Numerous activities and public awareness for Safer Internet Day in Germany Conferences, press events, online quizzes, expert chats and hotlines, information events, online games – the range of activities on Safer Internet Day in Germany was far-reaching. klicksafe held a big press events in Berlin, among other activities.

The klicksafe press event at John-Lennon-School in Berlin revolved completely around the issue of cyberbullying. Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media, Bernd Neumann, emphasised the need to inform and sensitise about risks on the internet and increase internet safety especially for young users. The directors of the Media Authorities of Rhineland-Palatinate and North-Rhine Westphalia, Manfred Helmes and Prof. Norbert Schneider, emphasized responsibility for providers of social communities and spoke up for more information and education of young users as well as parents and teachers.
Will Gardner (CEO Childnet International), Dirk Heinrichs (actor, association “language against violence”, anti-bullying-workshops), and Markus Gerstmann (media pedagogue, ServiceBureau Youth Information, cyberbullying expert) spoke about their experiences with cases of cyberbullying as well as approaches for prevention and the fight against this problem. The press conference was moderated by Dr. Christian Stöcker, journalist at Spiegel Online, one of the biggest German online news portals.

The klicksafe press conference was also the framework for the presentation of the German subtitled version of the Childnet film “Let’s fight it together” as well as the premiere for the EU clip “Stop cyberbullying”.

In the week before Safer Internet Day, klicksafe launched a survey about cyberbullying on its website. All together, more than 1,200 users participated in this survey, partly thanks to klicksafe’s cooperation with schuelerVZ, one of the biggest social communities for young people in Germany. Most of the participants therefore were pupils between 13 and 18 years old, 17% of which stated that they had already been a victim of cyberbullying, another 30% said they were aware of the problem in their local area.

Further events on Safer Internet Day were, e.g.:

A joint conference of Media Education Research Association Southwest (mpfs), jugendschutz.net and Foundation Media Literacy Forum Southwest (MKFS) was held in Mainz with a presentation of the new KIM study (Children and Media) containing the latest data about children’s use of media. There was also a presentation of the new instant messenger for children, developed by Microsoft in cooperation with the FSM (Self-control for Multimedia Service Providers) and jugendschutz.net.

A conference of the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (Bundesministerium für Ernahrung, Landwirtschaft und Verbraucherschutz) together with BITKOM (German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media) in Berlin focused on “Data protection in the information society – new requirements for consumer politics and economy”

Apart from events there were, as in previous years, many online activities on Safer Internet Day. For example the campaign “Respect on the net” of schuelerVZ (social community for pupils), expert chat and children’s website kindercampus.de with an expert from the klicksafe team, a nationwide online game of jugendnetz-berlin.de, online activities at children’s website toggo.de and a media pedagogic online portal for children and parents, internet-abc.de.

Furthermore, there were expert telephone hotlines (e.g. of Federal Office for Information Security BSI), a thematic focus in radio stations (e.g. of 45 local radio stations in North-Rhine Westphalia, and of big public radio station in Baden-Wurttemberg and Rhineland Palatinate) and a thematic focus on internet safety in TV stations (e.g. in Open Channels in Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse).

All news broadcasts on TV were able to report on the many events and activities that were taking place on Safer Internet Day. In addition, most of the larger online news portals and newspapers also carried stories. Media coverage is currently still being analysed, but already shows an overwhelming breadth of content.