White Paper: 'Moderation in Social Networks' updated

When we published our last white paper  'Moderation in Social Networks'  in February this year, we had planned to update it as and when new developments in the social networks occurred.  We hadn't necessarily planned on having to do two updates within three months, but recent changes (primarily Facebook's privacy settings, its publication of Community Pages and the recent argument between CEOP and Facebook over the implementation of a panic button) have called for a slight rewrite.  The third version of 'Moderation in Social Networks' can be downloaded for free, and please let us know by emailing tia@emoderation.com if you have any information we should include in the next update.

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Crisp Thinking Now Offering Automated Moderation for Games in 8 Languages

We're really pleased to help spread the news that our technology partner Crisp Thinking is now offering support in eight languages for its NetModerator service for games, virtual worlds and social networks.


The service allows companies with online communities to use a single management and control system to analyze the behavior of players to improve user experience while reducing company moderation costs.  Crisp’s multi-language capabilities now include popular European languages such as French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Russian. Language capability will soon be expanded further with the release of Asian languages such as Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean.

To give an idea of the need for such a multilingual tool, in this week alone eModeration staff are working in thirty different languages across eleven timezones.

The Crisp system provides automated, real-time management control of online interactions between players by reading, analyzing and reporting inappropriate as well as escalating communication issues taking place in-game activities for intervention.  Installations can be customized with different rule sets for each language and specific behaviors customers wish to have reviewed. With NetModerator, the need for live intervention by customer service representatives on low-level issues can be reduced by up to 80 percent.  Moderators are freed up to deal with incidents requiring higher-level analysis and decisions.

“With the explosive growth of online communities, studios cannot rely solely on manual moderation. This is especially true when dealing with multiple languages. NetModerator helps customers scale their communities across territories whilst providing the most effective tool for user management,” said Adam Hildreth, CEO, Crisp.  “NetModerator is the only proven system that provides companies a way to offer effective user management in both single language communities and communities where users may speak multiple languages.”

Supported languages include:

• English (U.S.)
• English (U.K.)
• French
• German
• Italian
• Spanish
• Dutch
• Portuguese
• Russian

Full details of Crisp Thinking’s NetModerator can be found at http://www.crispthinking.com/technology.htm.

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Twitter profiles and the three second rule

What do you think makes a good Twitter profile? What makes you want to follow back? And what has you reaching for the bucket?

Most mornings, sometime between about 10am - 11am, I'll start clicking through to see who my new Twitter followers are. I guess I'm aiming to give each profile a three second glance - then if it looks of interest, I may click through to the website, follow, put them in a list, send them a welcome tweet, even forward their details to other people who make want to follow them too - which all takes a lot longer. But essentially, a Twitter profile has that three second window to capture my interest. I'm not being snobbish, or overly discerning - I'm just busy, and I don't get enough time to read the many interesting people I follow at the moment.

I tweet for work (this is very important) and I'm British. (So is this. There are appear to be enormous cultural differences on Twitter). So ... for me, here are some profile no-no's:

• Purely personal Twitter profiles are out. I need to know what company and, hopefully, website and blog you are associated with.
• Obviously stock-shot photographic backgrounds
• Great big customised extra information splashed about ME! ME! ME! and MY BUSINESS WHICH COULD MAKE YOU MONEY ON THE INTERNET!
• I need a decent picture - not soft porn, preferably not a cheeeeeeesy studio portrait. If it's a bit quirky, that's good.
• If you call yourself a guru or a social media expert, I'm gone. I don't much like entrepreneur either. And if you describe yourself as making your money from social media I suspect you barely scrape a living and probably upset a lot of people in the process. Harsh, but true.
• If you are a company logo, please tell me who is doing the tweeting - if several people do, please initial your tweets. I can't form a relationship with a logo.
• Don't boast. And some self-depreciative humour goes down well with this cynical Brit.
• Mentioning your family at the end of your business description is fine. In fact it's good. I'm less keen to know your golf handicap, but that's just me.

And of course, I'll look at some recent tweets to see what kind of interest/education/amusement you can offer. These will turn me off immediately:

• Pithy sayings by the famous
• Pithy saying by the unknown
• Song Lyrics
• Everything In Initial Caps And Worse If It's Not Even The Title Of An Article.
• Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
• All conversations between friends which I don't understand and am not interested in. And conversely, no conversation. The best Tweeters have a mixture of conversational starters, passing on information and gnomic responses to 'friends'.
• Dodgy punctuation!!!!!! Andpeeple who cant spelll 2

I'm really conscious that I'm standing in a great big glass house now (or should that be birdcage?), and you can come and throw great big stones at my profile if you like: I expect I deserve it. Even worse, I really wanted to post up some choice profiles to illustrate my points (oh, I have some beauties). But that would be mean and nasty to actual people, so I've had to restrain myself.  It would be great to hear what turns you off Tweeters though - and maybe you'll feel more able to share some of the goodies in your intray?

Image: Duane Hoffmann / msnbc.com
  

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IWF 2009 report reveals 'brands' selling child abuse images online

The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) today published its Annual Report 2009, revealing the existence of at least 450 distinct criminal ‘brands’ selling images and videos of the sexual abuse of children, worldwide.



The ten most prolific ‘brands’ alone account for more than 650 unique web pages. By removing and disrupting these ‘gateway’ pages the Foundation is helping to disable access to many thousands of images as well as the membership and payment systems which support this horrific trade.

Content distributers use increasingly complex systems to evade detection, moving their distribution networks regularly between hosting providers and countries, with 92% of content hosted in those areas with advanced, cheap and accessible internet infrastructures and services (North America, Europe and Russia).

The severity of the content dealt with by the IWF is extremely serious: 72% of child victims appearing to be between 0 and 10 years old and 44% of images depicting the rape or sexual torture of a child.

The Foundation is planning to widen its links to the internet industry around the world, in partnership with Hotlines and law enforcement agencies, in order to speed up the removal of child sexual abuse images hosted outside the UK.

In 2009:

• The IWF assessed 38,173 reports of online content;

•  It took further action on 8,844 occasions against web pages depicting child sexual abuse content, across 1,316 websites around the world;

• 48% of all child sexual abuse content reports processed (commercial and non-commercial) were traced to networks in North America; 44% to Europe and Russia;

•  IWF issued 40 notices to companies to remove child sexual abuse content in the UK

Your can read the IWF 2009 report in full here.

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Tamara Littleton speaking at Social Media in Business

Just to let you know that on 21st May 2010, I'll be in Richmond, London, speaking at the Social Media in Business Conference.  The theme for 2010 is Community Relations 2.0.

Billing itself as an an agile progressive Web 2.0 style conference (where the conversation  and interaction begins well before the event day, and continues long after), the conference examines how social media culture and social networking platforms are having a major impact on business communication, practices and processes.

How can these tools be utilised, how can you employ strategies within your company to increase profitability, sustain reputation and empower your employees to be brand ambassadors? Indeed should you employ internal social networks within your own organisation as a means of facilitating a sharing community amongst your employees, or should you use public open platforms?

 The conference aims to provide an outstanding and in-depth educational experience.  The speaker list is certainly impressive, including representatives from Facebook, Paypal, Gumtree, Sun Microsystems - and of course I'll be adding my insights too.


I'll be talking about 'The Rules of Engagement':  Engaging with consumers through social media platforms is far from a one-size-fits-all solution. How you should participate will vary according to your aims, resources and audience, but in order to really develop a community, you will need dedicated resources and support from within your organisation ...

We've got a promo code: pop in smibemod when booking to get 15% off ticket price.  It looks like being a really good neworking event, as well as potentially very informative.  If you're planning on being there, do tweet me @tlittleton, and we'll try to meet up.

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Formspring. Why do teens engage with the latest hub of cyberbullying?

Have you heard of Formspring.me?  It only came to my attention last week , but suddenly, in the way the internet does, I am tripping over articles about it.  For those as yet blissfully unaware, Formspring.me, founded in Nov 2009 by survey company Formstack,  is a site which enables questions to be posted to members, with the choice of anonymity.  Members have an in-box, choose which questions to answer, and post the Q&A.  Only when they are answered do the questions become public.   Formsping (now of course a verb - "Hey, let's formspring Alice!") links with your Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook account to  invite questions and publish answers among a wider audience.

I guess predictably, the site has proved virally popular amongst teens.  As danah boyd and Anne Collier  point out in their thoughtful articles on the topic, quizzes and questionnaires have long been a rite of adolescent passage - Jackie magazine c. 1976: "Are you a faithful friend? Take this test to find out", 90's email chainletters with '10 Things you Didn't Know about Me'.

And equally predictably, Formspring has become a hub of cyberbullying, allegedly contributing to one teen suicide and with a host of shocked and anguished parents calling out for the site to be banned from school networks.

"Social banter isn't what makes Formspring particularly interesting or controversial.  There are also plenty of anonymous sexual innuendos like "you're cute" or "will you go out with me" questions, followed by "who is this?" as the answer.  There are also many more explicit versions of this, with some bordering on sexual harassment.  There are also anonymous posts that ring of bullying or harassment, from the relatively painless "you're fat" to the more crass "fuck you slut."  Finally, there are the ones that invite the participant to talk about a third party, often by full name (e.g., "don't you hate Kristen?").  Now, keep in mind that only questions that are answered are posted and participants have a choice in what they decide to answer.  So when you see crass questions followed by answers, the participant chose to answer the question and post it.  I don't even want to imagine the questions that they receive and don't answer..." (danah boyd)

Teens are posting obscene or offensive questions, and they are being answered: self-humiliating Q&As posted  to a publicly visible page associated with their real name.  Some of the answers to the anonymous questions suggest that the respondents actually  know who is asking them. Why are the young people participating? Why are they replying?

danah boyd speculates that it may be a 'truth or dare' scenario:

"Teen girls engaged in responding to crass questions are using Formspring to prove that they're tough to their peers.  Teen boys and girls are throwing curve balls at their peers to see how much they can handle, primarily using mean-spirited and sexualized language.  While staying tough is clearly part of the game, it's also clear from my informants that the harassment is playing a psychological toll."

My take out from the Formspring craze is less outrage at the site's existence, or even danah's distressed question of why teens feel they have to act tough and 'take it on the chin' (I was a teen: nothing has changed),  but the question of the rise in young people's  tolerance towards crass, bullying and abusive behaviour online, which Anne Collier mentions in her article in NetFamilyNews :

"I recently heard from a friend and middle school teacher about the school principal thoughtfully sending a letter of warning about Formspring out to parents. The teacher emailed me, “I’m struck by the fact that adults still see this largely as a ’site’ issue and not a behavior issue. We can ’tilt at windmills’ and try to take on all the ‘offensive sites’ offline, or we can educate our students on how to advocate for themselves as well as develop citizenship skills that address both their own and others’ behavior.”

How can we help young people to understand that, contrary to what they witnessing in the media, civility is (or should be) actually the social norm?

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Social Media Round-up #41

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

This week (a little bleary-eyed): The Social Election; Facebook's fork in the road; and Apple redux.

THE HEADLINES ...

ON FACEBOOK...

THE LOWDOWN ...

APPLE JUICE ...

NEWSBYTES...

THE HEADLINES ...

After the most closely-fought (and poorly-predicted) election since 1992, we Brits awoke today to a New Dawn. No, strike that - a Dawn of Chaos, Confusion and Disarray.

It has, I’m sure you’ll agree, been a night - indeed a campaign - of delirious highs, and pendulous lows.

In the course of the country’s first social media election, The Worm took its place beside the fabled Swingometer in political lore, and social media was monitored to within an inch of its life for clues to the nation’s intentions. There was rolling sentiment analysis, streaming debate, and of course, obsessive tweeting - as well as that rather awkward moment of electile dysfunction when Labour’s Twitter Tsar Kerry McCarthy peaked too early, and revealed the results of postal voting before she should have.

Two of the three main parties launched last-minute social efforts, hoping to sway the many voters who dithered till the bitter end. The Conservative Party booked a well-padded takeover of YouTube’s homepage, where users were treated to the party's final election broadcast, 'A Contract between the Conservative Party and you', for the duration of the Big Day.

Labour, meanwhile, targeted its core supporters with a Facebook viral - a smart rebuttal of Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea - in which an exhausted mother of the future revealed what life might be like if individuals became providers of vital public services. In the final frames, the mother berates a friend on the phone, for causing the chaos by not voting Labour – and the friend’s name appears, through some cunning Facebook trickery, to be that of the viewer themselves. Clever – but not clever enough, it appears, to swing it for Labour.

And what of Mumsnet - the parenting website whose users were so eagerly courted by the three party leaders that this became known as the Mumsnet Election? Well, until Monday, when Gordon Brown stopped by for a quick chockie-bickie and a last-minute webchat, the site had been firmly Cleggist; a poll conducted immediately after the final Leader’s Debate gave the LibDems an enormous 42.5% of their vote. Meantime, Facebook had predicted remarkably similarly: a poll of 463,000 users gave Nick Clegg a mammoth, but - as it turns out - wildly unrepresentative 42% of the vote.

On Election night, Twitter’s function as the new town square was firmly established, as socialites of every hue settled in for a night of outraged tweeting and the neurotic analysis of exit-polls - activities which continued through the early hours and into the new day.

Now, of course, it is over; Britain has, for now, a hung parliament. Whether this is a moment for peals of gay hilarity, hiccups of bewildered apprehension, or tears of bitter recrimination and regret will depend on the particular cut of your political jib. Either way, it has been a night to remember.

If you are still awake, and inexplicably keen to review the month’s electoral events in even greater detail, BrandRepublic anatomises the iconography of #GE2010, here.


ON FACEBOOK ...

It’s quite possible that Facebook’s PR dept are reduced to biting each other’s nails, their own being already gnawed to the quick, and beyond. This week the site was forced to suspend Facebook Chat for several hours, after it became clear that, with a bit of not-particularly-sophisticated manipulation, users could see the pending friend-requests of each of their connections, as well as – gulp – their private chat messages. Once again, the social behemoth’s privacy policies were brought into painfully sharp focus, and once again, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s breezy assertion that privacy is no longer a social norm hung awkwardly in the air.

In case you’ve been very determinedly Not Paying Attention, Facebook’s latest raft of changes mean that users’ digital identities now follow them around the web, like a floating tail of bathroom tissue accidentally caught in their trousers. When a user clicks the new ‘like’ button on a third-party web page, that third party can access the user’s list of Facebook friends, favourite activities and other content which the user has previously shared. Meanwhile, data about each individual’s home town, education and hobbies is linked to community pages on those topics.

Publishers are understandably delighted. Within a week of its launch, 50,000 websites had clutched the ‘like’ button to their collective bosom, and Zuckerberg’s plucky prediction that he'd serve a billion of them within the first 24 hours was quickly realised.

But the modifications have brought the site under the increasingly beady scrutiny of privacy campaigners.

And, as ReadWriteWeb points out, the tactics which the ‘Book have used to encourage users to opt-in have verged upon the thumb-crushing: as well as making it the whole process predictably serpentine - thus discouraging individuals from getting to grips with their settings - users who refuse to allow their info to be linked to Community pages find that their profile page is suddenly, and alarmingly, blank.

Last week Four US senators wrote personally to Zuckerberg, and they were rather grumpy, to put it mildly, about recent developments. Yesterday, a gaggle of 15 consumer groups filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the recent changes “violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations.”

Regardless of whether these particular complaints come to much, it seems incontrovertible that Facebook – and by default, the rest of us – have hit a fork in the road; and that an increasingly bright spotlight on privacy can be expected from both users and regulators.

It may be well to bear in mind that Facebook has mis-stepped on privacy before (Beacon anyone?) with memorably disastrous results for all concerned; and while another error of that magnitude is unlikely, anxious brands might appreciate the strategic bullet points offered by Augie Ray on Forrester’s blog, here.

Meanwhile, if you’re anxious to know which slippery snippets of your personal info Facebook is enthusiastically scattering across the web, this simple tool may prove enlightening.


THE LOWDOWN ...

The amount of digital data in the world is currently equivalent to that which would be generated if everyone in the world tweeted constantly for a century – indeed is expanding so rapidly that a new unit of data measurement has had to be invented. A warm welcome, then, to the Zettabyte: you are worth a staggering 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes, and though your name most closely resembles that of a mid-range fast-food chain, I don’t doubt you will become a familiar friend in the coming decade – during which the digital universe is predicted to expand by a factor of 44.

Cupidtino is a dating site for Apple fans, whom, the site says, frequently share personality traits, professions, aesthetics and love of technology - more than “enough reasons for two people to meet and fall in love”. At first glance, this all seems rather touching. Then comes the dawning realisation that the resulting progeny will share a double genetic payload of pickiness, and that indefinable air of smugness. Best hope it doesn’t catch on.

It need hardly be said that in the matter of child-rearing, Discipline and Drudgery are my watchwords. No sentimentalist, I – though I confess I swallowed hard at Boeing’s response to the plane-obsessed 8 year-old who sent them a design for a fantastical fire-fighting plane: “We do not accept unsolicited ideas. Experience showed that most ideas had already been considered by our engineers and that there can be unintended consequences to simply accepting these ideas. The time, cost and risk involved in processing them, therefore, were not justified by the benefits gained.” Harsh, chaps, harsh.

Do you shy away from bluntness? Too busy avoiding offence to fully grasp the rungs of the ladder of success? Don’t despair – those innovators at GeekCulture have launched the Steve Jobs Email Generator, guaranteed to have you firing off curt responses like the Master - or your money back.

According to the Telegraph, women are blaming smartphones and other ‘modern’ gadgets for their husbands’ apathy towards conjugal relations. With uncharacteristic candour, that most respectable organ reports that ‘hand-held devices [are] particularly to blame.”

Meanwhile, another poll reveals that the under-25s are keen multi-taskers in the boudoir – 10% of them think it’s quite the thing to text during, erm, intimacy. As Mashable so aptly puts it, there’s never been a better time to worry about the future of civilization.

‘Controversial’ Venezuelan presidente Hugo Chavez has joined Twitter, to muffled sniggers from the international press, where he is widely held to be the most verbose of global leaders. So far, @chavezcandanga is managing the 140 character restriction - although his tweet-per-day rate is accelerating at a rather ominous pace: this is, after all, the man whose weekly improvised TV broadcast regularly exceeds seven hours.

Some readers may find this next report disturbing: new app In 20 Years reveals how you will look in – um - twenty years. Please: Think Before You Click.


APPLE JUICE ...

Gawd, these Apple scandals do drag on a bit, don’t they? This week, we will attempt to buck the tide by presenting you with a handy redux of the week’s developments in Apple’s lost-iPhone saga, consisting almost entirely of links which will lead you, if you care to follow them, to reams of additional info.

California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team raided the home of Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor who apparently bought the ‘lost’ iPhone. Gizmodo owners Gawker Media threatened a law suit, claiming that the raid was illegal under laws which shield journalists from revealing their sources; Time magazine poo-pooed the claim, arguing that the public interest had not been served by the theft – and Chen covered his bases by hiring a criminal defence lawyer. Meanwhile, Wired announced that they had tracked down the culprit, who turned out to be a nice college boy who did volunteer work in his spare time, and was really very sorry for all the trouble he’d caused.

I believe that about covers it.

In other Apple news, there has this week been much back, and not a little forth, between Steve Jobs and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, who have been tussling over whose fault it is that Adobe crashes Apple’s OS. Now – following a complaint by Adobe - it looks possible that the Federal Trade Commission will be weighing in, with a formal investigation into whether Apple’s Adobe ban for app developers is anticompetitive.

The iPad’s sales stats are, if not quite vertical, then listing only slightly:
1m iPads have been sold since its launch on 3 April - easily outpacing the iPhone, which took what now feels like a tortoise-like 74 days to reach that number. Now, all eyes are on the iPad 3G, an estimated 300,000 of which flew out during last weekend’s launch.

If you are not only unconvinced by the iPad. but actively ill-disposed towards it, you will enjoy the following experiments, in which various individuals - who perhaps define the thematically-linked expressions “more money than sense”, and “too much time on their hands” - put their idle musings on the robustness of Apple’s wundertablet to the test.


NEWSBYTES ...

35% of British children – that’s over 4 million – still don’t have easy access to the internet, meaning that they’re unable to complete some of their homework, or access the social world of their peers, a new report by Point Topic has found.

US Senators have urged Congress to review whether America’s privacy law is sufficiently robust to protect children from unscrupulous online marketers. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) currently requires that sites get parental approval before they gather info on under-13s - but some senators are demanding that the age limit be raised to 18, and that its remit be immediately extended to include geo-location data.

Meanwhile, the head teacher of a New Jersey secondary school has called for parents to enforce a ban on social networks, which he says are nothing more than a platform for cyber-bullying. The school’s guidance counsellor claims that 75% of her work now involves dealing with social network-related worries.

Finally, 48% of parents add their children as friends on Facebook - news which, with luck, will be just the spur youngsters need to get to grips with the social network’s byzantine privacy settings. Those same parents might want to check if their offspring are signed up with Formspring.me, the wildly popular new site where users invite friends and strangers to ask them a question – any question. Plenty of opportunities to stalk their offspring there.


A gruff Rupert Murdoch admitted that ‘big mistakes’ had been made with MySpace, in an earnings call which revealed yet another consecutive quarter of escalating losses. And it’s time to gen up on Murdoch’s much-vaunted plan to gather other media companies behind a group paywall – we’ve been told to expect an announcement in ‘three to four weeks’.

YouTube has announced plans for a self-service rental platform, through which moviemakers will be able to upload and rent out their own streaming content, according to MediaPost. But will anyone watch? asks VentureBeat, nodding to YouTube’s dismal rental stats.

Google is breathing down Amazon’s neck, announcing plans to turn Google Editions into a vendor of digital books. It’s also invested $38.8m in two North Dakota windfarms: always good to have a plan B, in case this internet thingy doesn’t quite pan out.


That’s all folks!

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