Safer Internet Day 2009 in Sweden The Swedish Media Council celebrated Safer Internet Day 2009 by inviting high school students and representatives of popular youth sites, experts on young people’s online communication, and other professionals in this field to an afternoon of film screenings and seminars at well-known youth centre Fryshuset in Stockholm.

Around 200 people, both young and old, were in attendance. The Swedish Media Council had invited organisations, NGOs and representatives from the industry to set up booths offering activities for the students. The fair format allowed for the students to talk directly to the people behind their favourite social networking sites, as well as meet with the youth centre’s own virtual social workers, the ‘web coaches’. The Swedish Media Council had its own booth where the students could compete for movie tickets by filling out a survey on their life on the internet. 

On top of this, there was a screening of the official Safer Internet Day video and lectures on cyber-bullying, this year’s Safer Internet Day theme. The day also featured screenings of digital stories from ‘My life 2.0’, a project launched last year on Safer Internet Day that encourages young people to make short films about their online lives. As the digital stories were produced by students in attendance, their classmates were cheering loudly and clapping during the screenings. Another appreciated part of the program was a panel discussion on social networking and responsibility, in which the panellists all agreed that the benefits of the social net by far outweigh the negative sides and that responsibility is shared between government, industry and users. Where the responsibility starts and ends was understandably harder to agree on.

For those who were not able to join the festivities in Stockholm, there was an opportunity to chat with safer internet experts on the site of Aftonbladet, a major Swedish newspaper. Many of the questions were related to cyber-bullying and how to respond to it. The experts’ advice was to report bullying incidents to the site owner and in cases where it was a matter of criminal behaviour, to the police.

Safer Internet Day 2009 was presented by the Swedish Media Council in collaboration with youth centre Fryshuset, BRIS - a children’s rights organization, the non-profit anti-bullying organization Friends, Stockholm School of the Arts, UR- the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company and many more.