Six years ago, Harvard withdrew admissions offers from 10 high school seniors it had previously accepted. School officials had gotten wind of jokes circulating on the students’ private Facebook group — memes that made light of school shootings and found hilarity in the Holocaust, among other repellant takes — and reversed course. After the George Floyd murder in 2020, more young people who had posted racist or apparently bigoted posts in their youth faced similar punishment when sleuths unearthed and shared their online offenses. A prominent New York Times story spread the word to ambitious kids and anxious parents: be careful what you say online, because it never goes away.
Author and media/technology guru Devorah Heitner heard all about it. Panicked parents approached her and asked, how can I keep my kid from going viral for all the wrong reasons? Heitner’s latest book, Growing Up In Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, addresses these and other concerns related to kids’ use a..
- Sunday, September 8, 2024