Intelligent Search for Strategies to Minimize the Risks of Internet Communication of Teens and Youth

Abstract

This article raises issues of children and young people communication safety in the Internet space. The materials of the article contain the results of an intellectual search conducted by the authors to compile a list of the most common risks of Internet communication faced by Russian children, or teachers and counselors working with children, including using the Internet, note the growth of these risks. Research design combines the following methods: social media analytics (provides content, dynamic, structural and discourse characteristics of relevant social media streams, including automatical metrics: tag cloud, audience activity markers, online opinion leaders, and so on) and eye-tracking for measuring perception of Internet memes by teens and youth. The article presents descriptions of markers that allow to identify these risks, possibilities of neurovisual correction of these risks, as well as makes recommendations for teachers and counselors, schools and universities, departments and agencies for social work with teens and youth to minimize them.

1 Introduction

In the modern world, the concept of the young man social life environment which creates sets of the conditions attending his daily activity, forms certain opportunities for expansion of communication processes, search of various information, leisure filling by various forms of self-realization, and significantly extended [3]. First of all, Internet becomes an integral part of this environment. With its help the new communities constructed on the principles of open communications, virtual images of personal perception are formed.

At the same time, as M. Castels noted “through communication, human consciousness interacts with its social and natural environment. This process of communication takes place in accordance with the structure, culture, organization and technology of communication in the society” [2].

Since modern gadgets, which accompany a child since his/her birth, become an integral and prestigious element of social life, children perceive them as necessary means of life support.

In addition, the Internet provides fast access to large amounts of information, instant speed of its distribution. It reveals almost unlimited opportunities to the user: which makes it extremely attractive to children and young people.

Competent strategies of Internet behavior are formed as a person gains life experience, there are ideas about the ways of behavior in the particular situation, which children still have minimal. Russian children and teenagers involve unlimited and uncontrolled use of Internet content by children, which threatens their personal security [1, 7, 8].

The problem of Internet communication risks impact on the children and young people socialization begins to draw the researchers’ attention. It should be recognized that researchers all around the world slightly earlier than in Russia began to study it.

The impact of online risks on children, protection from them and prevention is considered by Brown [4]. The research of European scientists in the field of Internet safety of young media users within the framework of the pan-European project “EU Kids Online” and the national project “British Children on the Internet” (UK Children Go Online) under Professor Livingstone [6]. For example, the study found that users with higher levels of digital competence face more online risks than their less convergent peers.

Important for this work are Milosevic’s research [8] on studying the actions of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, to overcome the problem of cyber intimidation by young users. Very notable is the study of Frumkin [5], who studied cyberbullying using experimental methods, where the level of predisposition to the role of the cyberbullying victim served as a dependent variable.

As a part of the personal-oriented approach, the authors of the article initiated a study that allowed to formulate a list of risks faced by schoolchildren, with which children turn to teachers and counselors for help, or teachers and counselors themselves note these risks, being involved in Internet communication with students. The study was conducted by the Federal Coordination Center for Training and Support of Senior Personnel (hereinafter FCC), working on the basis of the Moscow State Pedagogical University during 2018–2019 and showed the existence of a whole list of topical threats, independent of the Russian Federation region where children, teachers, counselors live. Among the most common risks on which we focused the continuation of the study noted: cyberbullying; pushing for suicidal behavior; distribution of extremist online content, terrorist content and involvement in extremist, terrorist activities (school shooting).

2 Methodology

The methodology of social media flows analysis presenting digital markers of Internet risks data for schoolchildren involved implementation of the following research procedures algorithm: justification of groups selection in social media as objects of message content qualitative analysis (20 online communities have been selected, and 1800 documents have been analyzed); developing of the digital markers dictionary for automated information flows accumulation; automated upload of Internet content using created marker dictionaries and online service for monitoring social media (software) IQBuzz, a total of 953,000 messages have been uploaded (together for all types of streams about Internet risks), depth of accumulation 2016–2018; the interpretation was performed according to the criteria specified by the program: weight of information flows; dynamics of information flows; opinion leaders’ publication activity and its audience.

3 Results

3.1 Cyberbullying/Harassment on the Internet

Cyberbullying is understood by the authors as a systematic and targeted negative online impact on the social media users for the purpose of causing psychological trauma and/or introducing depression.

Total number of social media documents accumulated according to these digital markers—280,000, source of unloading—blog hosting “VKontakte,” depth of unloading—period from 1.01.2017 to 10 October 2018.

The dynamic characteristics of the resulting arrays of relevant documents are shown in Fig. 1. According to these data, a remarkable intensification of the analyzed flow occurred at the end of February—the beginning of March 2018, and the maximum extremum is at the end of September 2018. These peaks have substantial intersections with offline events concerning cyberbullying. At the beginning of this spring, there was an active discussion in traditional and new media of the intensive growth of network groups with a destructive focus: pushing to harm health and life, immoral and criminal social actions. It was during this period that the number of reports attempting to make sense of the factors, causes, triggers of cyberbullying, and ways to prevent and counter this type of Internet risk increased dramatically. At the end of September 2018, the surge in reports of cyberbullying could be explained by the indirect impact of the Kerch tragedy, which significantly affected social media content, including information flows about cyberbullying.

Fig. 1.

Dynamics of information flows on cyberbullying in social media in the period from 26.02.2018 to 22.10.2018

On the one hand, the digital environment becomes a space of harassment, moral damage, and mental damage, while the social media space provides opportunities to express the reaction of cyberbullying victims, as well as to find like-minded and sympathizers.

There is a complex correlation between the emergence of depression in adolescents and young people, threatening suicide attempts and involvement in communication through social media. This connection is expressed in the fact that depressive states did not end in suicidal actions most often in those members of the younger generation who had the opportunity to be constantly online, and, on the contrary, removal from communication in the network as a whole more often caused attitudes for suicide.

3.2 Pushing for Suicidal Behavior

Pushing for suicidal behavior in a network environment as a research case was interpreted as a targeted psychological influence on the user in order to form a behavioral setting on committing suicide.

By means of the listed digital markers 102 802 messages of their blog hosting “VKontakte” from March 1, 2016 till November 1, 2018 were accumulated.

Analysis of the names of influential blogs and online groups reflecting conversations about suicide shows that the most numerically voluminous audience has a block of priest Vladislav (see Table 1) providing spiritual assistance in difficult life situations. The remaining groups have from hundred to four hundred among their user audience. Group names are entirely based on the names of their creators and do not carry a serious semantic load. These groups are not so-called death groups that stimulate and encourage adolescents to commit suicide. Real “death groups”—closed communities, accounting and unloading of messages of which online service for monitoring social media does not carry out.

Table 1. Publication activity of network leaders forming suicide attitudes

The socio-demographic analysis of the suicide report’s authors indicates the prevalence of girls among them, users aged 15–17 and most often residents of large cities.

The dynamics of the social and media flow about suicide, presented in Fig. 2, shows that this flow is unstable, has many peaks of different intensity, and falls to virtually zero. Most of the relevant messages are recorded in the blog hosting “VKontakte.” The peak in March 2016 is due to a case that took control of the Civic Commission on Human Rights: “On March 23, 2016, the Civil Commission on Human Rights was approached by Andrei Vershinov from the city of Arzamas, who reported that on March 10, 2016 his aunt Elena Vershinova (both names changed) committed suicide allegedly after having taken an antidepressant on the appointment of a psychiatrist” (http://www.cchr.ru/news/464.htm). Although the woman was not in suicidal groups, a surge in social media activity triggered this due to the active circulation of reports of this suicide online.

Fig. 2.

Dynamics of social and media reports of suicides between March 2016 and November 2018, in thousands

Taking into consideration the fact that messages from closed “death groups” were not included in the unloading, and the statistics presented in Fig. 2 (measured in thousands of documents) reflect only an open online discourse about suicide, it is obvious that there is a very wide interest in the topic of stimulating suicidal behavior in social media.

3.3 Distribution of Online Content of Extremist and Terrorist Content, Involvement in Extremist, Terrorist Activities (School Shooting)

This type of Internet risk is interpreted by the team of authors from the point of view of mobilizing users through online propaganda of radical, extremist attitudes: readiness to participate in actions of civil disobedience, terrorist actions. An integral part of the risk type is school shooting, which can be reduced to motivation in the network space for the organization of terrorist acts in educational institutions. School shooting served as a specific case for exploring the process of distributing online content of extremist and terrorist content.

570,000 messages were unloaded in the Russian-language and English-language segments of social media: “Facebook,” “VKontakte,” “YouTube,” “Odnoklassniki,” “Twitter,” “Instagram” for the period from January 8, 2018 to October 22, 2018.

Figure 3 shows a surge in the intensity of flows about school shooting in social media in connection with the tragic accident in Kerch in September 2018. An alarming signal is the fact that the main contexts analysis of this stream messages indicates attempts to glorify the teenager who carried out this terrorist act and romanticize his motives.

Fig. 3.

Dynamics of social and media flow reflecting digital traces of school shooting between January 2018 and October 2018 in blog hosting and microbligs: “Facebook,” “VKontakte,” “YouTube,” “Odnoklassniki,” “Twitter,” “Instagram”

Analyzing the publication activity of the most influential network groups associated with school shooting (see Table 2), note that the largest user audience has a community “Natural selection,” and it features 20,027 participants. It is a group that designs and distributes ideas of necessity of natural selection, rejection of values of humanity and mercy, realization of the principle “Survives the strongest.”

Table 2. - Publication activity of network leaders forming school shooting installations

“The World of Maniacs and Serial Killers” group generally semantically and discursively repeats the contours of ideas circulated in the “Natural selection” community, spreading the values of mass murder in order to uphold their principles and achieve their goals. Participants of this network group deny, subvert the importance of morals and morality in human society. This group has a very wide audience (281,718).

In another rather representative online community—“World of Crimes”—there is a discussion of various ways of killing people, options for committing crimes. Despite the absence of explicit calls for school shooting or other crimes in this group, the very fact of active communication on these topics can serve as a trigger for the formation of the user’s position on the organization of socially dangerous actions.

Analysis of the tag cloud typical for the school shooting flow revealed several semantic word usage groups associated with a particular discussion context. The first group of words: “Crimea ‘college’ place|” indicates the intense circulation in social media of reports about the Kerch episode of school shooting, which literally blew up the network environment in late September—early October 2018. The second group of tags: “murder ‘life’ child|” concerns an indication of the social essence of school shooting. And the third group of the most common in the analyzed stream of word usage: “weapons ‘explosion’ murder|” concerns the technological aspect of the organization of school shooting.

4 Conclusions and Discussion

Summarizing the results of the social media analysis, it should be noted that the wide scale of distribution of flows, which reflect markers of Internet risks of the younger generation in the global network, as well as their coverage of a huge adolescent user audience, has been revealed. Common to all the streams studied was the extremum of graphs of their dynamics converging at a point dated to the end of the first decade of October 2018 and related to the tragic accident in Kerch. For the flow of school shooting, this event served as a trigger for a sharp increase in the number of reports on the topic of mass killings, including the reason for romanticization and glorification of the teenager who carried out the attack. “Suicidal Stream” was also stimulated by this tragedy, because it served for network leaders, who form in their user audience installations for suicide, some “model” of termination of life. The cyberbullying stream also experienced the impact of the Kerch attack, as the opinion centers of the stream were aimed at exploiting the idea of teenager harassment as the main reason for his mass murder.

Significant measures to prevent the involvement of adolescents in online school shooting communities are their belief in the need to have an opinion, to critically sense, to reflex from various sides the information coming from the network; discuss what consciousness manipulation technologies are used in online groups mobilizing extremism and terrorism, and the benefits that network leaders derive from their criminal activity.

It is obvious that in conditions of internment risks it becomes extremely important to manage effectively strategies of child behavior by teachers, parents, and other participants of educational environment, to build in children resistance to emerging internment threats.

The criteria for selecting the relevant content may be its entertainment (what can shift attention), logic (what meets common sense), and normative acceptability (what meets the rules of the reference group). Opposition to such content should consist in encouraging alternative creative actions through the formation and awakening of positive meanings, the popularization of acceptable standards of behavior and role models.

The effectiveness of countering destructive network communities in all three areas mentioned above can be facilitated by neurovisual techniques such as the use of well-known warning symbols, the management of discourse by changing attention concentrator objects, the targeted use of verbal and graphic metaphors. Thus, our eye-tracking studies with the help of eye trackers show that additional mobilization in the perception of graphic images can be provided by the use of familiar symbol-warnings. The appearance of a red line on the computer screen for 7–10 s in combination with the inscription of the type “Beyond the line it is impossible!” significantly reduced the time of respondents to consider high-risk zones and increased the time of view stay in safe zones. For example, when looking at a person on a computer screen standing on the edge of a cliff, on the ledge of a high-rise building, on a rock, the time of sight in places of possible fall after the demonstration of a red line inadvertently decreased on average more than twice (567 respondents participated in experiments). At the same time, the time of sight in safe places of such images increased more than one and a half times.

According to the authors, the effectiveness of large-scale counter-risks of children and young people Internet communication can be increased by training teachers and counselors to digital navigation of teenagers, which includes both the ability to identify risks in the process of Internet communication with students, and to minimize them in the course of educational and out-of-school activities. The continuation of the study may involve the development and testing of a digital navigation model for teachers, the improvement of neurovisual techniques to counter destructive network communities.