You may've heard about ChatGPT. It reached 100 million active users last month, "making it the fastest-growing consumer product in history," according to The Economist, which may have something to do with all the headlines about it. So here's my thinking on this quite remarkable chatbot, which, basically, is artificial intelligence that you can chat with, like Siri or Alexa, except that Siri or … [Read more...] about ChatGPT for media literacy training
Ethics & Etiquette
Counterspeech: New online safety tool with huge potential
Susan Benesch, founder of The Dangerous Speech project, tells the story of how worried people in Kenya were in the run-up to their national election in 2013. Dangerous, inflammatory speech around the previous election in 2007 had led to widespread violence involving more than 1,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of people being displaced, she said in a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center, where she … [Read more...] about Counterspeech: New online safety tool with huge potential
From bystanders to ‘upstanders’ & leaders: How it’s done
This is one way it's done, anyway – the way #iCANHELP does it. And in more than a decade of writing about solutions to anti-social behavior online, I haven't seen one as effective, pro-social and pro-student as #iCANHELP. [Disclosure: I'm working with #iCANHELP to pilot a social media helpline for schools this year, so I'm biased, but this is why I'm working with them – besides the fact that 1) … [Read more...] about From bystanders to ‘upstanders’ & leaders: How it’s done
‘Disconnected’: Crucial book for closing the ‘ethics gap’ online
I don't know about the millions of people in developing countries going online for the first time with mobile phones but, here in the developed world, something strange happened when we moved onto the Web nearly 20 years ago. It's as if we checked our thousands of years of social-norms and ethics development at the door of cyberspace. Somehow we saw that space as "technology" and got stuck there – … [Read more...] about ‘Disconnected’: Crucial book for closing the ‘ethics gap’ online
From public shaming to public compassion
The public discussion about "online reputation" has gotten darker, as "public shaming" appears in more and more headlines. We may think it's tough to be a celebrity, having everything one does – good, bad or anything in between – go viral. But it's even tougher not to be, if you post something negative online. Because when you're not a celebrity, it seems only bad stuff goes viral, not just every … [Read more...] about From public shaming to public compassion