is asked to stand on a stool –a very weird set-up pretending to be about attachment parenting but is all about the photograph– and look directly to the camera and be on the cover of a national magazine, you have to discuss the issue of consent by children.

While consent can be tricky at times, in cases like this, it’s not. A four year-old cannot understand the concept of national exposure, let alone consent to it. And the media should not override that child’s privacy interests without a very strong reason balanced by that child’s best interests. Let’s not manufacture “controversy” when there should be none, and let’s not pretend a ploy to grab attention is actually about parenting, or that child’s own best interests.

A more recent, but more nuanced, case was the story of a transgender child who was named and photographed in a profile by the New York Times. The NYT public editor, Margaret Sullivan wrote on her blog that the decision to name the child was made because “parental approval, along with the child’s own willingness, should rule the day” and that since either was nothing wrong with being transgender, there were no “privacy concerns” to balance in this case.

First, that young a child’s willingness is meaningless and invoking it is irresponsible. And parents do not own their children’s consent, they are merely entrusted with it–which means that children’s best interests need to be considered.

Second, the idea that if there is nothing wrong with something therefore there are no issues of privacy regarding that topic is probably the most dangerous misunderstanding about privacy out there. Let’s explore both.

First on consent by children: my research means that I mostly talk with and survey two age groups—middle schoolers and college students. I find that it’s hard for even those age groups –much much older than the preschoolers and elementary school kids we are talking about here– to understand national exposure, or to deal with consequences of such decisions. With college students, obviously, we assume that they are young adults–even there, we still need to do a lot more to educate them as they, too, struggle deal with the ramifications of privacy in a networked world where exposure can get out of control much quicker and in hard-to-anticipate manner.  Middle schoolers, on the other hand, often have little thought of exposure beyond their peer groups and also find it difficult to conceptualize the life-transitions that they may go through. (Has everyone really forgotten what it is like to be that age?)

Preschoolers consenting to national exposure? Heck, as sociologist Kieran Healy said in a tweet replying to me, a six year old will consent to most anything if you promise them ice cream.  I am aghast that this is not obvious. They cannot understand the concept of national exposure.

@techsoc @sulliview Really? That’s ridiculous, considering what my 5 year old would agree to if he thought he might get some ice cream.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) March 20, 2013

 

As children get older, their ability consent and understanding grows and one starts entering gray areas and societally, we draw an arbitrary line around that gray area and declare eighteen to be adult. I understand that a teenager may decide to choose national exposure–and sometimes such issues can get tricky. I am not at all advocating that trans or queer kids hide –in fact, I’m all for making their schooling experience, as much as possible, separated from their experience of gender tensions.

Second, let’s get to the question of that erroneous understanding of privacy: “if there is nothing wrong with X, then there are no considerations of privacy of exposure.” Put in your favorite X here: breastfeeding, transgender children, who your friends are on Facebook, what movies you like or hate…

Privacy and exposure and contextual variables and are not about secrets from everyone but about your integrity as a person and your right to share information about yourself on your own terms. (Hellen Nissenbaum’s “Privacy in Context” and Daniel J. Solove’s “Nothing to Hide” are two great primers on this topic). The opposite of “secret” or “shameful” is not “national exposure is okay.” Who in any position of power applies that principle to everything about their own lives? How can we justify forcing that view of privacy on children?

There are a lot of complex issues to deal with here—for example, what right do other parties to a social interaction have to reveal its contents? When is an otherwise private matter of public concern? What should consensual privacy decisions look like and how do we deal with violations? How can we education children and young adults who are struggling with these issues? But then there are other issues on which we can draw clearer lines.

Let me give a deliberately provocative example: child sexuality. If you read any research or talk to any preschool teacher, you find that it is normal and fairly common for very young children to have an emergent sense of sexuality. They ask questions, they explore, they touch, they feel. There is nothing wrong with this if kids are allowed to be kids and not drawn into dealing with this on adult terms or be subjected to adult manipulations. Can we or should we nationally expose any one child’s emergent sexuality for adult consumption because there is nothing wrong with it per se?  No, no, no.

So, let’s get back to the case of this transgender child. I applaud her parents for advocating for her. As they have already found out, this can be difficult for children to navigate. Schools should try to help all children feel welcome and to destigmatize the spectrum of human experience.  That age group (like middle-schoolers) often goes through a heightened gender-stereotype period (which comes up in my research) where they become overly-rigidly attached to gender categories in ways they will likely grow out of (the attack of the princess period, the crazy overdone makeup of middle schoolers, etc.)

In the case of this child, though, per parents advocating for her does not mean she has consented to be a “quite literally, the poster child” for this issue. We do not know if she will grow up preferring to not be known as having transitioned to another gender. Maybe she’ll change her mind. It happens and we should give her the space to do so (the definition of freedom, no?) which is obviously harder as a “poster child” with national exposure. Maybe she’ll really prefer not to have this issue define her middle and high school experience (which, barring a name change, her parents have all but guaranteed). Maybe she will want to be a poster child in her own terms. I don’t know, you don’ know, and neither do the parents.

This clearly calls for erring on the side of caution–and the best interest of the child is the space to make her decisions on her own terms, not under a crushing media spotlight.

How about kids with Down Syndrome or autism, asks Margaret Sullivan’s piece. It’s a similar issue but there are obviously differences. For one thing, both of those are more visible differences so a child often does not have a choice on whether their peers know their atypical attributes. On the other hand, a transgendered child may have an experience where many of her peers approach her without that issue in the foreground at all. Further, of course parents of kids with disabilities and media should consider if their kids can consent to be “poster children” for their circumstances. It will dramatically impact their experience growing up in this networked environment. The answer is not an automatic yes.

So, here are some thoughts on how to approach this topic:

1- Is the name and photo of the child essential to the story? If not, please consider caution to be prudent.

2- Is the child too young to appreciate national exposure and therefore cannot consent?  If yes, please assume no consent and ask the next question. (Should be obvious that preschoolers cannot consent and I’d argue that anyone below middle school should be“no consent” and be evaluated case-by-case after that age.)

3–Is there a very specific, tangible and important benefit to the child from the exposure that cannot be gained without the name and the photo? (Surely, the same article can be written without the name or the photo of the kid in this case, no?).  For example, a kidnapped child and an “amber alert” clearly fit into this category. Plastering the kid’s photo on the national news might save the kids life so, yes, let’s do that. But, always, we should also ask the last question:

4-Can we reasonably assume circumstances that the child grows up and wishes the exposure never happened? If yes, can we consider this again?

As a final note, I do know that The New York Times argues that “Katie Couric did it first” by having the parents and the child on the show. Well, that was clearly wrong of the parents and the Katie Couric show–but that doesn’t make subsequent exposures okay. In any case, I wrote more to make the principles explicit than judge which exposure was worst or who gets the most blame.

Finally, I really wish that parents, editors of national media, highly-visible websites, and anyone who feels that it is their prerogative to push this level of exposure on children would recognize that its heart, this is an exercise of power over a vulnerable individual. There may be cases in which there is good reason to do so but “the six-year old child consented” and “there’s nothing wrong with the thing being exposed” are not good reasons.

I end with Khalil Gibran’s timeless poem “On Children.”

On Children

Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A common complaint about online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is that errors and rumors propagate too easily. For example, Andy Carvin’s recent book A Distant Witness has striking examples from the Arab uprisings of 2011–and documents his extensive efforts to counter and quelch them. It’s certainly important for some people to actively play the role of fact-checkers but a lot of the errors are honest mistakes made by a wide variety of people. I’ve written previously on comparing structural sources of error in traditional journalism with social media environments and there is a lot to be done at the institutional and individual level. But that is never the whole picture. We should also be thinking about the role of design of online platforms on how to counter, correct and halt the spread of errors.

Of course, the way errors propagate (or don’t) also depends on the composition of your social network—as I discovered within seconds after I sent out an erroneous piece of information on Twitter about the new Pope:

I had corrections pouring in almost within seconds. To be honest, it was a careless mistake. I apologize. I was correcting proofs of a peer-reviewed article of mine using a restricted version of Adobe–and I was frustrated. I turned to the excellent “The Lede” section of the New York Times to see how they were covering the announcement of the new Pope. The event seemed like a clear example of a “Media Event” –spectacles performed to be consumed by (often global) publics such as the Olympics, royal weddings, etc. which were first explored by the classic book by Dayan & Katz.

The naming of the Pope had clearly become a global media event but now with the addition of social media to its shaping—most everyone on my Twitter timeline (ranging from Egyptian revolutionaries to Turkish students to academics to journalists) was either talking about it or complaining about why others were talking about it. Almost all worldwide trending topics were about the papal transition. The new Pope-to-be had captivated that crucial, scarce resource: attention.

And then the Pope was announced and immediately, The Lede posted that there was a personal twitter account of the new Pope.  The new Pope’s speech had just mentioned new communication technologies. Robert Mackey, who runs the Lede, is a journalist experienced in using social media and has always been very keen on figuring out false information out there so I started with trusting the information.  It all seemed plausible in my less-than-fully careful state. I glanced over to the alleged account, translated a few of the tweets and put out the aforementioned erroneous tweet and decided that it was about time I returned to wrestling with Adobe.

Of course, as you can see above, my tweeps jumped to correct my careless mistake. I think I had dozens of people within two minutes. (I take this as a compliment to my own efforts to engage with careful, sharp people on social media!) In fact, I have seen this happen many times—Twitter may make it easy for errors to propagate but it also makes the corrections easy to propagate. The process of correction can often be much faster than traditional journalism where major errors –reporting on Iraq’s non-existent stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction—persist for years and only be corrected after it’s all too late.

Of course, I quickly corrected my error as did The Lede and as did Robert Mackey on Twitter. The problem, remained, though, with the original tweet.  It was still there and I started pondering what to do about it.

Here are my options as Twitter design currently affords:

1- I can delete the erroneous tweet. That would also “disappear” the retweets but it would not alert the retweeters that I had deleted it. How would they know something in their past timeline was now gone? It would be an unknown unknown to them—they wouldn’t know that they don’t know I corrected it. It would also disappear the record of my error—not a big deal in my case but there is reason to think that keeping a record of errors is healthier for journalism.

2- I can keep issuing corrections in the hopes that everyone who retweeted my original tweet will see it. Odds of success? My experiments say very little. People dip in and out of streams so corrections don’t always get seen.

3-I can “mention” everyone who retweeted my erroneous tweet—poke them in the eye with the correction, so to speak. I can also urge them to “retweet” my correction so that their network who saw the error in their own timeline can also see the correction.

However, even as I was thinking all of this (and discussing it on Twitter) more and more people were retweeting my original tweet.  Not only were tweeps not seeing my correction, they were somehow seeing my error, untouched, and not noticing the many, many comments under it correcting it.

Here’s why it’s useful to think about how design and “affordances” –what design allows, makes easy, makes hard, facilitates and inhibits—influence our social processes.  Twitter makes it easy for errors to propagate and also makes it easy for people to challenge errors. But it does not make it easy to correct honest mistakes one makes and wishes to correct.

What would such an affordance—a new feature—look like?

Here’s one suggestion.

First, it has to make sure the “error” is clearly marked as error–which is why Alexis Madrigal put a huge “fake” or “real” or “unverified” in bold colors in of photos he was verifying or debunking during Hurricane Sandy: just the existence of the photo in a high-profile outlet can help propagate the error even if the text says the photo is fake unless the world “fake” and the photo are inextricably intertwined:

Second, it has to be a push mechanism.  Pushing content to people is tricky business but there is no iron law that it cannot be done—but it is certainly open to abuse.  Issues of consent certainly matter and I think it is perfectly justified for Twitter to assume following someone PLUS retweeting their content as implied consent to the occasional, simple correction by the originator.

Third, it has to be straightforward and limited so it does not become a way to push spam or other unwanted content or to repush a message.

So, I suggest Twitter lets me push the same tweet but now visibly slapped with one of three simple labels on it: “ERROR”, “RETRACTED” or “SORRY” nothing more.  There should be a limit to how often you can do this (Only one per hour?). It should go to every person who retweeted the original message based on the assumption that if they are interested enough to retweet, they should be interested enough in the correction.

So, I want something like this to be shown to everyone who retweeted the original message, as well as this appearing on the original tweet itself:

Why not? Twitter already pushes promoted content, and it has made many design changes over the years. It has incorporated many innovations that were pioneered by users into its  platform–that’s how we got the native retweet in the first place. This one could significantly help Twitter’s reliability as a platform—and given its key role in breaking news and a place for citizen journalism, it would be a healthy move.