Lori Townsend: Social media can offer positive connections, but there is also the potential for abuse and shocking trends that proliferate online.

Unknown: This isn't something I've ever talked about with anybody actually, but people are sharing images of their own self harm on Instagram.

Lori Townsend: How can parents combat internet dangers to keep their kids safe?

Social media security for your teen is our discussion right now on Alaska Insight.

Good evening.

A new 11 minute documentary produced by Victims for Justice and Affinityfilms highlights the growing concerns of parents and educators over the increasing influence of social media on teenagers lives and actions.

Called "1 Million Strangers in their Pocket," the documentary also offers guidance for how parents can take control, and a warning: the clip we're about to show and tonight's discussion could be upsetting for some viewers.

Unknown: We have almost everybody with a phone in their pocket and a phone in their backpack that they can utilize for a number of different things, social media, using them for class projects, and just being connected.

They're connected all of the time now.

There's no downtime.

There's so much technology that is coming out on a daily basis.

And it's really hard to keep up with.

There's no template in which to address social media and its advantages and disadvantages.

What we're really noticing is juveniles have unlimited access to using social media and a lot of times without the knowledge or permission of their parents.

Students are getting online at night time, maybe calling in, what we used to know as a bomb threat, now they're calling in a school threats or gun violence, or something like that.

Finding things that they connect to that aren't necessarily positive in nature all the time.

It could be bullying, it could be online chat groups, it could be different games that are a lot more violent than they were 15 years ago.

Students were challenged on TikTok to commit acts of vandalism.

So they said that steel be soap dispensers.

And when that message went out, we were noticing that every school, middle schools and high schools were hit.

We're trying to be proactive and really get the message out there that these challenges are not okay to do at schools.

But each week there's a new challenge or a new trend.

What's going on in the real world isn't as exciting for them anymore because of what's going on online.

A lot of times what's getting put on social media is just the good things and the positive things and they start to compare themselves that can lead to anxiety.

It can lead to depression.

We see fights and assaults that are, they have their origins from social media conversations.

Sometimes the bullying will happen in the classroom.

And then at night time when the student goes home.

It will continue on the online platforms.

It even gets worse when it's not in person.

Lori Townsend: Joining me tonight to discuss how parents can keep their kids safe from disturbing content and online predators is Victoria Shanklin, the director of Victims for Justice, an Alaska nonprofit that advocates for victims of violent crimes.

And Sven Gustafson principal at West High School in Anchorage, who was also featured in the documentary.

Thanks both of you for being here this evening.

Victoria, I want to start with you.

How did this project get started?

What what how did it get put together?

Unknown: Well, it actually stemmed from the municipality of Anchorage alcohol tax funding.

We were taking a look at violence prevention, and what can we examine as an influence in violence with youth and while we were just exploring this topic, social media really became a highlighted piece of it that we wanted to learn more about.

Lori Townsend: The length 11 minutes anything significant about that, or why it's somewhat short?

Unknown: Well, you know, I think we have only so much time in our day to right now consume, media, consume and learn things.

So the fact that it's short is probably useful and beneficial for a number of both parents and youth if they're going to watch it and discuss things.

Lori Townsend: Is there an age demographic that is of particular concern for vulnerability online?

Or because of the wide ranging type of content?

Does it span from very young to adults?

Unknown: You know, it really does.

I think and especially depends on when you get a cell phone in your hands, or when you get that tablet, right.

Because as soon as you have that you have access to a whole nother world.

And that's what we just really have to be careful of.

Lori Townsend: Mm hmm.

Sven, how long have you been in education?

And how have the distractions of concern changed in that time?

Unknown: Well, this is my 29th year in education in the state.

And over the past, say, five to 10 years, the definite use of social media and technology in the classrooms and the disruption that can happen is definitely you know, it's just compounded upon itself every single year.

Lori Townsend: Yeah, 29 years, you've seen a lot of change, then, from a time of no device distractions, to what you're dealing with.

Now, what is the policy at your school for when students can and cannot have their phones or other devices?

Unknown: Well, we hear we use kids use their phone, some for educational purposes, you know, we have a technology around those and in classes is kind of a teacher's preference, and what they actually will allow in the classes because some classrooms are going to be using their phones for different Cahoots or engaging activities and other classrooms are doing so they're looking up research things, and some teachers just don't have them have their phones out at all.

I mean, we literally have the gambit from one, one extreme to the other in the classrooms.

Lori Townsend: That's really interesting.

So there's no real hard rule about the minute you come to class, or into the school building your phones are put away for the day.

They are used in the classroom setting in a lot of cases.

Unknown: Yeah, a number of years ago, we we had initiative in the Anchorage School District at middle schools and high schools - - I did a lot of time I did 20 years at middle school -- And we had a bring your own device program where kids could bring their own devices and use them in certain times for technology purposes or school-based purposes.

But over the time, it's it's gotten to where we have other technology they can use but they still they still utilize them some right there and in class, but but then again, some teachers just don't have them with the technology as well, it you know that it's out there all the time.

I mean, we can have hard and fast rules, but they're very, they're very difficult to monitors unless we're really on top of kids.

And right now there's, we have so many different uses for him also in positive ways that we're trying to balance that.

Lori Townsend: Mm hmm.

Yeah, a difficult task, it sounds like.

I imagine that this sort of runs the gamut.

But what do you hear from parents about this?

Do they feel overwhelmed?

Are they apathetic or dismissive about how real the danger is online?

Or are they scared for their kids and realize that this is a very real concern?

Unknown: If you'd like me to take that I, I believe that we have a whole gambit of that as well.

We have many parents who are right involved with their kids and know exactly what the different dangers are, and what their kids are using technology for.

And we have other parents that, that don't really know what the dangers are out there.

And their kids are on their technology.

And some of them probably don't even know how to utilize or look onto their technology to know what they're actually accessing.

So I think we have a huge range of parents knowing and not knowing what's going on.

Lori Townsend: Absolutely.

Thank you.

Victoria, how about in your experience with working with families and parents?

What do you hear from them about how they are trying to manage these things to keep their kids safe?

Unknown: You know, every family has different rules and different ways of being one of the things I appreciated about this short film is that it did give some solid examples of things that you can do, like demonstrating good behavior with your phone, not being as apparent on your phone the entire day, or even for dinner, putting them away or putting them aside or not letting them go to bed with them.

I really appreciate it, it gave some tangible tools to use in the interim while you're kind of figuring out what kind of conversation you want to have and what does that look like.

Lori Townsend: Talk about Victoria, how people get trapped in manipulative relationships that may start out friendly or funny and kind, but then become controlling and sinister over time.

Unknown: So that's a huge concern, especially for organizations like Victims for Justice.

When you are meeting people online, and say you're from somewhere in rural Alaska, and you're trusting that what that person says is real and honest, then you can get into all kinds of situations, you can be convinced to come into Anchorage, you can be convinced to go meet somewhere that is unsafe.

And it's really important that we understand that not everybody's telling the truth and figure out how to really like, check that, is that real?

Have I seen them face to face?

Do they have the same friends?

There's a number of questions we need to ask before just completely trusting.

And that is a huge concern, especially among youth who could be genuinely just too trusting.

Lori Townsend: How much, Victoria, has, or how much more prolific has the problem of human trafficking become, because of online recruiting in the relative invisibility of those recruiters are not lurking by the door of the schoolyard?

Unknown: I assume that it is a strong tool that they're using, I don't actually have numbers and data associate to link the two.

But we know that that people are grooming individuals using social media.

And there has been proof of that in case individual cases.

I don't know like numbers and data with it, how much that is.

Lori Townsend: Do you in the amount of information that you do have, do you find that it is more local traffickers recruiting locally?

Or are you seeing more urban based recruiters trying to get young people to come in from rural Alaska?

Unknown: It's, I believe, more urban based.

And then, but it can happen nationwide, too.

I mean, if you can convince someone to leave, or convince somebody to do something, from a distance, it's a powerful tool to use.

And again, why we just need to have those conversations and understand those risks.

Lori Townsend: Alright, thank you.

Sven, I want to turn back to you now.

Beyond the very real fear of someone being lured into a bad or possibly deadly situation by an online predator.

Your school had to lockdown in November because of a fight that broke out.

Tell us about that.

And do you suspect that it started online?

Unknown: Yeah, we had a, we had a incident here at school where number of kids got into physical altercations.

You know, when do you determine whether or not those started online or not a out of nowhere anything starts, but usually those types of things.

Social media is a big piece of and we saw some of that.

We definitely saw some after effects of social media kids posting stuff.

And afterwards, and, you know, anytime I see that kind of stuff, we are actually investigating, and we're calling kids in and we're talking to him and but yeah, any of these kinds of interactions, probably 90% of the time, there's something to do with social media, posting Snapchatting or even just texting one another.

So yeah, it's pretty prevalent whenever we have those types of activities happen in our schools.

Lori Townsend: Well, following up there, there were also reports of damage to schools in several parts of Alaska that were perpetrated by students after they saw a prompt to vandalize school property on the app that's so popular with young people called TikTok.

Describe what happened there.

Unknown: So that that one definitely came to us through West High School.

We had numerous of our bathrooms vandalized due to kids being told to go out and vandalize take soap dispensers take paper towel, this dispensers.

We had one school, not necessarily at our school, where kids actually took a sink off the wall.

And it was because they were getting challenged a TikTok challenge that those actually occurred.

In fact right here under my desk.

I have some of those broken up soap dispensers.

I keep them there so I can talk to kids about what why we aren't doing this type of stuff whenever they come in.

Lori Townsend: Alright, thank you.

Let's watch another clip from the documentary exploring the kind of bullying that teens experience on social media.

Unknown: Sometimes it's just, you know, you're fat, you're ugly.

And kids internalize things off of social media.

We're having people from other communities, bullying kids in our own school, and acting like they know them when they don't.

But the kids think they know him because they have an online presence.

It isn't just a local thing anymore.

I can connect with a ton of peers with none of the emotionally draining energy it takes to consistently and actively reach out to them and be like, Hey, what's going on in your life?

It becomes a problem when that's super passive, and you don't realize that Sure, yeah.

You think you have those connections?

But in reality, you haven't talked to them in over a year?

Like, seeing them again?

Is that is that actually a meaningful connection that like, brings you joy, or like, is meaningful or somebody that you can lean on or something like that?

Lori Townsend: Victoria, those comments really stand out.

Is it meaningful?

If the only interaction is online?

Can that really be a meaningful relationship?

Do you think this conditions people to see relationships as less personal and something you don't really need to invest in?

Because if you get bugged by your online friend, you can just block them, rather than discuss and work it out?

Like you have to do in a upfront and, you know, face to face relationship?

Unknown: That's an interesting question.

You know, I don't know, I think that people can find a lot of support and positivity from online communities.

And I think that the pandemic has been a good example of when we had to lean on that.

I do think, though, that, yeah, you can, again, meet somebody and think that it's a meaningful relationship, only to be found out only to find that you were deceived in some way or another.

And yeah, you can cut people off pretty quickly.

And then the impact that that has on that other person.

I mean, I'm always amazed at when I hear people talking, and they're like, oh, that person didn't like my thing.

I think that they're mad at me.

And I'm just a little bit not to make light of it.

But I'm a little blown away with paying attention to who's actually liking and then what's interpreted from an individual like, of something you post.

So I think, yeah, the effects just trickle down.

And they spread to both the person posting and the person responding or not responding.

Lori Townsend: It's interesting to hear you talk about the reaction to whether someone likes something or not.

I remember when I first realized that we should be on Facebook as a as media professional, I struggled with that idea of friends, because I thought, well, if I don't know this person, how do we.

So of course, that's changed a lot of how we think about people as friends, whether they're online or in person, but finding some balance and how much weight you put behind those comments, or likes or not likes is certainly important.

Thank you.

Sven, how do you see this beyond the direct assault of someone saying mean things about you?

Or the way you look?

How do you think this affects expectations about what a real relationship is?

Or should be, especially for young people who are learning about appropriate social interaction?

Unknown: Yeah, you know, we're at middle school and high school level, you know, kids are that's the age kind of learn about relationships and relationship building.

And many of the kids nowadays are developing those relationships over social media first, and then they start talking in person or getting to know one another, a little more in person.

But you know, when I started as a principal, I get a middle school we'd have lots of kids holding hands, you know, and kind of working on that relationship building and now you hardly ever see it, it's, it's a little different.

It's a lot of those relationships are just primarily on online up.

It's like they don't even know how to talk to each other anymore in some instances.

Lori Townsend: So you're seeing less personal interaction kids up close with each other at lockers or holding hands in the hallway, you're seeing less of that as we become more hyper connected online.

We're, Unknown: I see less of that, yes, in my school.

Kids are more individuals now.

And they're more looking, you know, they're walking down the hall looking at their phones, more so than talking to each other.

And really communicating and, and, and really, you know, getting to know each other and it's more of a experiential basis.

You know, I went on a basketball trip with some with one of our basketball teams and go to dinner and every kid's on online and they're texting each other right across the table and I'm like, holy smokes, everybody put your phones down.

Let's actually talk to one another, you know that it's just a kind of a feel for this is how we communicate now.

And sometimes those relationship pieces just aren't as strong because of that you're not hearing the actual voices.

Lori Townsend: That's incredibly sad on a lot of levels.

TikTok has been described, Sven, as addictive.

It's short snippets of content, how do you see this affecting the ability of students to focus and concentrate on assignments or projects that may require more than seven minutes of reading?

Unknown: You know, that's a, that's a big question.

Because, you know, TikTok is just one of them.

That that kids utilize.

And, you know, the, the focus piece is, it can be difficult, especially with kids with disabilities and, and you know, the kids that are driven, they kind of push through that, and, and they, they do just fine.

But the ones that struggle a little bit, if they get their attention on something else, they definitely start struggling even worse.

And so, you know, that's a concern of mine is really, how do you help kids get past that?

And so that they can actually buckle down and get some work and learn actually.

Lori Townsend: Yes, absolutely.

So, in thinking about that, what keeps you up at night in this regard, is it the fear that the next TikTok trend may call for violence against people rather than soap dispensers, or that students may become sort of radicalized against others because of inaccurate and negative information about race, religion, or ethnicity or other things?

Unknown: You know, it at my level here, I, I don't I don't stay up all night thinking about TikTok challenges, that's just not something that I do, because it's out there, there was a TikTok challenge kind of thing that the rain was going.

So the surge of SROs was talking about in the video about that they were TikTok challenges about you know, slap a teacher, something that we're coming up, not necessarily just working on, you know, repping a soap dispenser often.

And we just went out and, you know, we, you know, we talked to kids and said, Look, we know this is out there, and we just can't have that kind of thing.

As far as I'm having you worrying about what's going to happen in society around like, you know, dangerous to the whole schools or, or if they get, you know, if they have some theories out there that they have to that they latch on to or whatever, you know, that that's something we as a whole society have to work on, I think not necessarily just here at the school or what have you, because that's that, you know, we kind of model our kids kind of follow what we model as adults.

And and we just have to be careful with that as we, as we communicate in any way with our kids.

Lori Townsend: Absolutely.

Victoria, want to turn back to you now.

You mentioned groups that respond to help people, especially women after they have been trafficked.

Tell us about these organizations and their services.

And are they also figuring out ways to help prevent this abuse from happening in the first place so that there's, you know, the damage doesn't occur before you can actually help someone?

Unknown: Yeah, there are a number of organizations that specialize or work solely with human trafficking.

And I know that there's work groups that have formed or are forming as well to have these conversations.

So priceless is an organization here in Anchorage that works in cute with human trafficking.

And then there's organizations like the Alaska Native Women's Resource Center, and Alaska Native Justice Center, that are also not just working, working with others to find a solution and to talk about how do we protect our youth?

And how do we create healthy communities, not just in person, but online?

Lori Townsend: Alright, thank you and Sven turning back to you.

What are we only have a minute or so left here?

What are some of the easy things that you recommend parents can do.

When my grandkids come to visit, they're 14 years old, I give them a 10 minute heads up at night, but then I take those phones and I keep them.

That's kind of like kryptonite.

I feel like if I've got their phones, they can't be up to anything.

What do you recommend?

Unknown: Yeah, you know, I always tell parents get in their business, you know, find out what they're doing online.

You know, look at the phones.

99% of the time, the parents are the ones that buy the phones and pay the bills and all and we need to be paying attention to what kids are doing.

So I tell them just find out talk to them.

No, have them show you look on it.

If you don't know how to use the technology, find a friend that does and have them teach you a little bit.

It's not really that hard at the end of the day.

The other thing is I I say, you know, have barriers are not barriers but have limits, you know, put them on the counter downstairs at night or, you know, let them have good night's sleep because a lot of the stuff happens, you know, in the bedrooms at night when they're just sitting up all night.

So really get their business, put some limits to it.

And because actually it is the parent business, we are the adults.

Lori Townsend: Yes, exactly.

It it's the parents business, not just the kids.

Thank you so much, both of you for being with us this evening.

And I wanted to let our viewers know that the documentary will be linked at our website so you can see it there.

Raising kids to be healthy, happy, productive people is always a challenge when it comes to keeping them safe.

But protecting your child from the invisible multitudes of predators online is exponentially harder than protecting them from a bully on the school bus.

Used in the right way, online life can be fun and educational.

But without proper controls, it's addictive and dangerous for young people who surf the web without an adult watching out for them.

It takes time to monitor their activity, but make it easy to do so by keeping computers in view in common rooms in your home and take those cell phones from your kids at night.

You'll sleep better and so will they.

That's it for this edition of Alaska Insight.

Thanks for being with us this evening.

I'm Lori Townsend.

We'll be back next week.

Good night.