Social Networking sites to launch "Panic Button"

A report in today's Telegraph suggests that an end is nigh to the ongoing disagreement between Internet Safety organisations and Social Networking sites on the use of so-called "Panic Buttons". 

Earlier this month, the social networking site Bebo agreed to place a "Panic Button" on it's website.  The button, created in association with the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), allows children to quickly and easily report offensive, obscene and other inappropriate material.  At the time, other (larger) social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace refused to adopt the scheme, claiming that they had sufficient mechanisms in place to protect their young users in the first instance.


Today's report suggests that, following advice from the government's Online Safety Advisor, Dr. Tanya Byron, Facebook (as one of 140 other websites and organisations) has performed a U-Turn and agreed to adopt the panic button after all.  Some other guidelines offered by Dr. Byron include adding a "Safe Search" option to sites to remove objectionable content, similar to Google's SafeSearch option, discussed in a previous post here.

According to research by industry regulator Ofcom, about 35% of children are able to access the internet in their bedrooms without parental supervision, and Facebook is without a doubt one of the most popular destinations, with up to 39 million unique visitors in any given month.

We welcome Facebook's move to implement the panic button, a simple, valuable tool in the continuing battle to keep the internet safe for our young people. 

Used alongside good, old-fashioned parenting, and discrete monitoring tools like Spysure, the panic button should help to keep your children safe.

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