Grade Eight Student Asks Toronto Sun to Remove Scammer Ads: No Reply but Ads Gone

Here are the facts: After it came to Jim Chen’s attention that work at home scammers were advertising on the online edition of the Toronto Sun, Jim felt obliged to contact the editor-in-chief, James Wallace to let him know it was happening. Mr. Wallace failed to respond to Jim’s email, however, a short while after the letter was sent, and a few other steps taken, the offending advertisements were nowhere to be found on http://www.torontosun.com.

There is no way at this point to prove a causal relationship between Jim’s letter and the disappearance of the ads in question but Neopaideia is willing to give Jim the benefit of the doubt and applauds this young man’s sense of civic duty.

Below is a copy of the email:

Thu, 3 March, 2011 18:37:46

To James Wallace, Editor-in-Chief of the Toronto Sun,

My name is Jim Chen. I am a Grade 8 student in the gifted programme at Cummer Valley Middle School. Like most 21st century learners, I have to do much of my researching online. I recently became aware of advertisements that don't seem like they belong in a major national news publication like the Toronto Sun.
        Attached is a .jpeg file I have of a screenshot of a Sun article with the advertisement I'm talking about. It displays an ad that I have found to be truly unethical. It portrayed a single and 'unemployed' Vancouver mother who made $6,397/month. Online. How is it possible that a single mother is supposed to sit in front of a computer all day and automatically get a paycheck towards their banking account?
        This advertisement was obviously targeted to young, single, and unemployed mothers. Clicking on the ad sends users to something called the “News Daily 7” that has a newspaper-like format. It has been proven to be illegitimate. Apparently, in order to learn the secrets of earning money online, the mother must fill out personal information, including full name, e-mail address, and phone number. She must then pay $20.40 via Paypal or a credit card for an Automated Profit Package. When I tried to exit the page, a popup then showed a message, “Special $10.00 Activation Discount, click “Cancel” to view this offer!” The new price was then $10.18. Why would such a package lower its own price by over 50%? That’s because it is a scam, and the ones receiving money have nothing to lose.
        In my opinion, it is deplorable to cheat money from single mothers who are most likely receiving state assistance. They are one of the main groups of people in the GTA suffering from poverty. Those mothers used a portion of their little income in hope of a package leading them to great job opportunities. However, after paying, they realized that they were being cheated the entire time. Taking money from the poor through false promises is wrong and disgusting.
        It want to believe that your advertising department ignored the importance of analyzing the advertisements sponsoring the website before displaying them to the general public. New media requires new literacies, and one of the ways 21st century readers can gauge the value of the information we find online is in looking at who sponsors the information. If the Sun did not have a printed newspaper component, I'd think this was all scam material and thoroughly untrustworthy based on the advertising I've mentioned.
        Toronto Sun has always been praised for its great articles. This type of advertisement should not be allowed on the website to disrepute the newspaper itself. I wish that you will take time to communicate with your staff and remove the advertisement as soon as possible.
Sincerely,                        
Jim Chen

Jim has yet to receive a reply. After trying again to contact someone at the Sun but still to no avail and as the adverts were still there after several days, Jim made a complaint to Advertising Standards Canada (ASC).  The ASC did reply and took the complaint seriously enough to assign it a case number and made a request for further evidence which Jim provided. 

Some time later there was still no reply from the Sun or its representatives and so Jim decided to contact a number of other local Toronto publications but not many of them were interested in the story. In fact, the only publication to respond, and kudos to them for it, was Chill magazine, the free semi-seasonal Beer Store magazine (nice to know that the publishing voice of an alcohol monopoly of the Ontario provincial government took the time to respond to Jim when so many other ‘community oriented’ publications ignored him). In her response, Stacy Bradshaw, 360° Digital Director at Chill,   explained that the ads probably ended up there in the first place as a result of google adsense policy and not the Toronto Sun. That may explain how it happened but it doesn’t absolve any publisher from the responsibility they have to be able to vouch for the legitimacy of their sponsors.

Coming back to the facts, as of the date of this blog entry’s publication (and possibly earlier), the Toronto Sun is completely free of the advertisements that were of concern.  They can still be found out there in cyberspace, not in major Canadian news publications but in the places where they belong at the fringes of the internet in places such as semi-legal streaming sites for circumnavigating copyright regulations and watching heavy pixel laden pirate copies of popular TV shows.

Congratulations to Jim Chen. He wanted to see the ads gone. He sent them a message. They may not have had the courtesy to reply directly but in the end, the ads are gone. Mission accomplished.

This blog entry is part of a series related to Project Athene dedicated to promoting digital literacy in new media users.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day Marks the Second Anniversary of 'Parent Revolution' in the US: Is the Revolution Floundering?

While the Parent Revolution's website touts the success of their movement and congratulates itself on its second-year anniversary, the LA Times paints a picture of a well intentioned movement in the throes of chaos.

According to their mission statement, the "Parent Revolution aims to transform public education rooted in what’s good for kids — not grown-ups — by empowering parents to transform their own children’s low-performing schools through community organizing."

Empowered by the Parent Trigger Law, their mandate to increase accountability in the public school systems, this America wide movement claims to be a community initiative that started out of Los Angeles County, CA that collects its own data on school performance.  It does not use standardised testing as a measure of 'success'  rather looks at issues of engagement by analysing figures such as drop-out rates and percentages of college admissions.

On the surface, this movement that encourages greater participation in the education process from parents as stakeholders on behalf of their children appears to be an encouraging one. Late in 2010, however, the Parent Revolution put forward the bid to enact the law at McKinley Elementary in Compton, one of the lowest ranking schools in the state. Since then, accusations from both inside and outside of the movement have been laid against the Parent Revolution and have ranged from being simply chaotic to intimidatingly conspiratorial. At McKinley Elementary, the Trigger Law has received its first test and is struggling to achieve a passing grade.

The accusations of chaos seem to come from the idea that while the movement encourages parental participation and contributions, beyond the instituting of a charter, there doesn't seem to be any means inherent in the movement of establishing any kind of consensus with regard to school reform once the Parent Trigger is enacted. Parents have claimed they have been tricked into signing in order to hand over power to the charter holders themselves. Charter schools operate on a charter that, among a set of other criteria, are free from union regulations.  As the parents themselves in the Revolution have formally formed a 'Parent Union', far from facilitating greater parent involvement, this has produced the danger of effectively cutting parents out of nearly any influence in school operations while the school works to meet the conditions of their charter.  It is this lack of consensus too that brings about accusations that far from being an organic movement, it is actually an initiative by charter school operators in league with professionals and funded by billionaires and corporate giants such as Bill Gates.

In the days that have followed the second anniversary of the Parent Revolution, it seems unclear at this point whether it is an inspiring move by parents to enact real and necessary education reform or a cynical bid to further the move toward the standardisation of education. In any case, charges of intimidation and the ongoing and ruthless battles between parents and teachers do not seem to serve the best interest of the children. This seems to be an example of the Parent Revolution falling short of their mission.

Animated Sir Ken Robinson

The video above is one of the most poignant and important talks on education in the 21st century.

The speaker in this video, Sir Ken Robinson, had his contributions to education recognised by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II who knighted him in 2003. His visionary commentaries on the subject of ways to identify and address problems inherent in today's education systems are a perfect spot for Neopaideia to begin.