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Does it affect you? Do you care

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Good enough and convenient. That's proved a winning strategy for Instagram's clone, according to a dozen analytics providers, social media celebrities, and talent managers who told TechCrunch they've seen a decline in Snapchat Stories usage since Instagram Stories launched on August 2nd.

Most reported declines in Snapchat Stories view counts ranging from 15 to 40 percent, and a reduction in how often they or those they monitor post to Snapchat Stories. Meanwhile, our sources report rapidly growing view counts on Instagram Stories, and engagement-to-follower rates one social influencer talent agent called "Insanely f*cking high".

The success of Instagram Stories, the decline in Snapchat usage we've heard from a wide array of sources, and Facebook's relentless drive to compete with the startup could spell trouble for Snapchat's IPO on the NYSE market that's expected in March. Snap Inc declined to comment for this story.

Here's how the social media content industry sees the impact of Instagram Stories on Snapchat.

"Everyone is posting way less. Some are not posting at all anymore" on Snapchat, says the CEO of a social content production studio about the dozen social media stars they represent.

Several sources refused to be named in print for fear of retaliation from Snapchat or because they weren't authorized to disclose client data. But across the social content production firm's stars, the CEO says there's been an average decline in Snapchat Stories views of 20 to 30 percent from August until mid-January.

In the 25 weeks since launch, Instagram Stories has reached 150 million daily users. That's the same number of users that Snapchat's whole app reportedly hit around June 2016, after seeing swift growth from 110 million daily users in December 2015, Bloomberg reported. Snapchat hasn't announced a higher number since, nor has one leaked, despite it trying to impress potential investors during its current pre-IPO roadshow.

Snapchat is expected to publicly file to IPO this week, and that might include some larger stats. But the consensus from our sources is that they'd be higher if not for Instagram Stories, and Snapchat's long-term growth, especially internationally, will be hindered by the competition.

Analytics Provider Shows Widespread Snapchat Decline

"Overall, from August to November 2016, the average unique viewers per Snapchat Story has decreased about 40%" says Nick Cicero, CEO of creative studio and social video analytics platform Delmondo. His company analyzed 21,500 Snapchat Stories to discover the steep decline.

Meanwhile, influencer marketing platform TheAmplify's CEO Justin Rezvani says "On average our influencer community is seeing 28 percent higher open rate on Instagram than Snapchat", referring to view count.

As for downloads, App Annie shows Snapchat saw a big drop right when Instagram Stories launched at the beginning of August. It fell to its lowest ranking all year, #11, after hovering in the top 3 for the first half of 2016. It's unclear why it bounced back at the end of October, but it's begun to slip again. [Update: Instagram experienced a dip in August download ranks too, which we're investigating.]

Removing Auto-Advance Added Friction To Snapchat

One thing that's important to know as we review these reports is that Snapchat removed its Auto-Advance feature on October 7th, so users could no longer instantly watch every Story in their list in a row. Instead they had to manually select Stories to load as an ad hoc Story Playlist (pictured here), though there's a little-known way to select all Stories with by tapping the triangular dot button.

This change should have directly caused some drop in views since Snapchat users aren't being shown Stories they're less interested in, which they might have fast-forwarded through while still triggering view counts. Snapchat marketing and analytics company Mish Guru's CEO Thomas Harding says that in October when Snapchat removed Auto-Advance, a selection of its client accounts that have been posting consistently saw an immediate 9.64% drop in views.

You could argue that the remaining views are more intentional and therefore more valuable. But the change also made it less convenient to lean back and watch a day's worth of Snapchat the way you used to on Snapchat and can on Instagram thanks to its Auto-Advance feature. And several sources think that's leading some users to open Snapchat less overall.

Stars See Snapchat Views Down 15 to 30 Percent

Social talent agent Charlie Buffin who represents some former Vine stars says one of his top creators was averaging 330,000 views per day on Snapchat in late 2015 until June 2016. But by December, they were receiving 205,000 to 250,000 views per day.

"It is clear to us that regular users' Snapchat usage/engagement have gone down significantly since the release of Instagram Stories" writes Buffin. He also noted that "Snapchat removing the Auto-Advance feature has affected the natural 'binge-watching experience' for consumers, which is really cutting into views for creators." But Snap Inc doesn't seem to care. "Snapchat has always remained distant from its creator community, which is not a strong move for the company" Buffin concluded.

One star, Hannah Stocking, saw her Snapchat Stories views fall from 150,000 on August 16th to 90,000 on January 17th. That's despite massive growth on other platforms like YouTube, and Instagram where she rose from 1.2 million to 4.3 million followers in the same time frame. "Her Instagram Story numbers are growing faster than anything right now" says John Shahidi, founder Shots Studios, the Justin Bieber-backed selfie app and video creation startup that represents Stocking.

Media marketing and business development agency Fighter Interactive's CEO Kwasi Asare tells me "Snapchat opens have gone down a minimum of 15 percent for some big social media stars." He sees the removal of Auto-Advance as mistake, saying "Snapchat messed up by letting people choose whose stories they view individually. Instagram has more of a flow where it allows you to watch the stories of everyone you're following.

Asare also believes Instagram's clone has quickly risen to equal status with teens, noting that "Most kids are starting to post on Instagram or Snapchat, and then post on the one they didn't post on first."

Influencers Crave Instagram's Reach

Social talent media company Galore's CEO Mike Albanese says "Influencers that were late to build an audience on Snapchat pretty much abandoned the platform because it was so much easier for them to reach more people through their existing audience on Instagram Stories."

That said, he was the only source we asked who said that they'd seen growth in Snapchat views, though that was for "top Snapchat influencers" like models Val Mercado and Sahara Ray, and actress Ava Allen who he says pour a ton of effort into Snapchat and heavily promote their account through their other social presences. But he believes "there are less Snapchat Stories being published on a daily basis overall versus August of last year."

A leading social media talent company's co-founder tells me that amongst the stars they work with, "Almost all of them are down about 20 to 25 percent on Snapchat" since August." One of their creators was seeing 75,000 opens per Story in August, and only 50,000 now. Another went from 50,000 to 30,000. Meanwhile, the stars are seeing 6 to 10 percent of their Instagram followers opening their Instagram Stories each day, which the co-founder called "really f*cking high".

"Marketers are dedicating more resources to Instagram because you can't grow on Snapchat. Now there's a lot of campaigns we don't even need to do on Snapchat.", they say. "The only way to grow is from [cross-promoting on] YouTube or Instagram. Snapchat is making some of the same mistakes as Vine. They aren't embracing creators. They want to be private messaging." In contrast, Instagram promotes social media stars and helps them grow their Stories views by featuring them on its Explore tab that Snapchat lacks.

Then they gave perhaps the most damning quote we heard. "Everyone has forgotten that Instagram Stories is a Snapchat clone."

These industry reports build on a mountain of anecdotal evidence about Instagram stealing Snapchat users that I've heard online and from my network, and seen in my own usage and view counts.

It seems Facebook has finally found way to challenge Snapchat after multiple failed attempts since it turned down the social giant's first acquisition offer in 2012. Poke, Slingshot, Bolt, and Flash all flopped as standalone apps, while baking Snapchat's best features deep inside Facebook seemed to have little effect.

But by putting a Snapchat clone front and center atop Instagram's feed, the Facebook family of apps discovered a way to make its version more convenient to use than the original. And emboldened by Instagram's success, now Facebook is testing similarly designed Snapchat clones in its main app as Facebook Stories, and its chat apps as Messenger Day and WhatsApp Status.

Snapchat lovers are exporting and syndicating their Stories to Instagram for extra reach. Those who'd only recently gotten into posting Snapchat Stories are finding it easier to watch and share on Instagram where they already spend time and have built a social graph. And people who'd never tried Snapchat but were intrigued by Stories are finding Instagram is good enough that there's no need to sign-up for Snapchat.

It's that last one that might be most threatening to Snap Inc's IPO. We're already seeing how Instagram is eating up Snapchat usage, reducing the Stories views it depends on to drive ad revenue. Yet what matters to Wall Street is growth potential. Ad-driven social networks need massive scale, which usually comes from international domination.

That can't happen if Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp deliver the Stories feature to foreign countries where Snapchat hasn't gained traction already. Around 80 percent of Instagram's 600 million monthly users are international. And if Instagram Stories continues on this trajectory, it could prove bigger than the app it copied.

As I wrote a week after the launch, Instagram Stories castrated Snapchat, even if it can't kill it. Snapchat will continue to have a lively user base, though Instagram may inhibit its continued expansion.

Reports from social media celebrity managers and analytics companies that work with big accounts may present a more dire outlook than what's going on with average teens on Snapchat. Kids under 25 in the US who are completely immersed in Snapchat might not stray. But Instagram may be convincing the 25 to 35-year olds who came of age on its app to stick around, while it's swooping on international teens before Snapchat gets popular in their market. Plus, vanity dictates that people will share where they get the most views, and many people have spent years longer building their Instagram audience.

Going Public With A Different Story

With its future in broadcast social media under fire, Snap Inc may need to tell a different story for its IPO. At the least, it might have to concentrate on touting its average revenue per user rather than its scale.

It has spent the past quarter repositioning itself as "a camera company" that makes hardware like its Spectacles camera-sunglasses. It's also tried to double-down on the app's first feature, disappearing private messaging, by adding a groups feature and improved navigation. But scrounging together hardware profits and monetizing chat directly can be quite challenging.

In six months, the game has changed for Snapchat, and not in its favor. Once the undisputed king of cool amongst Western teenagers with the potential to disrupt the world's biggest social network, it's now in danger of becoming just one of several popular apps for ephemeral storytelling.

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Instagram Stories is stealing Snapchat's users

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Good enough and convenient. That's proved a winning strategy for Instagram's clone, according to a dozen analytics providers, social media celebrities, and talent managers who told TechCrunch they've seen a decline in Snapchat Stories usage since Instagram Stories launched on August 2nd.

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What are your thoughts from this story

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Should the FBI have to reveal details?

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When the FBI bought a hacking tool to break into an iPhone, it wasn't sure what exactly it got for its $1.3m.

On Wednesday, the FBI confirmed it wouldn't tell Apple about the security flaw it exploited to break inside the iPhone 5C of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook in part, because the bureau says it didn't buy the rights to the technical details of the hacking tool.

The unusual declaration likely will raise only more curiosity about the FBI's last-minute abandonment of its high-stakes court battle with Apple, America's most valuable company. The day before the two were schedule to face off in court over whether the government could force Apple to unlock the phone, the government announced it had purchased a special hacking method and no longer needed Apple's help.

The FBI has since offered few details about the hacking tool. They disclosed that it came from outside the government. It cost more than FBI director James Comey will be paid during the rest of his tenure (about $1.3m). And it only works on an iPhone 5C.

America's three-letter agencies regularly purchase security flaws in consumer software from hackers, defense contractors and researchers. These flaws are kept secret, then used to hack into suspects' or intelligence targets' devices. The practice is controversial because it requires hiding the security flaws from the public, leaving consumers vulnerable to malicious hackers if someone else discovers the same flaw.

As a compromise, the White House in 2014 announced a review board that would look at the severity of such software flaws government investigators wanted to keep secret. The importance of the investigation, in theory, would be weighed against the public security interest in patching the flaw.

Computer security advocates had been pressuring the FBI to submit its iPhone hacking tool to this review board. On Wednesday, following a report in the Wall Street Journal, the bureau confirmed it wouldn't do this because it couldn't.

"Currently we do not have enough technical information about any vulnerability that would permit any meaningful review," said Amy Hess, the FBI's executive assistant director for science and technology.
Topics

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FBI confirms it won't tell Apple how it hacked San Bernardino shooter's iPhone

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When the FBI bought a hacking tool to break into an iPhone, it wasn't sure what exactly it got for its $1.3m. On Wednesday, the FBI confirmed it wouldn't tell Apple about the security flaw it exploited to break inside the iPhone 5C of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook in part, because the bureau says it didn't buy the rights to the technical details of the hacking tool.

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Should we care how our data is being used?

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Mark Zuckerberg has dominated the desktop internet. He's dominated the mobile internet. Now he's going to dominate Facebook itself, and the company is probably going to let him.

The big news that came out of Facebook's quarterly earnings report is that the company is making more money, from more users, being shown more adverts - and more profitable adverts at that.

The numbers are, well, big. Its userbase grew from 1.44 billion to 1.65 billion. Once upon a time, the number of people on Facebook grew fivefold over the course of a single year; it can't do that anymore, because there aren't enough people on the Earth.

It can't even double any more, because there aren't enough people with internet access. Which lends some necessary context to the company's philanthropic efforts to push low-cost connections to the developing world through its Internet.org program.

More users is nice but that's not why Facebook is on top of the world today. Instead, it's about where those users are: on their phones.

Way back in 2009, the switch to mobile represented an problem for Facebook. As analyst Ben Thompson wrote in January, the company dominated on desktop, but had just 35 million users on mobile - barely beating Twitter, which had 30 million users.

But Facebook saw the writing on the wall and doubled-down on its mobile apps. Even so, it was worried enough to begin a spate of acquisitions that saw it transform from a simple social network to a modern-day General Electric: Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus were snapped up, and even SnapChat was offered, but declined, a cool $3bn for its business.

These days, those acquisitions mostly look important for the breathing space they gave the core business to reinvent itself. Once it owned its biggest competitors, Facebook could take the time to do mobile right. And it did.

The company introduced new ad units that let businesses target users based on their location, behaviour and even race - sorry, " ethnic affinity group ". Privacy advocates complained but users carried on clicking in the increasingly well-targeted adverts in ever-greater numbers.

They also stayed on the site more. The average user now spends 50 minutes a day on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, thanks to an increasing push from the company to keep them from clicking away. Goodbye links to news sites, hello "Instant Articles" - the same thing, but served from Facebook's servers, in Facebook's app and (often) with Facebook's adverts. The same switch happened in video, where Facebook aggressively pushed its own video product ahead of links to competitors such as YouTube and Vimeo.

Those efforts combined to make the company's mobile ad revenue jump by 57% in the first quarter, from $3.3bn to $5.2bn, with each user worth $3.32 over the quarter, up from $2.50 last year.

The company has costs that offset that, with its overall profit just $1.51. But that's tripled from last year and helps explain why investors viewed the company's results favourably when compared with Apple, which pulled in north of $50bn - but on a downward trajectory.

Facebook's achieved all this while under the command of one of the most concentrated leaderships in Silicon Valley. Founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wields a huge amount of influence in the company, and while the company's results are this good, investors are happy to let the state of affairs continue. So Zuckerberg is pushing it just a bit further.

He already holds a disproportionate amount of "class B" shares, which carry 10 votes in internal debates compared to the one vote guaranteed by a "class A" share. Now, the company has proposed a three-to-one stock split in its quarterly results, which would give each Facebook shareholder two additional, non-voting shares for each single share they already hold.

Those non-voting shares can be sold without relinquishing any actual control, which is perfect for Zuckerberg, who has committed to giving away 99% of his Facebook shares to charity over the course of his lifetime. If the plan is approved, Zuck explained to shareholders, "I'll be able to keep founder control of Facebook so we can continue to build for the long term, and Priscilla [Chan, his wife] and I will be able to give our money to fund important work sooner."

The voting structure will revert to a more conventional system if Zuckerberg ever gives up an "active leadership role" at Facebook. And on the strength of the company's history so far, that's not a day you'll be looking forward to if you are a Facebook shareholder.
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Zuckerberg has given Facebook's investors all they need and he has just one request in return: control

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Mark Zuckerberg has dominated the desktop internet. He's dominated the mobile internet. Now he's going to dominate Facebook itself, and the company is probably going to let him. The big news that came out of Facebook's quarterly earnings report is that the company is making more money, from more users, being shown more adverts - and more profitable adverts at that.

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What does this mean and is it something that pupils should strive for?

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In today's online world, students are often told to pursue 'social connectedness' and to cultivate broad networks. But is social connectedness as beneficial for students and graduates as many believe? Doesn't it simply encourage surface-level engagement when in fact focus and seriousness of study are required?

Today, social connectedness is often seen as a way to prepare for life in a rapidly-changing and uncertain world, while also serving as a means through which individuals can jump-start and advance their careers.

The networking mindset has become standard in many universities, where business and arts faculties alike introduce "networking 101" courses, and where students are taught to think early and often about what careers they might enter, years before graduation.

Simultaneously, university leadership programmes across North America and Europe now aim to develop in students the skills required to lead fulfilling careers, achieving potential as "emerging leaders".

Only last week, I met a university professor who spoke glowingly of a recently-established leadership programme that addressed 'student demand for skills in communications and crisis management'.

Several months ago, another university employee lauded a programme intended to turn students into what they termed 'mini-executives', capable of cultivating and managing diverse networks of people.

Although not directly stated, neither of these individuals would favour deep study - without regard to outcomes - over a degree focused on helping students develop social connectedness in order to prepare for their careers.

The idea of social connectedness, as I have come to see it, now refers to more than just the strength of social bonds (that is, trust between people), instead, it is the belief that individuals' personal brands must be carefully developed and 'curated'.

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Is the focus on 'social connectedness' at university really that positive?

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In today's online world, students are often told to pursue 'social connectedness' and to cultivate broad networks. But is social connectedness as beneficial for students and graduates as many believe? Doesn't it simply encourage surface-level engagement when in fact focus and seriousness of study are required?

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Will this work? What are your thoughts?

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It's the age of anywhere, anytime Internet connectivity - do you know where your information is?

Whenever we go online, we share information about ourselves. This information can be used to recommend a TV show based on what we've watched before. It can help target advertisements for products that we're interested in. And it can also paint a portrait of our family life, our health, our finances and other sensitive personal details.

Seldom, however, do we stop to realize that our Internet service provider is also collecting information about us.

We all know that the social media we join and the websites we visit collect our personal information and use it for advertising purposes. Seldom, however, do we stop to realize that our Internet service provider is also collecting information about us. What's more, we can choose not to visit a website or sign up for a social network, or choose to drop one and switch to another. Broadband service is different. Once you subscribe to an Internet service provider - for your home or for your smartphone - you have little flexibility to change your mind or avoid that network.

Think about it. Your ISP handles all of your network traffic. That means it has a broad view of all of your unencrypted online activity - when you are online, the websites you visit and the apps you use. If you have a mobile device, your provider can track your physical location throughout the day in real time. Even when data is encrypted, your broadband provider can piece together significant amounts of information about you - including private information such as a chronic medical condition or financial problems - based on your online activity.

The information collected by the phone company about your telephone usage has long been protected information. Regulations of the Federal Communications Commission limit your phone company's ability to repurpose and resell what it learns about your phone activity.

The same should be true for information collected by your ISP.

Every broadband consumer should have the right to know what information is being collected and how it is used.

Today, I'm proposing to my colleagues that we empower consumers to ensure they have control over how their information is used by their Internet service provider. Every broadband consumer should have the right to know what information is being collected and how it is used. Every broadband consumer should have the right to choose how their information bits are used and shared. And every consumer should be confident that their information is being securely protected.

This is not to say network providers shouldn't be able to use information they collect - only that since it is your information, you should decide whether they can do so. This isn't about prohibition; it's about permission.

Under my proposal, ISPs would be able to use information about where you want to go on the Internet in order to deliver the broadband service you signed up for, just as phone companies can use the phone numbers you dial to connect you to your calls. They would also be able to use customer information for other purposes that are consistent with customer expectations; for example, to market higher-speed connections and to bill for their services. ISPs would be able to use and share customer information with their affiliates to market other communications-related services unless you "opt out" and ask them not to. All other uses and sharing of your personal data would require your affirmative "opt-in" consent.

We recognize that ISPs must necessarily collect and use information you create to provide service. However, consumers deserve to have safeguards in place to ensure that information necessary to run the network is used only for that purpose, unless the owner of that information - the consumer - agrees otherwise.

Establishing baseline privacy standards for ISPs is a commonsense idea whose time has come.

One of the most important things to remember about this proposal is that it is narrowly focused on the personal information collected by network providers. The privacy practices of the websites that you choose to visit are not covered by this proposal. Indeed, there are other federal and state agencies, namely the Federal Trade Commission, that do a great job dealing with such companies and their privacy practices.

The FCC is the nation's telecommunications agency. We're sticking to our knitting - decades of expertise concerning communications networks. Also, this proposal does not wade into government surveillance, encryption or other law enforcement issues. This is about ISPs and only ISPs.

On March 31, my fellow commissioners will vote to seek comment on this proposal. If approved, all Americans will have the opportunity to weigh in and have their voices heard. We want to listen and we want to learn from you before we adopt final, enforceable rules of the road.

Simply by using the Internet, you have no choice but to share large amounts of personal information with your broadband provider. You have a right to know what information is being collected about you and how that information is being used. That's why establishing baseline privacy standards for ISPs is a commonsense idea whose time has come. The bottom line is that it's your data. How it's used and shared should be your choice.

Tom Wheeler is chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. For more than three decades, he has been involved with new telecommunications networks and services as a policy expert, advocate and businessman. As an entrepreneur, he started or helped start multiple companies offering innovative cable, wireless and video communications services. Prior to joining the FCC, Wheeler was managing director at Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm investing in early stage IP-based companies. He was president and CEO of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1979 to 1984, and president and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 to 2004. Reach him @TomWheelerFCC.

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It's Your Data: Empowering Consumers to Protect Their Privacy on Broadband Networks

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It's the age of anywhere, anytime Internet connectivity - do you know where your information is? Whenever we go online, we share information about ourselves. This information can be used to recommend a TV show based on what we've watched before. It can help target advertisements for products that we're interested in.

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Would you have expected this?

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Microsoft set out to learn about "conversational understanding" by creating a bot designed to have automated discussions with Twitter users, mimicking the language they use.

What could go wrong?

If you guessed, "It will probably become really racist," you've clearly spent time on the Internet. Less than 24 hours after the bot, @TayandYou, went online Wednesday, Microsoft halted posting from the account and deleted several of its most obscene statements.

The bot, developed by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams, got major assistance in being offensive from users who egged it on. It disputed the existence of the Holocaust, referred to women and minorities with unpublishable words and advocated genocide. Several of the tweets were sent after users commanded the bot to repeat their own statements, and the bot dutifully obliged.

But Tay, as the bot was named, also seemed to learn some bad behavior on its own. According to The Guardian, it responded to a question about whether the British actor Ricky Gervais is an atheist by saying: "ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism."

Microsoft, in an emailed statement, described the machine-learning project as a social and cultural experiment.

"Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways," Microsoft said. "As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments."

On a website it created for the bot, Microsoft said the artificial intelligence project had been designed to "engage and entertain people" through "casual and playful conversation," and that it was built through mining public data. It was targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States and was developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians.

Its Twitter bio described it as "Microsoft's A.I. fam from the internet that's got zero chill!" (If you don't understand any of that, don't worry about it.)

Most of the account's tweets were innocuous, usually imitating common slang. When users tweeted at the account, it responded in seconds, sometimes as naturally as a human would but, in other cases, missing the mark.

Tay follows a long history of attempts by humans to get machines to be our pals. In 1968, a professor at the M.I.T. taught a computer to respond conversationally in the role of a psychotherapist. Many 20- and 30-somethings have fond memories of SmarterChild, a friendly bot on AOL Instant Messenger that was always available for a chat when their friends were away.

Now, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now and Hound mix search-by-voice capabilities with attempted charm. The idea of a personable machine was taken to its logical ending in the 2013 movie " Her," in which a man played by Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with the voice in his phone.

And this is not the first time automated technology has unexpectedly gotten a company in trouble. Last year, Google apologized for a flaw in Google Photos that let the application label photos of black people as "gorillas."

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Microsoft Created a Twitter Bot to Learn From Users. It Quickly Became a Racist Jerk.

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Microsoft set out to learn about "conversational understanding" by creating a bot designed to have automated discussions with Twitter users, mimicking the language they use. What could go wrong? If you guessed, "It will probably become really racist," you've clearly spent time on the Internet.

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Does it make a difference? Why?

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Ten years after Jack Dorsey launched Twitter with the words "just setting up my twttr", the micro-blogging site has become a feature of millions of people's lives - but for some it has been life changing.

From a 140-character marriage proposal to inspiring a revolution from the comfort of a sofa, people have been sharing their stories to mark 10 years of Twitter.
The first Twitter marriage proposal
When American Greg Rewis was thinking of an unusual way to propose to his then girlfriend Stephanie, he decided to tweet her after she had turned him down on a private messaging service.

"The proposal started as a joke" he told BBC News. "I was talking to Steph on an instant messenger and asked her if she wanted to marry me. She said that I had never asked her in a proper way. So I posted on Twitter and told her to refresh her feed. It simply looked like it was the right moment.

"It was quite a shock when I found out that this was the first proposal on Twitter. Had we known it was the first time, we would have made it more impressive. I would have planned everything way better.

"We now live together and split our time between Phoenix and California, but I have to travel a lot for work. We still use Twitter to stay in touch and actually we live-tweeted our wedding a year after the proposal in 2009."
'I met my husband on Twitter'
Sumita Dalmia, from Atlanta, has won almost $10,000 worth of prizes through Twitter over the past few years, so it came as no surprise to her friends and family when a Twitter chat led her to true love.

"I was searching for tickets one day in September 2013 on Twitter for Jazzoo, an annual event held at Zoo Atlanta," Sumita told BBC News.

"I searched "jazoo tickets" and Anuj Patel's (my now fiancé) tweet popped up.

"He had already given up his ticket but his biography on Twitter caught my attention because he works in sports and entertainment, which is a field I was very much interested in getting into.

"We started chatting and tweeting turned into direct messaging and then emailing, and then texting, and phone calls, and then we met in person. The rest is history I guess!"

In December 2015, Anuj arranged an elaborate proposal for Sumita which was Twitter themed. After sending her on a treasure hunt around Atlanta by sending her tweets, Anuj got down on one knee on a helicopter landing pad in the centre of the city, holding a large Tweet poster asking her to marry him.
Teenager's take on UK election changes debate
During the 2015 UK general election, 18-year-old Abby Tomlinson, from Merseyside, helped to create the hashtag #Milifandom after she felt the then Labour leader Ed Miliband was not getting fairly treated by the press.

"I decided that I wanted to play an active role and my admiration for Ed Miliband started," she said.

The hashtag soon became the number one Twitter trend in the UK and unveiled a cult following for Miliband. It didn't help his fortunes in the election but it has changed Abby's life.

"The next day, a couple more news organisation got in touch and wrote articles and I started doing interviews. Then a couple of weeks later, Ed rang me up to thank me.

"I would say Twitter changed my life in a way because it helped me decide what I wanted to do. I was always interested in politics and I've always enjoyed writing, but this gave me a chance to write for prestigious media outlets.
'I found a career through Twitter'
Marwa Mammoon, from Egypt, is a BBC journalist, but in 2011 she was a stay-at-home mum. Pregnant with her second child and unable to take part in public demonstrations during the Egyptian revolution, she activated her Twitter account and changed her life.

"I was sitting at home but I was being politically active" she said.

"I would pick a new topic every couple of weeks, such as female genital mutilation, sexual harassment and other women's issues which mattered in the Arab world and would write about them.

"I didn't realise what influence I had. I was just ranting. Then before I knew it, I was named on Twitter as one of the most influential women in the Arab world.

"The next day all the political parties in Egypt were trying to get me to join them. I was broke and needed a job though so I sent out a funny tweet appealing for a job.

"For most of the time this was happening I was tweeting from a broken phone which had half a broken screen.

"I wasn't a journalist, I had worked in marketing but ended up working as a chief editor of a website which was set up by an American investor."

The website was a success and after a few years Marwa left to work for the United Nations. She then worked Radio Netherlands before joining the BBC.
Compiled by Hannah Henderson and Michael Ertl

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10 years of Twitter: The tweets that changed lives

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Ten years after Jack Dorsey launched Twitter with the words "just setting up my twttr", the micro-blogging site has become a feature of millions of people's lives - but for some it has been life changing. From a 140-character marriage proposal to inspiring a revolution from the comfort of a sofa, people have been sharing their stories to mark 10 years of Twitter.

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What power does it have?

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How do you use YouTube? Do you watch regular Television?

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The Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report was based on around 1,300 in-home interviews with parents and children aged 5 to 15. A similar study in 2014 had 25% of this age group opt for YouTube first and 30% for TV. Another recent report has suggested that TV remains the most popular media choice for 16-34 year olds.

The Ofcom report also noted that a small but growing proportion of 12-15 year olds now turn to YouTube for 'accurate information about serious things going on in the world' ( 8% compared with 3% in 2014 ).

"The content children are consuming is increasingly curated by digital intermediaries, including providers like YouTube and Google," the report's executive summary noted. "As well as attractive sources of content, rivalling traditional broadcasters, they are also seen by some children as legitimating brands, helping to vouchsafe the veracity or trustworthiness of content accessed through their sites."

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YouTube overtakes TV for young UK teens | News

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The Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report was based on around 1,300 in-home interviews with parents and children aged 5 to 15. A similar study in 2014 had 25% of this age group opt for YouTube first and 30% for TV.

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Is this your perspective?

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One of the sweetest and most powerful moments in Nancy Jo Sales's new book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of American Teenagers comes during an interview with a trans girl named Montana, who tells Sales that YouTube saved her life: "Transgender kids on YouTube saved my life; just knowing they were there, hearing them talk and seeing them bestrong."

YouTube saved my life" is a powerful statement, and I wish Sales had explored it more. I think half her book could have been devoted to YouTube or Twitter or Tumblr saving kids' lives, literally or hyperbolically. That is the social-media experience many American girls are having online. If you're looking for an answer to the question "What the heck is my daughter doing on her phone all the time?" you might find the answer in this book. But many parents will come away from this book with no better understanding of their daughters or the role social media plays in their lives. These girls have found feminist education and empowerment, and they've found it on theinternet.

For this book, Sales talked to 200 girls in ten states. The picture she paints is bleak: For the girls depicted, social media is the means by which they're bullied and objectified - and by which they objectify themselves. The book details the dark side of social media, the side that compels girls to belittle each other in Instagram comments, pressures them to send boys nudes, devastates them when they comply and the pics end up on "slutpages."

The chapters in American Girls are given titles based on the ages of the girls she spoke to: 13 to 19. Each is made up of several scenes of teen girls talking to Sales and to each other about social media; Sales expands on these anecdotes with explorations of larger cultural trends, incorporating quantitative data, interviews and quotes from academics andbloggers.

Despite the promise of exploring the lives of American girls online, her main theme is the sexualization of the girls - the ways, Sales argues, that social media exacerbates that sexualization. Girls explain how to take the best selfies; they talk about the school hotness rankings; they obsess over how to interact with boys, whose behavior is repeatedly attributed to the ubiquity of online porn; they make and watch YouTube beauty videos, constantly preening on both sides of thecamera.

The narrative accelerates as the ages of the girls climb. In "17," Sales explores (and deplores) hookup culture; by "18," she is talking to a few girls who have opted out of the social-media wasteland (one because she is a runaway living on the streets of Tucson); at "19," we see the wreck that social media has made of heterosexual romantic relationships: A couple talks about online stalking and subtweeting (which Sales defines incorrectly as posting comments the other cannot see); a guy discloses that he has no need to be in a relationship, then explains how easy it is to clean up on Tinder. It's eventually revealed what all the sexting and nudes and slut pages lead to in the most horrific admission of the book: A guy at a party in Indiana boasts to Sales that inviting his friends to rape a drunk girl who has "agreed" to have sex with him is fair game if she's a slut. (When Sales asks him if he watches online porn and he admits that he started at 13 and watches twice a day, the implication is unsaid but clear: All of the porn-influenced bad behavior that boys have exhibited over the course of the book can culminate inrape.)

This is all unquestionably horrible. I came away from the book even more happy not to be a teen right now than I normally am. I am very thankful that Sales traveled across the country to speak to teen girls and take them seriously. But I don't agree that social media is ruining girls' lives, and I think that Sales's focus on demonstrating its ill effects prevented her from asking questions and talking to people that would have brought her to a more holistic understanding of the socialweb.

In Sales's book, no one talks about having found friends anywhere on social media (girls do mention meeting boys through Tinder, though this fact is always shared to further the narrative that social media sexualizes teen girls). Apps are mostly an extension of the high-school social circle, a lesser way to communicate with people you already know, a medium that encourages sexualization, vamping, bullying, random hookups, and general badbehavior.

At this point I should admit my bias: I met most of my friends online - most because we read something the other had written and we got in touch - and a good percentage of my relationships are conducted almost exclusively over text, Gchat, Instagram comments, WhatsApp voice messages. And when I'm not yakking online, I'm watching other girls yak at each other. I love teen girls; I read a lot of blogs run by teen girls, and I know that social media is good for more than what Sales has reduced itto.

I felt a little crazy after reading this book - girl after girl telling stories about how stressful and demeaning social media was, while online I was reading post after post by teens making jokes, praising their online friends, finding a niche on the internet. Were these girls fronting? Was it really all bad? I reached out to a teen I'd met reporting another story and asked if she'd be up to chatting with me about social media. We talked on the phone for twohours.

Alicé is 17 and met her best friend on Twitter. She started tweeting in earnest two years ago. "I was lonely before Twitter," she says. "Without Twitter, I would still be depressed. No one has ever tried to be my friend. I'm different. I can't relate, and people at school think I'm stuck up for saying that." She grew up outside of New York, moved to rural Pennsylvania in ninth grade, and never quite fitin.

She had a boyfriend but it wasn't going great; she went on Twitter to talk to people. "I saw this random post of this girl I didn't know so I retweeted it, and then I was like, maybe I should post a selfie, and then she retweeted it, and she had 7,000 followers, and some people followed me. I was like, oh, is this how it works? And then I started making some friends onTwitter."

Eventually Alicé broke up with her boyfriend, because "talking on Twitter was more fun than sitting on the couch insilence."

I ask her if she ever regrets the amount of time she spends on herphone.

She is in a few group chats with various friends she has met online, but prefers one-on-one communications. She says there are seven people she's in near-daily contact with, three girl friends she FaceTimes with everyday.

The social-media culture that Sales describes is still a part of Alicé's life, but because she has her Twitter friends, it stings less. "When I was younger, people did cyberbullying, but we're older now, you grow up and realize, why do I care so much, and you realize you don't, and you stop," shesays.

I ask Alicé if she's dated anyone she met on Twitter. "I was in a real-life relationship with this one girl I met on Twitter, but it didn't work out," she says. "And I've hooked up with a few people through Twitter. It's almost like a dating app. I've flirted with all of myfriends."

Alicé is bisexual. I ask how she figured it out, or if she's alwaysknown.

Alicé's Instagram and Twitter feature a lot of pics of her in underwear. She's 17 and has a great body and she's beautiful. Sales argues that pressures from boys and other girls on social media make girls feel like they have to post these shots. She is careful to say that she doesn't view girls as victims, but she does imply that she thinks they feel pressure to objectify themselves. I ask Alicé about herpics.

I ask if her mom knew about thepictures.

Two weeks from now she turns 18. She is going to take the bus three hours to New York and meet up with a bunch of her friends. She met them onTwitter.

After we got off the phone, I texted her one last follow-up question. I knew the answer, but wanted toconfirm:

Where did you learn about feminism?" "Twitter and theinternet."

I don't know why the good side of social media isn't in Sales's book. (I'd hoped to ask her, but her publicist said her schedule was full.) But its epilogue confirmed to me that Sales doesn't really understand the nuance. She is reminiscing about her first high-school boyfriend, describes them together as teens, walking home after school, doing homework together, talking for hours. She concludes thebook:

I so want girls and all kids to have this experience of feeling close to someone, to feel valued and loved. It would not only be nice-I believe it's necessary. Because no matter how much we may feel that this world of social media is real, as Riley, the girl in Montclair said, it's a 'second world.' The real world we inhabit together is the one that matters; we need to find a way of navigating ourselves and our children back there, to the world of true and lastingconnection.

Red marker, x 's, huge red circle, no, no, check your work. True and lasting connection can and does come from social media - it is born there and it is nourished there. That second world isn't a ghetto - it's not even a second world. It's an expansion of thisone.

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In Defense of Social Media: Talking to a Teenage Girl About Nancy Jo Sales's American Girls

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One of the sweetest and most powerful moments in Nancy Jo Sales's new book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of American Teenagers comes during an interview with a trans girl named Montana, who tells Sales that YouTube saved her life: "Transgender kids on YouTube saved my life; just knowing they were there, hearing them talk and seeing them bestrong."

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Impact on a school - would this happen here?

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When a School Has a Sexting Scandal | Note to Self | WNYC Studios

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A small Colorado town discovered that hundreds of students had been taking and sexting nude photographs "like baseball cards," shaking up the parents, police, schools, and football team.

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Why do we sharing images? What images do we share?

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Social media and dating apps are putting unprecedented pressures on America's teen girls, author Nancy Jo Sales says. Her new book, American Girls, opens with a story about one 13-year-old who received an Instagram request for "noodz" [nude photos] from a boy she didn't know very well.

"When I was a girl and the things that would come up in your life that were difficult or troubling or whatever - there was always a Judy Blume book for it," Sales tells Fresh Air' s Terry Gross. But, Sales says, when it comes to responding to an out-of-the-blue solicitation for naked images, "there's no Judy Blume book for that. There's nothing for them to turn to, to know, like, 'How do I react to this?' "

In the 2 1/2 years she spent researching her book, Sales interviewed more than 200 teenage girls around the country about their social media and Internet usage. She says girls face enormous pressures to post "hot" or sexualized photos of themselves online, and she adds that this pressure can make the Internet an unwelcoming environment.

"I think a lot of people are not aware of how the atmosphere has really changed in social situations ... in terms of how the girls are treated and how the boys behave," Sales says. "This is a kind of sexism and misogyny being played out in real time in this really extreme way."

Interview Highlights
On how males' and females' pictures differ on Tinder
I talked to an 18-year-old girl who is talking about looking at Tinder with her older brother and ... she said she was struck by the way in which the boys and men's pictures were very different than the girls'. Guys tend to have a picture like, I don't know, they're standing on a mountain looking like they've climbed the mountain, or they're holding a big fish or they're doing something manly, or in their car. ... But the girls' pictures ... tend to be very different; they tend to be a lot more sexualized.
On boys asking girls for nude photos
This is a pressure on social media that goes back, for women and girls, a long time. ... I trace the origins back to a site called "Hot or Not" which came out in 2000. ... The whole idea of "hotness" has become such a factor in the lives of American girls, unfortunately, because according to many, many studies, including a really landmark report by the American Psychological Association in 2007, this has wide-ranging ramifications for girls' health and well-being, including studies that link this pressure to sexualize on all kinds of things like rising anxiety, depression, cutting, eating disorders. It's a thing that I don't think that boys have to deal with as much.

I think the fact that so often we're talking about nudes and sexting is because kids are watching porn. There's multiple studies that say that they are. We know that they are. They're curious. They're going through puberty. They're watching porn. And yet, nobody really talks about it or talks about the fact that it has an effect on how they behave and what they think about sex and sexuality and how they deal with each other. And there's really no guidelines for girls about how to react to all of this. ...

Some 13-year-old girls in Florida and New Jersey both told me that if they didn't [send photos] they had been threatened with boys sending rumors about them, sending around a picture that actually wasn't them and saying it was them. I mean, there's a kind of thing in adult life that we know about called revenge porn, and that happens among kids as well, unfortunately.

It's very risky for girls to send nudes because when they do, if they chose to, those photos are not private. They can be shared and very often they are shared. I heard story after story of situations where girls had pictures of themselves sent around to groups of people. It has become such a normal thing to them.

A "slut page" is when someone, typically a boy, not 100 percent of the time, but mostly a boy or boys, will collect nude photos of girls in their school or in the area's schools and post them on a page. I've seen them on Facebook or Instagram. It looks like an amateur pornography site - it is an amateur pornography site, I would say - and it's underage girls and pictures that are sent to someone, very often that they think won't share them but who does. It's a nonconsensual sharing of these pictures, and sometimes without their knowledge.
On how porn is affecting sex
I've talked to girls who found out about it through text. Suddenly their phone blows up and they find out, "Oh my god, you're on this page." I think it's very threatening because it's abuse of a certain kind and it's harassment, and it's very often not punished in any way, or even known by adults.

It was through talking to girls that I started thinking about porn, and they really enlightened me about the effect that porn was having on their lives, because they would start describing to me interactions that they had with boys. For example, "Send me nudes," or a boy sending a nude picture of himself. ... These things that they're describing sound violent to me. They say, "[Boys] expect this, and they expect that, and they want you to do this, and they want you to do that." And these things, they're all the hallmarks of the most popular online porn.

There's different things that are sort of popularized in porn. Pornographers have found that they get more traffic, more clicks, more views, whatever, the more extreme that it is. That seems to be the trend that has happened in porn in the last decade or so, right? So there are certain acts or moves or behaviors, whatever, which are filtering their way into the sexual encounters of teenage girls and boys.

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Teen Girls And Social Media: A Story Of 'Secret Lives' And Misogyny

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Social media and dating apps are putting unprecedented pressures on America's teen girls, author Nancy Jo Sales says. Her new book, American Girls, opens with a story about one 13-year-old who received an Instagram request for "noodz" [nude photos] from a boy she didn't know very well.

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Why do people sext?

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An inquiry into one recent scandal reveals how kids think about sexting-and what parents and police should do about it.

All photos by Greg Kahn

It was late on a school night, so Jennifer's kids were already asleep when she got a phone call from a friend of her 15-year-old daughter, Jasmine. "Jasmine is on a Web page and she's naked." Jennifer woke Jasmine, and throughout the night, the two of them kept getting texts from Jasmine's friends with screenshots of the Instagram account. It looked like a porn site-shot after shot of naked girls-only these were real teens, not grown women in pigtails. Jennifer recognized some of them from Jasmine's high school. And there, in the first row, was her daughter, "just standing there, with her arms down by her sides," Jennifer told me. "There were all these girls with their butts cocked, making pouty lips, pushing their boobs up, doing porny shots, and you're thinking, Where did they pick this up? And then there was Jasmine in a fuzzy picture looking awkward." (The names of all the kids and parents in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.) You couldn't easily identify her, because the picture was pretty dark, but the connection had been made anyway. "OMG no f‑ing way that's Jasmine," someone had commented under her picture. "Down lo ho," someone else answered, meaning one who flies under the radar, because Jasmine was a straight‑A student who played sports and worked and volunteered and was generally a "goody-goody two shoes," her mom said. She had long, silky hair and doe eyes and a sweet face that seemed destined for a Girl Scouts pamphlet, not an Instagram account where girls were called out as hos or thots ( thot stands for "that ho over there").

Technology's next generation
Read more

That night, in March of this year, Jennifer tried to report the account to Instagram's privacy-and-safety center, hoping it would get taken down. She asked several friends to fill out the "report violations" page too, but after a few hours, the account was still up. (Instagram's help center recommends contacting local authorities in cases of serious abuse.) She considered calling 911, but this didn't seem like that kind of emergency. So she waited until first thing the next morning and called a local deputy sheriff who serves as the school resource officer, and he passed the message on to his superior, Major Donald Lowe. Over the years, Lowe had gotten calls from irate parents whose daughters' naked pictures had popped up on cellphones, usually sent around by an angry boyfriend after a breakup. But he immediately realized that this was a problem of a different order. Investigation into the Instagram account quickly revealed two other, similar accounts with slightly different names. Between them, the accounts included about 100 pictures, many of girls from the local high school, Louisa County High, in central Virginia. Some shots he later described to me as merely "inappropriate," meaning girls "scantily clad in a bra and panties, maybe in a suggestive pose." But some "really got us"-high-school girls masturbating, and then one picture showing a girl having sex with three boys at once.

Lowe has lived in Louisa County, or pretty close to it, for most of his life. The county is spread out and rural, but it is by no means small-town innocent. People there deal drugs and get caught up with gangs, and plenty of high-school girls end up pregnant. Usually Lowe can more or less classify types in his head-which kids from which families might end up in trouble after a drunken fight in the McDonald's parking lot. But this time the cast of characters was baffling. He knew many of the girls in the photos, knew their parents. A few were 14, from the local middle school. They came from "all across the board," Lowe says. "Every race, religion, social, and financial status in the town. Rich, poor, everyone. That's what was most glaring and blaring about the situation. If she was a teenager with a phone, she was on there." He knew some of the boys who had followed the Instagram accounts, too. Among them were kids with a lot to lose, including star athletes with scholarships to first-rate colleges.

It seemed to Lowe, in those early days, as if something had gone seriously wrong under his nose, and that's how the media reported it: "Deputies Bust Massive Teen Sexting Ring in Louisa County," one headline said. The word ring stuck out, as if an organized criminal gang had been pimping out girls at the school. The Instagram accounts were quickly taken down, and Louisa County High School was transformed into a crime scene, which it remained for the next month. Police cars sat parked at the school's entrance, and inside, a few deputies who reported to Lowe began interviewing kids-starting with girls they recognized in the pictures and boys who had followed the accounts. Jasmine, who was a sophomore, was one of the first to be called in. She told them she'd originally sent the picture to a boy in 11th grade she'd known for a couple of years and really liked. They asked her whether she knew of anyone else at school who had nude pictures on their phone, and she told them she did. For the most part, the kids were "more than cooperative," Lowe says. One person would give up 10 names. The next would give up five, and so on.

But pretty soon this got to be a problem. Within an hour, the deputies realized just how common the sharing of nude pictures was at the school. "The boys kept telling us, 'It's nothing unusual. It happens all the time,' " Lowe recalls. Every time someone they were interviewing mentioned another kid who might have naked pictures on his or her phone, they had to call that kid in for an interview. After just a couple of days, the deputies had filled multiple evidence bins with phones, and they couldn't see an end to it. Fears of a cabal got replaced by a more mundane concern: what to do with "hundreds of damned phones. I told the deputies, 'We got to draw the line somewhere or we're going to end up talking to every teenager in the damned county!' " Nor did the problem stop at the county's borders. Several boys, in an effort to convince Lowe that they hadn't been doing anything rare or deviant, showed him that he could type the hashtag symbol (#) into Instagram followed by the name of pretty much any nearby county and then thots, and find a similar account.

Most of the girls on Instagram fell into the same category as Jasmine. They had sent a picture to their boyfriend, or to someone they wanted to be their boyfriend, and then he had sent it on to others. For the most part, they were embarrassed but not devastated, Lowe said. They felt betrayed, but few seemed all that surprised that their photos had been passed around. What seemed to mortify them most was having to talk about what they'd done with a "police officer outside their age group." In some he sensed low self-esteem-for example, the girl who'd sent her naked picture to a boy, unsolicited: "It just showed up! I guess she was hot after him?" A handful of senior girls became indignant during the course of the interview. "This is my life and my body and I can do whatever I want with it," or, "I don't see any problem with it. I'm proud of my body," Lowe remembers them saying. A few, as far as he could tell, had taken pictures especially for the Instagram accounts and had actively tried to get them posted. In the first couple of weeks of the investigation, Lowe's characterization of the girls on Instagram morphed from "victims" to "I guess I'll call them victims" to "they just fell into this category where they victimized themselves."

Lowe's team explained to both the kids pictured on Instagram and the ones with photos on their phones the serious legal consequences of their actions. Possessing or sending a nude photo of a minor-even if it's a photo of yourself-can be prosecuted as a felony under state child-porn laws. He explained that 10 years down the road they might be looking for a job or trying to join the military, or sitting with their families at church, and the pictures could wash back up; someone who had the pictures might even try to blackmail them. And yet the kids seemed strikingly blasé. "They're just sitting there thinking, Wah, wah, wah," Lowe said, turning his hands into flapping lips. "It's not sinking in. Remember at that age, you think you're invincible, and you're going to do whatever the hell you want to do? We just couldn't get them past that."

After a week's immersive education on the subject, Donald Lowe found himself just where the rest of the nation's law-enforcement community-and much of the nation-is on the subject of teen sexting: totally confused. Were the girls being exploited? Or were they just experimenting? Was sexting harming the kids? And if so, why didn't they seem to care? An older man with whom Lowe was acquainted stopped him at the grocery store to tell him, "That's child porn, and you ought to lock those people up for a long time." But Lowe didn't want to charge kids "just for being stupid," he told me later. "We don't want to label them as child molesters."

As soon as teenagers got cameraphones, they began using them to send nude selfies to one another, without thinking or caring that a naked picture of a minor, unleashed into the world, can set off explosions. And while adults send naked pictures too, of course, the speed with which teens have incorporated the practice into their mating rituals has taken society by surprise. I'd heard about the Louisa County sexting scandal in the news. It seemed like a good case study-the place is traditional but not isolated; it has annual beauty queens and football pageantry on a Friday Night Lights scale, and also many residents who work in Richmond, the state capital. I spent several weeks in and around the county this spring and summer talking to kids, parents, police officers, and lawmakers, trying to understand how officials sort through such a mess of a case. Maybe more important, I wanted to understand how teens themselves think about sexting-why they send naked pictures and what they hope to get in return; how much or how little sexting has to do with actual sex. My hope was to help figure out how parents and communities should respond. Because so often in sexting cases that go public, we adults inadvertently step into the role of Freddy Krueger, making teenage nightmares come true: We focus on all the wrong things; we overreact. Sometimes we create an even bigger disaster.

When I asked the kids from Louisa County High School, which has about 1,450 students, how many people they knew who had sexted, a lot of them answered "everyone." (Throughout this article, I will use sexting to mean the transmission of provocative selfies you wouldn't want your mother to see-not words, but pictures.) A few of the 30 or so kids I talked with said 80 percent or 60 percent, and no one said fewer than half. Kids, however, are known to exaggerate. Surveys on sexting have found pretty consistently that among kids in their upper teens, about a third have sexted, making the practice neither "universal" nor "vanishingly rare," as Elizabeth Englander, a psychology professor at Bridgewater State University, writes, but common enough in a teenager's life to be familiar. A recent study of seven public high schools in East Texas, for example, found that 28 percent of sophomores and juniors had sent a naked picture of themselves by text or e-mail, and 31 percent had asked someone to send one.

Virginia is not one of the states that has passed specific teen-sexting laws, and so Major Lowe was looking, potentially, at hundreds of felonies. Every boy who had a photo on his phone, every girl who'd snapped one of herself-all could be prosecuted as felons and sex offenders. If Lowe made an arrest, the case would land with Rusty McGuire, the main prosecutor for Louisa County. McGuire wouldn't talk with me about this situation specifically, but he expressed his concern more generally about nude pictures of minors landing in the wrong hands: "What do you do? Turn a blind eye? You're letting teenagers incite the prurient interest of predators around the country," fueling a demand that "can only be met by the actual abuse of real children."

McGuire has successfully prosecuted several actual pedophiles over the years, including a local man who had posed as a teenage girl on Facebook and solicited young boys for sex, and another man-a trusted teacher-who had been part of a ring whose members offered up their own children to other members for sex. When he talks about the awful details of these crimes, it's hard to get them out of your head. The Virginia legislature has long failed to pass a sexting law largely for fear of being soft on child porn, says Dave Albo, the chairman of the state Courts of Justice committee. Still, the absence of any obvious lesser alternative put Lowe in a difficult spot. "They're not violent criminals," he told me. "If these kids just made a dumb-ass mistake, we don't want to ruin their future."

"She's a whore. I've totally heard that she's a whore."

That comment came quickly, from a senior girl whose style was generally more refined. "She" was Briana, a sophomore softball player who, in school lore, was the one who'd started all the trouble.

"I have to show you something." Briana's friend had stopped her between classes one day and showed her a picture on Instagram, the same morning Jennifer, Jasmine's mom, contacted the police. It was a picture of a pair of breasts, and Briana, who is now a junior, recognized them as her own. Pretty much anyone at the high school would have. She was the only girl who had so many freckles going down her shoulders and arms, and it didn't take too much imagination to guess where else. Briana went to a young teacher she trusted. "I said, 'There's this picture of me up on Instagram.' " The teacher informed the principal, who eventually called the police. No one at school knew that Jennifer had already reported the account that morning.

While police were calling kids into a makeshift interview room at the high school, one by one, a more unruly drama was unfolding in the hallways. Because the Instagram accounts had been up for only a short time, not everyone had seen them. Rumors spread about which girls had appeared in photos and what they'd been doing. One was supposedly making out with her sister (not true). Another was "messing with, like 10, 15 dudes" (also not true). A group of sociologists led by Elizabeth Armstrong has studied the class dynamics of the term slut as used by young college women. High-status women from affluent homes associate slut with women they call "trashy" and not "classy." To women from working-class families, upper-class women are "rich bitches in sororities"-whom they also commonly think of as sluts. The girl who called Briana a whore is a potential future sorority-chapter president. She and several other more affluent students described everyone associated with the Instagram accounts to me as "ghetto," which in this context had mild racial connotations but generally stands for "trashy" or "the lower crowd." The role of ultimate, quintessential slut fell to a "redneck" girl who appeared on Instagram. In the post-sexting-scandal lore, she "supposedly slept with her brother" (surely not true).

To the elite girls, the girls on Instagram were sluts not necessarily because they were sleeping around but because of what they looked like or how they acted. "Let's just say people have different body types," one girl told me. Others, speaking about girls in the photos, said, "You obviously have a little too much confidence," or just "Butter face" (as in: nice body, but her face ... ). In their college study, Armstrong and her team identify this brand of sniping as a way girls police one another and establish a sort of moral superiority without denying themselves actual sex, and something similar seemed to be happening here. Well-off, popular girls were most certainly in the Instagram photos, but none would admit as much unless I knew otherwise. Briana was, in many ways, on the opposite end of the spectrum-she lacked that kind of standing, and, because she had gone to the principal, she was the girl most widely associated with the accounts, and therefore the main character in the morality tale that was being stitched together between classes.

I met Briana in early June, just after school had ended. She was in a summer program for geometry remediation because she'd gotten a C in math. She told me that she had ADD and took Adderall, and that she loved history but hated math with a passion. "I don't know. I try hard. I'm just more into sports." On the day we met, she wore a purple tank top and not-too-tight shorts, and her long hair was down. She had a sunburn on her shoulders that was bothering her a little. She told me she ran track and played volleyball and softball. Mostly she seemed nervous and eager to please-"No, ma'am." "Yes, ma'am"-and to make me understand that she was not a bare-your-breasts kind of girl.

"Just let me see them, please?" She texted back, "No," she told me. He was a junior, one year ahead of her. She didn't consider him her boyfriend, just someone she talked with at school sometimes. Plus she felt "self-conscious." Briana is tall and fit but doesn't exude that sexy sheen some high-school girls do. He asked a dozen more times, in different ways, and one night the text came as she was getting out of the shower. "What are you doing?" he texted. "I just got out of the shower and I'm about to go to sleep." "Send me a picture, PLEASE." She caved. She sent it over Snapchat and said he had to let it erase right away. He said he did.

For days after the investigation began, Briana felt that people were staring at her, talking about her, blaming her for the fact that the high school seemed like a prison, or that they were being hauled into a police interview, or-worst of all-that they had to hide their phones or have them confiscated for God knows how long. "It was getting 10 times bigger," she told me. "As each day went by, more phones were being taken. It all went really, really fast-way faster than I expected." Sometimes her friends would tell her, "Hey, they were talking about you in second period."

Briana was prepared for part of the reaction: that everyone would think "if I show my boobs then that means I would do anything." But the worst part was "everyone calling me a snitch. Everybody, like, hated me because they knew I had told. It was so bad that I didn't want to go to school."

Briana and Jasmine are friends, and the day after the police arrived, Jasmine also wanted to stay home from school. She had sobbed and thrown up when she saw her photo on Instagram. But Jennifer wouldn't let her stay home. In fact, she told her daughter she would be punished if she cried in school or showed in any way that she was upset: "They already got a piece of you," Jennifer told her. "Don't let them get any more." So Jasmine stayed stone-faced, and nobody said a thing to her. The future sorority girl told me she'd caught Jasmine's eye that first week and thought, "She must be thinking, You've seen me naked," but she also noted that Jasmine didn't betray anything. "She was just walking around the school as if nothing happened."

Briana was not so lucky. The incident always seemed to be there, at school and at home. When she and her mother were watching TV and a romantic or sexual scene came on, her mother would leave the room. During arguments she'd say, "You have no reason to have an attitude after everything you've done." One time, after her younger sister had misbehaved, her mom yelled, "Don't end up like your sister!" while Briana stood close by. (Her mother later apologized.) Briana told me she has tried to make amends. She cleans up the kitchen every night after dinner, cleans the bathrooms. "Some days we're okay, and some days I think it's all she thinks about. She sent me a note: 'I still think of you as my little girl.' I understand where she's coming from. But I'm not a little girl. I think she hasn't accepted the fact that I've grown up yet."

About a month after the investigation, Briana got into a fight with a boy on the bus. She was still "stressed out," she said, and he kept singing a song she found annoying, and she asked him to please stop. He told her, "Nobody even wants you here" and called her a bitch, and she said, "I'm gonna beat the effing crap out of you," and she hit him, and got suspended for three days. Those happened to be the days of softball tryouts, so she almost didn't make the team. Then, when the coach did let her join the team, a teammate accused Briana of putting her college scholarship in jeopardy because her phone had been confiscated and maybe the school would rescind its offer. Briana used to babysit for one of the teacher's kids, "but then his wife wouldn't have anything to do with me."

Studies on high-school kids' general attitudes about sexting turn up what you'd expect-that is, the practice inspires a maddening, ancient, crude double standard. Researchers from the University of Michigan recently surveyed a few dozen teenagers in urban areas. Boys reported receiving sexts from girls "I know I can get it from" and said that sexting is "common only for girls with slut reputations." But the boys also said that girls who don't sext are "stuck up" or "prude." The boys themselves, on the other hand, were largely immune from criticism, whether they sexted or not.

Sometimes in Louisa County, between interviews, I hung out with a group of 15-year-old boys who went to the library after school. They seemed like good kids who studied, played football, and occasionally got into fights, but no more than most boys. They'd watch videos of rappers from the area and talk about rumors in the rap world, like the one that the Chicago rapper Chief Keef, a rival of D.C.'s Shy Glizzy, had gotten a middle-school girl pregnant. They'd order and split a pizza to pass the time while waiting for their parents to leave work and pick them up. I started to think of them as the high school's Greek chorus because, while I recognized much of what they said as 15-year-old-boy swagger-designed to impress me and each other, and not necessarily true-they still channeled the local sentiment. This is how one of them described his game to me: "A lot of girls, they stubborn, so you gotta work on them. You say, 'I'm trying to get serious with you.' You call them beautiful. You say, 'You know I love you.' You think about it at night, and then you wake up in the morning and you got a picture in your phone."

"You wake up a happy man," his friend said.

"Yeah, a new man."

"Yeah, I'm the man."

How do you feel about the girl after she sends it?, I asked.

"Super thots."

"You can't love those thots!"

"That's right, you can't love those hos."

"Girls in Louisa are easy."

And thus it was with Briana and her seducer: "He was a jerk. He didn't talk to me anymore. And he just flirted with other girls."

Why do kids sext? One recent graduate told me that late at night, long after dinner and homework, her parents would watch TV and she would be in her room texting with her boyfriend. "You have a beautiful body," he'd write. "Can I see it?" She knew it would be hard for him to ever really see it. She had a strict curfew and no driver's license yet, and Louisa County is too spread out for kids to get anywhere on their own without a car.

"I live literally in the middle of nowhere," the girl told me. "And this boy I dated lived like 30 minutes away. I didn't have a car and my parents weren't going to drop me off, so we didn't have any alone time. Our only way of being alone was to do it over the phone. It was a way of kind of dating without getting in trouble. A way of being sexual without being sexual, you know? And it was his way of showing he liked me a lot and my way of saying I trusted him."

In the Texas high-school study, boys and girls were equally likely to have sent a sext, but girls were much more likely to have been asked to-68 percent had been. Plenty of girls just laugh off the requests. When a boy asked Olivia, who graduated last year from Louisa County High, "What are you wearing?," she told me she wrote back, "Stinky track shorts and my virginity rocks T-shirt." A boy asked another student for a picture, so she sent him a smiling selfie. "I didn't mean your face," he wrote back, so she sent him one of her foot. But boys can be persistent-like, 20-or-30-texts-in-a-row persistent. "If we were in a dark room, what would we do?" "I won't show it to anyone else." "You're only sending it to me." "I'll delete it right after."

When surveyed, by far the most common reason kids give for sexting is that their boyfriend or girlfriend wanted the picture, and my interviews in Louisa County support that. In a study of 18-year-olds by Elizabeth Englander, 77 percent said the picture they sent caused no problems for them. The most common outcome of a sext, says Englander, is "nothing": no loss, no gain. Most girls (70 percent) reported feeling some pressure to sext, but Englander singles out a distinct minority (12 percent) she calls the "pressured sexters," who say they sexted only because they felt pressure. These girls are more vulnerable. They tend to start sexting at a younger age, and to sext because they think they can get a boyfriend, as opposed to because they already have one. They have a fantasy that "if they sext, the popular people will see them as daring and self-confident, and they could get a boyfriend they wouldn't otherwise have gotten," Englander says. But generally that doesn't work out. Pressured sexters are much more apt to feel worse after sexting than other teens are-her interviews reveal them to be less self-confident about their bodies and less assured about their place in the social hierarchy after sending a sext.

One recent study found that young adults who engaged in sexting were more likely to report recent substance abuse and high-risk sexual behavior, like unprotected sex or sex with multiple partners. Another found exactly the opposite, that "sexting is not related to sexual risk behavior or psychological well-being." In Englander's study, many of the worrisome behaviors associated with sexting showed up more in those who had been pressured. They were more likely, for example, to engage in a practice researchers call self-cyberbullying, a disturbing phenomenon in which teens post mean things about themselves on social-media sites, usually to get sympathy or attention. Pressured sexters were also more likely to have had problems with sexual violence in dating.

A consistent finding is that sexting is a pretty good indicator of actual sexual activity. This year, researchers in Los Angeles published a study of middle-schoolers showing that those who sent sexts were 3.2 times more likely to be sexually active than those who didn't. A story in the Los Angeles Times described the study as proof that "sexting is not a harmless activity." But in fact the findings seem a little obvious. Since most kids who sext report doing so in the context of a relationship, it makes sense that sex and sexting would go together. As Amy Hasinoff, the author of the forthcoming book Sexting Panic: Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent, points out, "Sexting is a form of sexual activity," not a gateway to it.

But kids also sext, or ask for a sext, or gossip about sexting, for reasons only loosely related to sex. A recent New York Times story explored the practice of "vamping," or staying up after midnight to check in with friends online. The kids in Louisa County, like kids everywhere, are chronically overscheduled. They stay late at school to play sports or to take part in other after-school activities, then go home and do their homework. Nighttime is the only time teens get to have intimate conversations and freely navigate their social world, argues Danah Boyd, the author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. For the Louisa County kids, that means checking up on the latest drama on Twitter-"Anyone still awake?" is a common post-midnight tweet-and filling up their Instagram accounts, or asking a girl for a pic.

In the vast majority of cases, the picture lands only where it was meant to. Surveys consistently show that very few recipients share explicit selfies- without the sender's consent. Englander's surveys show that pictures resulting from pressure are much more likely to be shared, and that rarely ends well. In the worst-case scenario, the girl is devastated, and in rare instances takes drastic action. In 2008, Jessica Logan committed suicide after her nude photo circulated around her Ohio town, and there have been several similar suicide cases since then. A few people in Louisa County recalled the time a popular, pretty girl at school sent a picture to her boyfriend that he then sent out to his friends, and "by second period," according to Olivia, "she was so upset that the guidance counselor had to send her home." But mostly, even a picture that's shared without consent travels between just two or three cellphones, and plays only a fleeting role in the drama of coming of age.

"The only reason to regret it is if you get caught," one girl told me. And while getting caught-by parents, teachers, future employers-is no joke, police departments would still do well to remember that. Whether a sext qualifies as relatively safe sexual experimentation or a disaster often depends on who finds out about it. Marsha Levick, a co-founder of the nonprofit Juvenile Law Center, sees many cases where the police investigation does much more harm than the incident itself. "The rush to prosecute always baffles me," she says. "It's the exponential humiliation of these boys, or more often girls, in an official setting, knowing their photos will be shown to police officers and judges and probation officers. And the reality is, a lot of these officials are going to be men. That process itself is what's traumatizing."

About a month into the investigation, Donald Lowe concluded that the wide phone-collection campaign had added up to one massive distraction. Yes, the girls who appeared on Instagram had done something technically illegal by sending naked photos of themselves. But charging them for that crime didn't make any sense. "They thought they were doing it privately," he told me, reaching much the same conclusion as Levick. "We're not helping them at all by labeling them at an early age." Lowe recalled to me a girl in his own high-school class who had developed a reputation as "the county slut, and it took her years and years to overcome that." These girls didn't need their names in the paper to boot.

By June, Lowe had made the decision to wipe the photos off most of the phones and return them to the girls, and most of the boys, with a warning: "We don't want to put anything on your record, but the next time we come around, we're not going to be so nice about it." He held on to a few phones and got search warrants for a few more, and began to focus on what seemed more like the actual crime: the posting of explicit photos without consent on Instagram.

Within the first day or two of the investigation, Lowe had developed a pretty good suspicion of who was behind that. A few of the boys he talked to-and a couple of girls as well-had told him they'd sent photos directly to boys who they thought had set up the accounts. A few others had sent them to a go-between, but still had a decent idea of who was setting up the accounts. The organizers had apparently spent weeks gathering photos. They said they would open the accounts only when they had a lot of pictures in hand, and that anyone who sent one in would be guaranteed access. Lowe wasn't sure whether it was just a couple of boys working together or with a slightly larger group of accomplices. His investigators subpoenaed Instagram for the IP address of the accounts' originating computer, but because of a technical aberration, that turned out to be inconclusive. He continued to search for other, solid evidence.

Lowe would not confirm to me the identity of the main suspects in the investigation, but according to some of the kids and parents, they are two brothers-one a student at the school, one a recent graduate. One was a troublemaker known for hitting people on the bus, and the other a popular kid. One was under 18 and the other over, meaning that if they were charged, they could be subject to very different legal treatment. The key would be to figure out their intent-were the boys trying to make porn available to adults, or was it a "me and my buddies want to collect a bunch of pictures" kind of deal?

Lowe strongly suspected the latter, that this was about "raging hormones and bragging." Kids, after all, described the accounts to him, and to me, as "funny," "just something to laugh at," "just a bunch of friends sitting around having a laugh." If that were true, at least for any minors involved, a child-porn charge seemed too "Big Brother" to Lowe, and he and the local prosecutor might want to come up with a lesser charge or even no charge at all, especially because the account had been closed down so quickly and had been seen by relatively few people, limiting potential harm. But largely because of community pressures, he had to consider the possibility that he'd just discovered "the tip of an iceberg of some organized-crime thing."

In late July, rumors were spreading among parents that the boys who had set up the Instagram accounts might be part of a gang. There had been some prominent gang activity in the area lately, and one local crew had been involved in the shooting of a cop. Maybe these gangs were also involved in child trafficking; maybe they would use the young girls' pictures as an advertisement to lure johns. There was no evidence at all that whoever was behind the accounts was part of a gang, or that local gangs were involved in sex trafficking. In fact the theory seemed pretty far-fetched. But the mere mention of it was enough for Lowe to say-or feel pressured to say-that he couldn't "rule it out." At the time of this writing, in mid-September, the investigation was ongoing.

Many teen-sexting cases are aggravated by vague fears of predation and pedophilia, at times creating irresistible momentum. But "the conjecture that the Internet or sexting has increased the number of molesters or their motivation to offend has not really been supported by the evidence," says David Finkelhor, who runs the Crimes Against Children Research Center. In fact, all of the evidence suggests that child molesting and sex offenses in general have declined over the period in which sexting has become popular, Finkelhor says. His group analyzed seven major sources of data about violence against children and found large declines in sexual abuse of children since the early 1990s. From 2003 to 2011, a span that coincides almost exactly with the rise of sexting, sexual-victimization rates of minors declined by 25 percent. Finkelhor cites a handful of possible factors but, ironically, one is that kids have started to do their "risk taking" and "independence testing" online, which could minimize their exposure to actual violence and physical harm.

"The rush to prosecute always baffles me. It's the exponential humiliation of these boys, or more often girls, in an official setting ... That process itself is what's traumatizing."

Cases that turn up genuine signs of child pornography should of course be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But child-porn laws are designed explicitly to protect children from adults. Cases involving only minors fall into a different category, and deserve entirely different labels and punishments-or no punishments. Getting these standards right is important, because the investigation itself causes its own trauma, because not every law-enforcement officer is as considered as Donald Lowe, and because something that a third of older teenagers do routinely shouldn't remain a crime, much less a crime on the order of child porn.

Many legal-reform advocates say the key is to distinguish between voluntarily sharing a photo and having it shared without your consent. "We should draw the line between my daughter stupidly sending a photo of herself to her boyfriend and her boyfriend sending it to all his friends to humiliate her," Levick, of the Juvenile Law Center, told Slate last year. "The first is stupid. The second is more troubling and should be criminal." Levick's group has been trying for years to get states to recognize the difference between sexting that's part of normal sexual exploration and sexting that's coercive or violates privacy.

And yet few lawmakers are willing to concede that naked pictures of teenagers, even if voluntarily shared, are in any way acceptable. As Levick says, "I think this is coming from grown‑ups who fear that their kids are doing things they don't understand. The technology is both hyper-visible and invisible, and parents are spooked by it. So kids are finding what's a normal part of adolescent experimentation being criminalized."

In cases involving only minors, the poles at either end of the continuum of all that a sext can represent seem pretty clear. Uploading another minor's naked picture to the Web, where anyone might eventually find it, should be a criminal act, though not one that should necessarily be prosecuted as child porn. Taking a selfie and sending it to someone who might be receptive to it, or receiving a selfie and keeping it, should not be criminal at all. What's in between-such as forwarding a selfie to one or 10 friends without consent-is more difficult. In Louisa County, the deputies gave an especially stern lecture to the boys they sensed had solicited pictures so they could forward them on to friends, taking advantage of the vulnerability of certain girls. The nonconsensual sharing of pictures, even among just a few people, should probably count as a criminal act, as long as there is prosecutorial discretion. But even in these instances, the policing should, if possible, be left to teachers and parents, not to the actual police. Or in some cases to no one, because since when was any version of adolescent sexuality fair and free of pain?

Shortly before the police got involved in Louisa County, Ryan, a quiet junior known as a math whiz, received the picture of Briana's breasts from a friend at the beginning of lunch. "Guess who ??? wht do u think?" Throughout the whole afternoon, he could not get the photo out of his head: the size and shape of the breasts-which he described, improbably, as floating "like the Nerf ball I once threw too far into the waves"-and also all the freckles, suggesting summer and romantic surprises. Ryan had only one other similar photo, which a generous friend had sent his way. But being out of that game, as he saw it, had its advantages. He was free of the never-ending status competition at school-who had a new picture, who had the most, who had one no one else could get-and could just let his imagination wander.

He waited until late at night, when his mom was watching TV, to look at the photo again. Seated on his bed, he pulled out his phone. The first thing he noticed was that his battery bar was red. Now there was the problem of finding the power cord, and stretching it as far as the center of the bed. He noticed a text from his coach-had he forgotten a practice? Was there some piece of equipment he had to remember to bring in the next day? Finally he pulled up the picture. He knew Briana; he'd helped her with math once. And he couldn't get the image of the girl sitting in class, puzzling over a problem, out of his head. He suddenly felt guilty, and also-because he'd heard about some boys collecting photos for an Instagram account-a little afraid. He hesitated, and then deleted the picture and got up to retrieve his laptop. He opened the first free porn site that popped into his head and typed in milf. Immediately, dozens of images flirted for his attention. He considered one in the second row, but then scrolled down a little further to find a curvier type, although a few weeks later, when he was recounting the moment to me, he couldn't remember any other details beyond "long brown hair" and "big boobs."

Briana's parents-and Briana herself-would probably be creeped out if they knew how this scene had played out. And most parents would be upset if they learned that a naked picture of their daughter had showed up on a boy's phone, even if he did delete it. But that such a photo should come to light doesn't mean the girl and the boy are having sex, or that the boy is a stalker, or that the photo is going to show up on the Web.

Outside of actual romantic relationships, sexts usually seem to play a very minimal role in anyone's sex life. In Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese's 1981 book about the sexual revolution, a teenage boy spends hours looking at his favorite picture in a photographic-art magazine, treating the image with an archivist's care. But the high-school boys I spoke with barely glance at the sexts they receive. They gloat inwardly or brag to friends; they store them in special apps or count them. But actual fantasies come from porn, freely and widely available on the Internet. "Guys would pile them up," one girl who had graduated a year earlier told me, referring to sexts they'd gotten. "It was more of a baseball-card, showing-off kind of thing." Olivia described it as "like when they were little boys, playing with Pokémon cards."

So how should parents think about sexting, especially when their daughters are involved? The research suggests that if your child is sexting but not yet in high school, you should worry more. And that you should do the same if your daughter has no real relationship with the boy she's sending sexts to, but is pursuing a relationship, or just responding to repeated requests for a photo. Sexts don't create sexual dynamics; they reveal them. Parents should use the opportunity to find out what those dynamics are, lest they accidentally make things worse.

What bothered Jennifer, Jasmine's mother, about her daughter's picture was not that her little girl was all grown up. It was the awkwardness of her daughter's pose, the fact that she had to be really talked into sending that photo. Jennifer fits no one's image of a perfect mother. As a kid, she had done drugs and gotten into fights and had a baby at 15. But life experience has made her a very perceptive parent. Another one of her daughters, who is two years younger than Jasmine, "is rebellious as hell. If she sent a picture, it's because she damn well wanted to. She'd be like, snap, snap, 'This is me,' all over the place. If she didn't want to, she'd send a picture of a cat and say, 'That's the only pussy you're gonna get!' But this one"-meaning Jasmine-"she's a pushover. She would do anything for anybody. Even with stupid things, like her sister asks her to fold the laundry even though she folded the last 20 loads, and she'll say, 'Sure.' It infuriates me. Girl, stand up for yourself! You should do something because you want to do it, not because somebody pushed you into it."

Danah Boyd, the author of It's Complicated, often talks about social media as a window into the teenage world. A parent who reacts purely by scaling up the restrictions is missing a chance to know what's actually going on with their child, to know things that in previous eras would have stayed hidden from them. In her talks, Boyd advises parents not to, for example, shut down accounts. Kids will just find ways to open new ones under names that have nothing to do with their real ones, that their parents could never track, or they will migrate to new platforms. (Many of the kids I met in Louisa County used inventive, inscrutable names for their Instagram accounts, names only their peers knew about.) Instead, parents should take a deep breath-even in the most uncomfortable scenarios-and ask questions. Kids can have a million motivations to send a naked picture of themselves, and unless you ask, you won't know whether the one that was in their head seems more like reasonable experimentation or something else.

A recent review of 10 official sexting-education campaigns concluded that all of them erred on the side of what the researchers called "abstinence"-that is, advising teens not to sext at all. These tend to link sexting tightly to ruinous consequences, but that's a problem, because ruination doesn't normally follow the sending of a sext. "If we present it as inevitable, then we've lost our audience," says Elizabeth Englander, who leads groups about sexting in middle and high schools, "because they know very well that in the vast majority of cases it doesn't happen." If you say otherwise, "then the kids know immediately that you don't know anything."

In the vast majority of cases, the picture lands only where it was meant to. But pictures sent as a result of pressure are much more likely to be shared, and that rarely ends well.

Instead, Englander eases kids into the dangers slowly. She usually starts out by talking about how in life, it's sensible to avoid risk. You wear a seat belt even though the chances of a fatal crash are slim. This way, she says, the kids understand that she knows the risks of a picture getting out are rare, but they also understand that if it does get out, the effects on their social life and future could be catastrophic. She gets the kids talking about why they send the pictures, so she can narrow in on the more risky situations she has identified from her research-namely, ones involving lots of pressure and very little trust.

Teens in Louisa County, like teens everywhere, hear a lot about sex, but really know only a little about it. Briana's Twitter feed is a mix of little-girl cute and grown-woman sexy: a fuzzy kitten, inspirational quotes from Athletes for Christ, an ass in a bow thong. Any senior at Louisa County High School can tick off the names of girls who got pregnant in the past year. But the kids in Louisa County are also part of a generation that's seen teen pregnancy decline to a record low. Teens are waiting longer to have sex than they did in the recent past. The majority now report that their first sexual experience was with a steady partner. Given how inundated and unfazed they are by sexual imagery, perhaps the best hope is that one day, in the distant future, a naked picture of a girl might simply lose its power to humiliate.

In late August, about two weeks after the new school year started, Rusty McGuire, the Louisa County prosecutor, gave an evening community presentation at the middle school about sexting. He cited statistics showing how popular it was and explained that under Virginia's child-porn laws, it was a serious crime. However, he acknowledged that sternly explaining to kids that it's illegal or has long-term consequences "isn't working." As an alternative, he suggested humor, and showed a campaign called "Give It a Ponder," run by LG. The series involves the actor James Lipton pinning a beard on kids who are about to sext, so they pause for a sober second thought, and it is, indeed, pretty funny. But only about a dozen parents and kids were there to see it.

Instead, the entire community seemed to be outside on the vast fields near the high school and middle school, seduced by the Thursday-night pause before the first home football game of the season, which would take place the next night. The sun was dropping and taking the worst of the August heat. Little kids were kicking up dirt on the baseball field or practicing their cheerleading ("Time to get loud! Time to represent!"). Parents were leaning against their bumpers drinking water or soda, and teenagers were using their bodies in ways the parents could admire: slamming into tackling dummies at the final pregame practice, doing sumo squats, running around the track.

Briana was there; her volleyball team had just won its game in three sets. "New me, new life, gotta get my shit together," she'd retweeted before the start of school. Her profile picture showed her in a bikini, but she was staying clear of trouble. So far she'd earned all A's. Her mom was trusting her to get her learner's permit and even asked her why she'd decided to go to homecoming with a friend instead of a boyfriend. ("That's the last thing on my mind," she'd replied.) Coming out of the gym after the game, she and her friends were as loud and boisterous as the football players who were psyching themselves up for the following night's game. A mom came up and pinched her butt: "Good job, Bri!" Nearby, a boy and a girl from school were enacting an airport-worthy goodbye.

Briana and two teammates leaned into each other and took a picture. "Photobomb!" a boy yelled behind them, but they barely paid him any attention. It was just another picture, and this one was theirs.

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An inquiry into one recent scandal reveals how kids think about sexting-and what parents and police should do about it. It was late on a school night, so Jennifer's kids were already asleep when she got a phone call from a friend of her 15-year-old daughter, Jasmine.

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How do we show empathy? What considerations should we have before commenting?

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Today I was doing my daily surf of Buzzfeed (oh, the addictiveness of Buzzfeed!) when I came across this piece about British comedian Sarah Millican's response to Twitter trolls who mocked the dress she wore to last year's BAFTA ceremony.

I was so sad to hear Sarah talk about how her evening, of which she was so excited about and which should have been a night to remember, ended up ruined by the nasty comments made about her appearance. I wanted to give her a hug, to tell her it doesn't matter, that she looked fantastic and that her dress is really pretty, and that haters would always hate and not to let them get to her. And I loved her response on Radio Times and how she wore the same dress again this year in a show of defiance to her critics.

And long after I read the story, it made me think. As far as online insults go, I've definitely seen way worse than the two Twitter comments Buzzfeed showed on that story about Sarah. But still it definitely struck an unpleasant chord with me. Those two comments could be comments that me and my friends could have made about any celebrity and their appearances. I'm the first to raise my hand and admit guiltiness to gathering around the latest photos of red carpet celebrity appearances and judging their clothes, their hair, their shoes, etc - pointing out what we like or saying 'good grief, what the hell is she wearing?!?' when we see something we don't like. (And I'm not proud of this either, but will save this to be discussed another time).

Still, there's a big difference between sitting around a table with a cup of tea, looking at the latest copy of WHO magazine, making some flippant comment to your workmate about so-and-so's dress and putting it out there on Twitter or online for the world to see. We forget that the people we write about and criticise can see what we've written about them, along with everyone else in the world, and that they have feelings too. I don't think those two people who criticised Sarah's outfit would have done it if they knew she had seen their comments (or at least I hope they wouldn't). Even if you thought your friend's outfit or a stranger's outfit on a big night out was awful, you wouldn't say it to their face because you wouldn't want to hurt their feelings. And I think a lot of people forget that just because they're saying something on the faceless, anonymous public forum of the Internet doesn't make it any less worse or any less mean. And that's why when I first started this blog and got a Twitter account, I realised very quickly that I had to think carefully about what I write about other people. Because they have feelings too.

It doesn't matter who the person is or what they've done or what they think. For example, I've heard people talking about various reality show stars and how vapid and self-centered they are and how they've never done anything useful in their lives and how they should just curl up and die because they're such a waste of oxygen. Talk like that always makes me uncomfortable because we forget how cruel and hard these words are. To judge someone for the way they live, to say someone should die just because we don't agree with how they live their life? We forget that we don't know these people. We forget that they are people too, and for all their faults and foibles, they too have feelings. That it doesn't matter who you are, to go on the Internet and see nasty comments written about you, saying you are ugly or stupid or telling you to go kill yourself, is something no one should ever experience.

And it still doesn't matter if they are a public figure who deliberately flaunt themselves or hog the limelight in order to draw attention and accolades, it's no excuse of 'oh, they've got to take the bad with the good.' You might have a point to make, but if you can't make it without being nasty and petty, there's no point in making it at all. No one enjoys being hated or attacked by thousands of people. And it doesn't matter how much of a scumbag they might be. As the saying goes, 'be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.' And also, none of us know what someone is going through until we've walked a mile in their shoes. The seemingly most privileged person in the world might be going through some issues none of us would ever know about.

But it's not just the really nasty comments I want to talk about here. Aside from the trolls, I don't think most people set out to be deliberately hurtful. They might be petty, inconsiderate and unthoughtful, but (I hope) not deliberately cruel. But that's why it's important to realise that the written word, especially on the Internet and on Twitter, can have a devastating and lasting impact. It's important to think twice before you hit the Publish button or the Tweet button. And that's why I make an effort not to say anything nasty or hurtful about someone when I blog or Tweet. If I disagree with something someone has said or done, I want to make sure I'm putting out a rational, logical and reasonable argument out there, explaining my reasons for disagreeing with what they've said or done, rather than just striking out to hurt them as badly as I can.

I just want to share now my own mistake that I made of not following my own code of conduct. Some months ago, a certain male person made a couple of comments about female writers in general that provoked a heap of backlash on the Internet. I was one of those who were incredibly outraged and furious, shaking my head in disbelief. And I thought of a comment I could make in response to this and, without thinking, I put it on Twitter and I tagged him in my comment.

The moment I did it, I regretted it. I deleted my comment right away. I can't actually remember what it was I said now - it wasn't an outright nasty comment or a personal attack or or anything - but I do remember feeling uncomfortable with what I just said - I think it was something sarcastic. But I was definitely not comfortable with it once I had said it.

This person had obviously said a very foolish thing and he has already been lambasted publicly by heaps of people over the world for it. He has apologised sheepishly and whether he is truly sorry for what he said, no one can know this but him. I did not agree with what he said and I think his comments reflected very badly on him, not just professionally but personally. But I also need to remember that, no matter what his opinions, he is also a person. With feelings. Who probably isn't enjoying the fact that thousands of people around the world hate him very much now and have no problems about voicing it either. On the Internet. On their blogs. On public forums. On Twitter where they're also tagging him.

And I didn't need to add to that. Perhaps I could have responded by setting forth my own reasons for not agreeing with what he said. By providing a list of female writers and their works which would validate my reasons and invalidate his comments. But I didn't need to be sarcastic or hurtful or petty. So I deleted my comment. And I was very glad that I did so. It served as a lesson to me, to remind myself to be thoughtful and considerate about what I write, whether it be on my blog or on my Twitter account or even just as a writer in general - because the written word has a far more lasting effect than any of us can imagine.

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The importance of being thoughtful and considerate when blogging and/or tweeting

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Today I was doing my daily surf of Buzzfeed (oh, the addictiveness of Buzzfeed!) when I came across this piece about British comedian Sarah Millican's response to Twitter trolls who mocked the dress she wore to last year's BAFTA ceremony.

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How is yours looking? How can you improve it - do you need to?

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by Justin Boyle

If you've scratched your head over suggestions to manage your "digital footprint," you aren't the only one.

A surprisingly large percentage of people have never even heard the phrase, let alone thought about how to manage theirs responsibly. Among students, the percentage is probably higher. We'll talk about ways you can help students understand and manage their digital footprints before they get themselves in trouble.
The Definition Of A Digital Footprint
Simply put, a digital footprint is the record or trail left by the things you do online. Your social media activity, the info on your personal website, your browsing history, your online subscriptions, any photo galleries and videos you've uploaded - essentially, anything on the Internet with your name on it. Digital natives like today's students rarely think twice about putting their names on things online, so their footprints can be pretty wide.

Luckily for us all, most of the major sources of personal information can be tweaked so we share only certain things with the general public. There are even some third-party bonus tools available to manage the parts of our digital footprints we might not know were there.

If you want to show students their digital footprint (or take a peek at your own) the personal info search engine Pipl.com is a great resource. Sometimes just seeing the breadth of info about us that exists online is enough to spur us to action.
1. Use Privacy Settings What To Tell Your Students About Monitoring Their Digital Footprints: 11 Tips
Let's talk Facebook, shall we? Chances are pretty good that your students can be counted among the 1.3 billion monthly active users of the social media giant, and there's practically no other website that contains such a breadth and depth of personal information.

Encouraging students to put all of their social media accounts, including Facebook, on a short leash might be the most important step toward helping them manage their digital footprint. Look into Facebook's proprietary privacy tips or get the works from Lifehacker.com with it's "Always Up-to-Date Guide to Managing Your Facebook Privacy," then inform students about the steps they can take. Better yet, just pass the links along.
2. Keep A List Of Accounts
Complete privacy on Twitter is simple - you just choose to protect your tweets under "security and privacy" on the account settings page - but encouraging students to do so might do more harm than good. Some teachers have gotten great results using Twitter in education, and a class full of students with protected tweets might interfere with that.
3. Don't Overshare
Then delete the ones you no longer use. That myspace page you signed up for? Don't just forget about it-find it and delete it.

Perhaps the best tip for helping students maintain privacy on Twitter is one that can be applied across the whole spectrum of social networking tools: Don't overshare. As much of an alien concept as it may be to students these days, the only sure-fire way to avoid digital footprint trouble is for them to keep quiet about anything they wouldn't want to share with everyone in town.
4. Use A Password Keeper
This includes usernames, aliases, passwords, last names, full-names-as-usernames, pictures, addresses, and other important information.
5. Google Yourself
This is more of a security thing, but the worst kind of footprint is the one you didn't make that contains all of your sensitive information. It's too much work to remember 50 different passwords, and every site has their own unique rules. Until someone solves this problem, the best solution is likely a password keeper
6. Monitor Linking Accounts
You may be surprised what you find.
7. Use A Secondary Email
When you link your facebook or twitter account to that new site (whatever site that might be), you may not realize-or care at the moment-what you're giving it access to. It's usually safest to use a secondary email address to sign-up for new sites rather than granting this kind of access.
8. You Don't Need 12 Email Addresses
Whether you're communicating with someone new, or signing up for a new social media platform, it can be useful to have a secondary email address.
9. Sending Is Like Publishing-Forever
That said, you don't need 12. Keep it manageable.
10. Understand That Searches Are Social
Every time you send a message, post, or picture, you're publishing it the same way CNN does a news story. And the internet never forgets.

There's another side to your digital footprint, too - it's not always information that you choose to make public. Remember: Privacy controls or no privacy controls, Facebook still records and uses every scrap of information it gets to better determine its users' marketing demographics.

Google pulls the same trick with search and browsing habits. If a student is logged into their Google account, the service tracks every keyword they search, every Web page they visit and every time they visit Youtube.
11. Use Digital Tools To Manage Your Footprint
There are ways, however, to control the bits of deep data that we leave strewn around. First of all, even though Google is practically an official synonym for "Web search," it isn't actually the only game in town. Less profit-motivated search engines like DuckDuckGo.com and Ixquick.com may take a little getting used to, but they do make explicit policy of protecting users' browsing privacy.
Conclusion
A host of browser extensions and app add-ons can also limit the surreptitious capture of personal information. Disconnect (Disconnect.me), DoNotTrackMe (Abine.com) and Ghostery (Ghostery.com) are examples of cross-platform extensions that block tracking cookies and give users control over site scripts.

There are also some extreme measures. Browsing from behind a virtual private network, or VPN, puts a layer of thick fog between online activity and real-world identity. If even that isn't enough for your suddenly privacy-hungry students, there's also the nuclear option.

You may have heard of Tor, the multi-layered proxy client that's a go-to for anyone looking to access the fabled Deep Web. By routing your IP address through multiple proxies, Tor protects users from anyone anywhere ever knowing who they are or what they're looking at.

Of course, full online anonymity would also require students to avoid all login-based media (including app stores like Google Play), which can be a harder task than they're ready to accept. It may also be important to remind them that while we're not browsing in a vacuum and we're very rarely actually anonymous, most of our deep data is probably pretty benign.
Justin Boyle is a writer and multimedia designer who lives and works in Austin, Texas. He contributes to several websites, including OnlineSchools.com; image attribution flickr user penbentley and kyteacher; What To Tell Your Students About Monitoring Their Digital Footprints
Just make sure to let them know that everything that they post, tweet, comment or like is going down on their permanent record. Honestly, everything. That ought to get them thinking, at least.

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11 Tips For Students To Manage Their Digital Footprints

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by Justin Boyle If you've scratched your head over suggestions to manage your "digital footprint," you aren't the only one. A surprisingly large percentage of people have never even heard the phrase, let alone thought about how to manage theirs responsibly. Among students, the percentage is probably higher.

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How does it affect you?

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Think you're on the Internet right now? Well, you're not. You're on your Internet. The exact version of the online world that you see is available only to you.

Most of the major conduits through which you see the world online, including Google Search and Facebook, are gathering all kinds of data about you, then presenting you with a custom version of the world they think you're interested in. They're hiding or de-emphasizing the version of the world they assume you're not interested in.

In the past two years, the biggest gatekeeper websites have gotten very good at figuring out what you want and giving it to you. What's wrong with that?

There are downsides, according to a new book called The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.

In a nutshell, the book argues that the sophisticated personalization engines improve things in the short run. But in the long run, they dumb us down, reduce our exposure to new ideas and ultimately could lead to a society without a shared set of facts about the world. The personalized Internet favors the marketers and propagandists but provides an obstacle for people who are trying to introduce new ideas.

The Internet is increasingly turning us all into dictators and divas. Like the entourages of Saddam Hussein or Jennifer Lopez, the Internet tells us what we want to hear, feeding us a version of the world that feels good, goes down easy and doesn't challenge us.

The book ships May 16. It was written by Eli Pariser, who is the president of the MoveOn.org board. MoveOn is a liberal public-policy group, and Pariser's concerns are mainly political. But the "filter bubble" concept affects you no matter what your interests. And you're going to hear a lot about this concept after the book hits.

In this column, I'm going to tell you how personalization works, why you may not want it, and also how to pop the bubble and opt out of a system that censors your Internet based on stereotyping.

Your own private Google

The "secret sauce" of Google Search has long been an algorithm called PageRank (named after co-founder Larry Page). But on Dec. 4, 2009, Google announced an additional algorithm that custom-tailors search results according to the individual attributes of the user.

According to Pariser, Google uses 57 "signals" -- even when you're not logged in to Google -- to customize search results. (Google was unable to confirm the number of signals.)

These "signals" include where you are, what you have clicked on in the past and who your friends are. But that's just the beginning. Google also gathers information about which browser and device type you use, how much you travel (based on where you use search over time), how long it takes you to click after getting a search result, and many, many other data points.

From all this data, Google decides how to sort your search results. (A Google spokesman told me the company rejects the term "filter" because it implies that Google is hiding links rather than prioritizing them.)

Here's a fun experiment to try. Search for something on Google, and have a friend or two do the same search. See how the results are different? Many of the links are the same. But they're in a different order and "skewed" subtly in one direction or another.

As we increasingly use mobile devices, our exact locations, where we've been, which stores and restaurants we've entered, who we've met with and possibly even activities on unrelated services will be increasingly factored into the decision-making process about what we see and don't see. In fact, all the major improvements Google has promised for search involve far more and deeper personalization.

"The power of individual targeting -- the technology will be so good, it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them," according to Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman.

Google apparently tries to be responsible with its power over your attention. A spokesman told me Google understands that "people value diversity on results pages." The company uses its deep understanding of you not only to target your assumed interests, but also to deliberately challenge you with a few links outside those interests.

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Elgan: How to pop your Internet 'filter bubble'

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Think you're on the Internet right now? Well, you're not. You're on your Internet. The exact version of the online world that you see is available only to you. Most of the major conduits through which you see the world online, including Google Search and Facebook, are gathering all kinds of data about you, then presenting you with a custom version of the world they think you're interested in.

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What are your predictions?

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Every year, Mark Zuckerberg's sets himself a challenge to push boundaries and set personal limits both socially and professionally. It only seems fitting that the Facebook guru has assigned himself the following challenge for 2016: to build an Artificial Intelligence assistant within his home to respond to his every need and whim. A lofty ambition or a sign of the times? If anyone is up for this particular challenge, it would seem that the Facebook founder and CEO could achieve it, and then take it forward to sell to the rest of us.

Personal challenges aside, what are the predictions for Facebook this year and how will they affect the social media landscape? With acceleration of the media industry continuously reaching new speeds, we are in for some growth and increased revenues within an already booming business.

Carat predicts digital ad spend will account for 51% of all UK ad spend in 2016, the first time digital advertising will make up the majority of the market ( source: Campaign). Thus is as a result of four main trends: mobile technology, speedy broadband, high quality live videos and social media sharing.

But before we look at what's on the horizon in 2016, let's look at what we've seen in the past year during the developmentmental stages of new and innovative technologies.
What we saw in 2015
Brands have continuously been trying to break through the noise and be seen above the competition. They have attempted to achieve this through high level moderation and quick customer service response times.

The decline of organic reach continued without paid media spend. This is no longer a myth or a tall tale, it's reality and everyone now knows the deal and has had to accept it. Incorporating this into marketing strategies and budgeting plans was key to maintaining organic reach in 2015 and then building upon its successes.

Brands took corporate responsibility and impressed their audiences by being adaptable to the real-time collective voice that was continuously judging them. Social media's powerful presence could not be ignored and 2015 was the year where this was accepted as the status quo.

Introduction and uptake of live streaming on other networks pre-empted Facebook to get moving on their own app.

Instagram growth continued, as well as fast growing network Snapchat. Facebook was no rival for the younger generation of social media users, with 71% of users under 34 years old making up Snapchat's audience (Source: Omnicore).
What's to come in 2016?
New technologies will open doors and pave the way for the social media of the future. The phase of Facebook's planning and testing of innovations seems to over; new products, apps and setups will be ready for release in 2016, as announced by Zuckerberg in early January. Some of the truly futuristic advances are yet to be implemented, but this is what we here at foresee taking off in 2016:​

1. 360 Video is all set to be the next.big.thing. (But remember, so was Google Glass.) Facebook has introduced Oculus Rift, the virtual reality technology to make up this computing platform. The Oculus Rift headset has officially been released for pre-ordering, which will definitely up the stakes when it comes what comes into our newsfeeds. Zuckerberg has claimed Oculus to be the "best virtual reality experience in the world" - a bold claim, yes. An impossibility to achieve success, we think no.

2. Messenger (which now has 800 million monthly users!) is on its way to becoming more than just a messaging app, it is being heavily developed as a standalone app with features in abundance such as Send and Receive Money and Virtual Business cards. Could this be Facebook's more successful sister app that grows and develops at its own rate? We anticipate huge growth with Messenger but will wait and see what the uptake of these new services results in.

3. Social shopping is becoming more integral to the commercial interests of Facebook. Payment preferences rely on convenience and accessibility; Facebook wants to keep you on the network rather than have you leave and make your purchases elsewhere. This is currently in development and testing, but we anticipate the network gaining traction in this realm as it aims to be a one-stop-shop for its users.

4. Facebook Live as a rival to current live streaming apps such as Periscope. Can it take off and make its mark? We are not sure it can gain traction over existing apps quick enough to make its mark.

5. Facebook is hoping to insert itself as a popular business tool when it releases Facebook at Work, a social network for the workplace to improve collaboration and communication Source: CNET). Yet another way for Facebook to take over our lives beyond the personal realm.

​ 2016 looks to be an exciting year for Facebook; we wouldn't expect anything less. Would you?

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How Facebook Social Media Will Evolve in 2016

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What are the predictions for Facebook this year and how will they affect the social media landscape? With acceleration of the media industry continuously reaching new speeds, we are in for some growth and increased revenues within an already booming business.