Status of Women committee  I should point out that our digital literacy resources as well as our media literacy resources do go from kindergarten to grade 12. What Professor Bailey said shows why media literacy is an essential element.

Status of Women committee  I think it's always dangerous or risky to get hung up on buzzwords, but I would have to echo what Professor Bailey said. We do know. We know from a great deal of research that some youth are more at risk of being victims of cyberviolence of various kinds and also suffer more harm

Status of Women committee  It shows we need comprehensive digital literacy education, with all of the elements that I've described earlier, in every classroom for every student from kindergarten through grade 12, and ideally beyond.

Status of Women committee  First of all, fund research. It's not only our research that's worth funding; there is lots of great research going on. A number of iterations of our research received federal funding, but it's not just original research that we need: we also need to have evaluations of interv

Status of Women committee  I'm not aware of any quantitative research specifically relating to pornography and sexting. There's certainly qualitative research that suggests a strong connection. Quantitatively, it is clear that pornography and, in general, sexualized media have a strong influence on how y

Status of Women committee  I didn't mean violence necessarily, but certainly a male-oriented vision of sexuality in which men are subjects and women are objects and porn is all about men's pleasure.

Status of Women committee  It's not just porn. There are many examples of this stereotyped sexuality in all kinds of media that youth and adults consume.

Status of Women committee  Thank you to the committee for inviting MediaSmarts to testify on this issue. Our research suggests that algorithms and the collection of the data that make them work are poorly understood by youth. Only one in six young Canadians feel that the companies that operate social net

Status of Women committee  I'm not really sure what to add on the topic. We've seen a number of cases in which, either through what you might call savvy gaming of algorithms or, in some cases, just brute force, people have been able to manipulate things such as trending topics. One study that was done of

Status of Women committee  In part, it happens because any time one message is being amplified, others get lowered. Someone's message is less likely to be trending if someone else's is. There's a limited number of spots. Some platforms also have what's called “downvoting”, in which users not only can boo

Status of Women committee  Yes, absolutely. One of the things that we educate young people about is, again, digital citizenship: their ability to make a difference online. We teach them, for instance, that when they see inappropriate content, particularly when it's something like cyber-bullying or hate c

Status of Women committee  There is an increased presence of digital literacy in curricula across the country. One of the things we do is keep track of provincial and territorial curricula, partly to make sure our resources match those curricula so that teachers can use them without taking time away from w

Status of Women committee  As an educational organization, MediaSmarts doesn't take a position on legislation unless it's directly relevant to our educational mission, but as part of our mission, we do educate adults and youth about their legal rights and the remedies available to them should they choose t

Status of Women committee  We certainly would make them aware of it. We don't necessarily recommend, but as I said, we certainly would make sure that all of our resources featured it, because it would be another tool that could be used for dealing with hate material on the Internet or other media.

Status of Women committee  We don't really have stable operating funding. We certainly get tremendous support from a lot of sources, from our sponsors, but I'm not going to list them all, because it would use up the time we have. When it comes to things like online hate, it's very difficult for us to find