We are living in the digital era which means everyone easily have an  access to internet but internet also has its threatening demeanor, cyberbully for example. The group of people who are harmed by Cyberbully are mostly kids and adolescents who have little to no idea of how to protect themselves on the internet. To make the matter worse, their parents and teachers seem to have no idea too. This is when dtac came up with Safe Internet program campaign to protect kids from digital threat.

dtac, together with teachers will create strategy to protect kids from Cyberbully.

We have a chance to discuss with K. Rachaya Kulnapongse, AVP Sustainability of dtac toward Safe Internet Campaign.

Cyberbully is a common thing everyone can face but kids can’t cope it well and have no protection scheme whatsoever. Mostly, when they are threatened with Cyberbully, kids tend to keep it to themselves and rarely consult their parents or teachers because they don’t think these two group of people can help them.This fact inspires us to educate teachers because they can provide a protection for kids at school.

dtac has conducted a research and the result came up that 90 percent of teachers realize it is their responsibility to protect kids from internet harm but only 57 percent of them are certain that they have a knowledge for this type of protection.

We take this issue to our heart as a service provider, we should give a social responsibility toward this issue. By doing this, we use SafeInternetForkid.com as a platform to be a guideline for every parties toward Cyberbully.

Linguistic insight is key.

We actually adopt SafeInternetForkid.com from Digiworld website which is strategically developed by expert like Parent Zone organization from England. Parent Zone is the expert toward intra-family communication in the digital world. When we adopt their contents, we need to translate them to Thai. Here comes the tricky part because we just can’t translate word-by-word because terms and definition of certain words are different toward each part of the world. For an example, there is a part in the website that requires user to analyze whether the certain sentence sounds harmful or not. The sentence is described “Older brother asks his younger sister whether he can borrow her green shirt”. For the English-speaking kids, this sentence is perfectly acceptable but Thai kids think otherwise. They think that the sentence is indeed inappropriate and real-life siblings are not talking like this.

Good thing we got help from Nation Junior, an expert in kids’ contents. They helped us translating and coming with the difficult phrases. Apart from translation, we have to come up with the new term for some certain word like “trolling”.

Conducting Focus group with experts

Once we had a decent translation, it’s time to conduct a Focus group which consists of every parties : Kids, parents and teachers. In each party, we partnered with different expert to deal specifically due to their expertise. For example, Inskru is the expert in communication with teachers so we let them conduct the teacher’s focus group. Turns out that Inkru could bring the best out of the teachers’ group. They shared their deep insight toward Safe Internet campaign. Most of them believe that Safe Internet can actually help kids protect themselves from cyberbully but they all agreed that the language must be adjusted for kids’ better understanding.

When it came to focus group for kids and parents, we partnered with Chulalongkorn Experimental Economic Center, Faculty of Economic, Chulalongkorn university. They are specialized in prompting people to realize the core problem and collect their reaction to come up with the strategic solution.

We divided kids’ focus group into three groups : 5-8 years, 9-13 years and 14-16 years because kids’ understanding are varied due to their ages. Turned out that young kids cannot fully understand the concept of Safe Internet because they cannot fully focus so in order to gain their full attention, we need to employ Safe Internet with other activities. The older group of kids can practically engage but they still viewed Safe Internet as merely game but unable to get the whole concept.

dtac also hosted teacher’s training and the result is satisfied. Since the beginning of the training to September 2019, we have trained 500 teachers toward Safe Internet and all of them will be given certificate to attract their interest. The certificate is a joint collaboration of dtac with Digital Economy Promotion Agency (depa). In the attempt to PR , we were lucky to be partnered with various experts like Catholic Social Communications of Thailand, Saturday School and Thai media fund. Catholic Social Communications of Thailand played an important role as they are partner with 300 schools around Thailand

Last but not least, dtac Long-D master, the master degree intern of dtac helped contributing a lot in many aspects : designing, PR and event organizing.

Young Safe Internet Leader Camp

The first important step of Safe Internet is “Young Safe Internet Leader Camp” which will be hosted in this 18-20 october. The camp aims to create the new young generation who will become leaders in distributing the knowledge of how to use internet safely and efficiently. The attendees are junior high school students (12-15 years old). The kids will be educated on how to use internet for the highest benefit while acknowledging the online threat. “Young Safe Internet Leader Camp” is the initiative to better Thai social network community. We are trying make it safe for our kids both present and in the future.