Kids Need to Learn How to Sift Out Net Junk

Last week, in writing about some of the dangers for kids online, I mentioned that I thought pornography was one of them but hardly the most common or serious. The most serious problem one can imagine is a child who turns up missing or is molested as a result of an online contact. It is tragic, but it doesn’t happen very often.

Of the millions of children who surf the Net, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has information on about 130 cases where a child has “left home or been targeted by an adult to leave home” as a result of an encounter on the Internet.” These generally aren’t cases of strangers bursting into homes and stealing young kids. The reported cases are almost all kids who have left home on their own, usually after “meeting” someone online.

And they’re generally not little kids. About 72% are over 15, and 83% are female. What we have here isn’t a case of bad guys snatching children; it’s mainly teenage girls exercising poor judgment.

That’s why I think it’s so important that kids approach the Internet with an arsenal of critical thinking skills. The odds of your kids winding up as missing persons are extremely low, but they can be affected in other ways.

The problem can be as simple as wasting time when they’re doing homework because they can’t distinguish between useful information and junk.

I’ve seen it in my own household. My son and daughter both use the Web to help them with their schoolwork. Sometimes it’s a great experience, but sometimes it can be annoying, frustrating and downright depressing. It can also lead to dead-ends and blind alleys. On a few occasions I’ve seen them write drafts of papers with undocumented or poorly documented sources. I’ve found them quoting information from sites without having any idea who operated the site or who wrote the material.

That’s not surprising. Look up “Thomas Jefferson” in an encyclopedia and you get a few articles from known sources. Look him up in a library card catalog and you’ll find lots of books. Some of them might have incorrect information, but at least you get the names of the author and publisher and the publication date.

If you look up Thomas Jefferson on Yahoo you’ll get links to 97 sites including the Thomas Jefferson Wine and Food Society. But at least Yahoo is a database compiled, in part, by people. Some search engines sniff out Web data without any regard to the context of the information. AltaVista comes up with 92,000 references to Thomas Jefferson, including a few that are X-rated.

Enter the word “whale,” and you’ll get more than 520,000 responses. Most are about the sea mammal, but some refer to the male sex organ. You don’t even want to know what happens when you enter Barbie or Bambi.

In other words, kids don’t have to stumble upon pornography to have a bad experience on the Web. Simply being lost or overwhelmed can also make a child uncomfortable and diminish the quality of his or her Internet experience. Kids can waste time going to unproductive sites or, worse, wind up at sites that fail to distinguish between fact and opinion.

My point isn’t to complain about search engines, but to emphasize that, at the end of the day, the key to getting the most out of the Internet is having the skills and judgment to decide for yourself what is and isn’t worth using.

The Internet isn’t the only medium that requires critical thinking. There are plenty of examples of misinformation and misguided advice on TV, on radio and in print. But on the Internet there are no barriers to entry. Anyone can set up a Web site, post to a newsgroup or participate in a chat session. In many ways that’s great, but it also means that people who visit those sites--especially children--must be forever vigilant.

Web users’ inability to distinguish between gems and germs can also lead to bad or even dangerous decision-making. Teens who use the Net to seek information on such topics as health, religion, dating, sex and money are going to get more advice than they ever imagined. Some will be good, some will be disingenuous, and some will be downright dangerous. I’ve come across sites that make all sorts of bizarre claims from ways to lose weight or get rich overnight to vitamin regimens guaranteed to cure cancer, and there are plenty of Internet sites dedicated to cults and bizarre rituals.

A young person suffering from asthma can find information from the American Academy of Pediatrics and Drkoop.com, but also from sites operated by health food companies and alternative healers who have their own ideas about how to treat the disease. I’m not implying that there is anything wrong with alternative medicine, but it’s hard enough for an adult to know where to turn, let alone a child.

I’m not suggesting that we need censorship, mandatory labeling for Web sites or content police. But we do need a more educated public that understands how to tell the difference between fact, fantasy and demagoguery.

The solution lies with parents and teachers. Parents should spend time with their kids online to help them understand, not the mechanics of searching the Web, but how to identify and use reliable sources. Starting in elementary school, teachers should emphasize Web research skills, focusing on helping kids better understand how to choose sources they can rely on. Parents and teachers should insist that children cite the source of any information they use from the Web in school projects. That should include the author and publisher, if available, as well as the URL of the site.

It’s also important to know when a site was created and last updated and who owns or sponsors the site. Finally, kids should be encouraged to do what good journalists and academics do: Seek out more than one source of information. If they find something on a Web site, they should be able to verify it by checking other Web sites or other media such as newspapers, magazines and books.

The London-based Health Education Authority (https://www.hea.org.uk) has put together a Quality Information Checklist at https://www.quick.org.uk that outlines “eight ways of checking information on Web sites.” It’s designed mostly to help youngsters evaluate sites with health information, but the checklist can also apply to other types of sites.

Questions you should ask include: Is it clear who has written the information? Are the aims of the site clear? Does the site achieve its aims? Is the site relevant to me? Can the information be checked? When was the site produced? Is the information biased in any way? And, finally, does the site tell you about choices open to you? The site also has a great quiz that kids can take to help them fine-tune their ability to critically analyze a Web site.

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Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”