We’ve got a social issue of clandestine school weblog sites on which children slander their classmates by posting anonymous messages. For school teachers are too busy to resolve these issues, education boards of several local authorities tend to outsource website patrol operations to watchdog experts.
Tokyo metropolitan government put its patrol work on public bid in early June, the Tokyo-based human-powered website patrol company PitCrew[J] succeeded to get a USD19 million deal for the two-year patrol operation over clandestine sites regarding 2,200 public schools in the city. PitCrew categorizes harassing message posts in three levels. If the company finds a case requiring urgent measures, it will make a 911 call to avoid possible critical events.
Meanwhile, a Shibuya-based web service start-up, Cybridge[J] is running a website[J] allowing to make it easier for parents to check up clandestine sites, which is called “Ura Site Checker”. At clandestine sites, local slang is usually used to call a school and to specify a person, which makes much harder to find the sites with Internet search engines such as Google. Cybridge created a list of the sites in human-power, it is appropriately maintained by the company’s employees.
Masaru IKEDA