Larry Magid

A post by Anne Collier on NetFamilyNews.org quotes an expert from the Bulgarian Safer Internet Center who said that “it is a sensationalist fake started by Russian media back in May 2016,” and that “several Russian politicians already mentioned ‘Western intelligence services’ and ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ as creators of the ‘horrible game’ with the aim to exterminate young Russian generation. But while the Russian-language Internet is groaning with profiles of young people playing or seeking to play the game, shocking photographs of self-injury like cutting marked with the game’s hashtags, and purported links to teen suicides, not a single death in Russia or Central Asia has been definitively tied to Blue Whale. Fact checking site Snopes.com calls the Blue Whale suicide story “unproven,” saying that it’s “not been found to have directly caused an uptick in young people taking their own lives. To prove how norms can affect bullying, the researchers created a school campaign with such messages as “Most (4 out of 5) students (at their school) do NOT spread unkind rumors or stories about other students,” and found that once students understood the actual positive peer behavior rather than the perceived bad behavior, they were more likely to practice good behavior.

He advised parents who support Trump’s policies but not his cyberbullying to remind children that “there is a lot of stress on individuals and sometimes we do and say things that we shouldn’t. The adults that they’re going to hear from the most in their life is their parents, not Donald Trump or any other famous person, so they need to hear those messages consistently from their parents,” Parents who don’t support Trump’s policies should also think about how they speak with their kids by separating out the personal from the political. It’s fine to disagree with his actions, but it’s not OK to make fun of his weight, just as it’s not OK to make fun of the size of the president’s hands or other aspects of his appearance or for Trump to have made fun of Megyn Kelly and Brzezinski along with all personal insults he hurled at his opponents during last year’s presidential primary and general election.

Interland is made up of Mindful Mountain (share with care), Tower of Treasure, Kind Kingdom, Reality River (don’t fall for fake) and each one of these sections is its own interactive video game aimed at young children. When I was first briefed about this, folks at Google pointed out that there are very few modern, research-based and well made resources to educate young children about internet safety. and it was created by my son Will Magid when he was 10 years old, based on my 1993 booklet, Child Safety on the Information Highway, published by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Google’s new resource is an excellent addition to the handful of other great materials for young people including NCMEC’s NetSmartzKids and the National PTA’s SmartTalk, both of which are also ConnectSafely partners.

Written by ConnectSafely K-12 Education Director Kerry Gallagher and myself, the Parent & Educator Guide to Media Literacy & Fake News will help children and students become more conscious consumers of information, explaining among other things: While we’ll never rid the world of false information, we can help parents and educators immunize young people so that they can become better consumers and creators of accurate information,” said co-author and ConnectSafely CEO Larry Magid. I’m proud that this guide includes truly practical tips and strategies that readers can bring to the dinner table or the classroom right away,” said Kerry Gallagher, Director of K-12 Education for ConnectSafely The guide also includes Top 5 questions about media literacy and fake news and “expert tips” from the National Association for Media Literacy Education and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.