Digital Wellness Module

Lesson 1: Online Reputation

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Who Knows Your Secrets?

Part 1

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

What is a secret you have about yourself? Keep this secret in your mind. You won’t have to share this secret with anyone or write it down.

Now answer these questions in your own mind — don’t speak your answers out loud or write them down:

• How many people in this room know the secret?
• How many people in your neighborhood know the secret?
• How many people that you have never met face to face know the secret?

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

Imagine that you had to write down that secret on a piece of paper and one random person in this group was to read it.
Here are some more questions — again, answer them only in your mind, not out loud or in writing. After one week goes by:

• How many people in this room would now know the secret?
• How many people in your neighborhood would now know the secret?
• How many people that you have never met face to face would now know the secret?

Part 2

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

You need to think of people who are likely to see a secret or other piece of information about you as “the audience” for that information. Having a better sense of the audience may help you more easily determine the information you feel comfortable sharing and what to not share with others.

An audience is made up of a person or a group of people that can access a particular piece of information. With new technologies today, audiences can grow very quickly. Because of this potential for rapid audience growth, it’s difficult — if not impossible — for you to know or limit the audience for your online information and activities. While it’s great that audiences can grow quickly when you want to share your work with a lot of people, it’s not great when this happens with information that you want to keep private.

Unfortunately, private information — especially embarrassing information — is often exciting to people when they see it, so once this type of information is out there online, it can be very challenging to control who sees this content.

Whenever you share information online (even just directly with one person, like in a text or private message), you should be prepared for the possibility that it may spread well beyond the audience you intended to reach.

Part 3

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• When you post a status update, photo, or other information on social media, who is your intended audience?
• Does it depend on the social media platform? Or the context?

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

It depends on your privacy settings as well as the social media platform you choose, but your audience could include just your closest friends/followers/connections or be broad enough to include anyone who uses that social media platform or anyone who searches for you online. But no matter who the audience is, information can be copied and posted somewhere else, someone can take a photo/screenshot of the content, or information can be shared through in-person and online conversations.

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• Who is your intended audience when you add content on social media?
• Who is your intended audience when, for example, you post on someone else’s Facebook timeline or when you add content to another person’s social media account (e.g., by commenting on one of their photos, tagging them in a post or photo)?

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

This will depend on both your and their privacy settings, but often the content will be visible to their friends/followers/connections, which will include people you don’t know — this might include their family members or administrators, or teachers at their school.

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• When you send a message (e.g., text, email, private/direct message on social media), who is your intended audience?

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

Your audience is the person you’re sending it to but be careful — others might see it as well.

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• How can your message reach people other than the person you sent it to? Possible ways include through photos/screenshots, forwarding, and in-person phone sharing.
• In which cases might reaching a larger audience be useful? Possible examples include hoping to spread a message to a large audience, mobilizing people, or raising awareness.
• In which cases could reaching a bigger audience than intended be problematic? Sharing beyond the intended audience can get you in trouble, cause embarrassment, reputational harms.
• What are some situations where maintaining a good online reputation might be important? Possible examples include school/college/university applications, job applications, and making new friends.

Researching your Reputation

Part 1

CLASS INTERACTION

The teacher chooses a public figure (e.g., someone in the music/film/TV industry, political figure, business leader) who will be familiar to the students. Look up the person’s name on an online search engine and, with students, examine a few of the items that come up (please project search results on a screen). Also, explore the public figure’s social media presence. After spending a few minutes exploring, ask two students to act out a hypothetical interaction between the public figure and a fan.

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• How does it feel encountering someone who knows a lot of information about you?
• How would you feel if that information was incorrect?
• How many people can access this information?
• How can you control what information about you is available online?

Part 2

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

People you meet will use search engines to obtain more information about you. What they find, good or bad, is going to impact what they think about you. If you want to be able to have control over how they perceive you, it is important for you to know what information they are likely to see.

These people include future employers and school/ college/university admissions officers. Admissions officers may not inform applicants of whether they looked them up online and/or used the information they found online to help make admissions decisions.

Part 3

CLASS INTERACTION

Organize students into pairs.

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

Brainstorm three things you would want to come up when someone searches for your name online. How likely do you think it is that these things will actually appear in the search results? Share with your partner.

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• What did you and your partner come up with?
• Raise your hand if you have searched for your name online. What did you see? What photos come up? Were you able to find information about yourself, or are there other people in the world who share your name?

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• When you search for your name online, ask these four questions:
  • What are the first few results?
  • Are you comfortable with this information?
  • What do the other results suggest about who you are as a person? As a student? As an employee?
  • What impression might someone who doesn’t know you develop upon seeing these results? What impression might they have if they clicked and read the information contained in the first few results?

Responding to Complex Information

CLASS INTERACTION

Pass out the “What should you do?” resource. Organize students into pairs. Ask students to discuss the scenarios on the worksheet and come up with two strategies/solutions for each scenario and think about the potential consequences of their actions. Give them 15 minutes to do this.

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• What should you do when someone posts content about you that you don’t like and/or find inappropriate in that context?
• What should you think about before posting content about someone else?

Responding to Negative Information

Part 1

ASK YOUR STUDENTS

• If you find negative information about yourself when you search for your name online (e.g., through a search engine or on social media), can you do something about it?
• What are some examples of content you might not want others to see?

Part 2

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

There are different approaches as to what can be done if you encounter online content about yourself that you don’t like, depending on the context and the type of information, among other factors. One approach is “counter-speech,” which means to draw attention/give more visibility to positive stories about yourself by creating and managing content that reflects you in a positive light. You can do this, for example, by creating a social media presence when appropriate, starting a blog, or registering a website based on your name.

A second approach includes different measures to have negative content removed. For instance, if you see content you do not like (e.g., a photo of you), you can try to reach out directly to the individual who posted it (particularly on social media and/or messaging apps) to ask him or her to remove the content.

Many platforms also provide interfaces to flag information that you feel is annoying or not interesting; content (e.g., photos, videos, text-based posts) that shows you in a negative/unflattering light; content that shouldn’t be on the platform (e.g., seems offensive, violent or prohibited); and content that appears to be a scam. The platform then checks it against its terms of service and community norms.

In some cases, you might have legal remedies and can, for instance, file a lawsuit in a court of law, depending on jurisdiction and applicable law (e.g., in some cases of invasion of privacy or false statements that damage someone’s reputation). Some countries have specific laws that require platforms to take down certain types of unlawful content upon notification (e.g., Kenya Information and Communications Act (Amendments of 2019)).

Part 3

Assignment

TELL YOUR STUDENTS

Now that we have talked about how publicly available online information helps form opinions about other people let’s apply what you’ve just learned. Over the next 30 minutes, individually, engage in the following activity.

Choose a public figure (e.g., someone in the music/film/TV industry, political figure, business leader). Search for publicly available information about that person online and explain, in a short paragraph, how this information has helped you form an opinion about this person. If you could provide this individual with four recommendations about how content about them could be available online differently (e.g., a change in privacy settings, a change in audience, a change in the substance of the content) and/or not be available at all (e.g., deleted, have taken down) to improve how this person presents themselves/is perceived by others online, what would they be?

Give students 30 minutes to finish the assignment.

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