The Cybersurvey 2023

Secondary

Real or Fake?

Alongside our long term tracking, some new themes appear this year:

• Media Literacy: How teens approach mis or disinformation, their opinions about online safety education, and gender differences in attitudes to trusting content.. 
• The role of tech: Are devices a help or hindrance when doing homework?
• Resilience: What does resilience look like? How do you react and can you recover when things go wrong online? 
• Belonging: A sense of belonging could play a role in improving teens' safety online:

Higher rates of online risks and harms are reported by those who often feel left out socially, deny that 'school is a place where I feel I belong' or say 'there are no adults I can trust at school'.

Girls are far more sceptical than boys about whether you can believe what you read or see online:

‘Its just hard to know who’s real and who’s fake, it’s kind of like a mask, fake people have multiple masks, but real ones have 1 pure mask.’ Girl no age given

Red flags:

While Cyberbullying has decreased, we see other forms of cyberaggression increasing, particularly misogyny and racism.

While the majority do not see harmful content about suicide or self harm, those that do, tend to see it repeatedly, whether or not they had searched for it. 

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