Keeping It Safe & Social: A Friendly Guide for Parents

12 Dec

Roy Ghoshal (He/Him), a Youth Action Academy Member and Events and Engagement Officer for SPW has written this blog to help us navigate the online world safely with our children/teenagers.

Introduction

Social media has become an unavoidable part of our lives, whether it is to catch up on the latest trends and find out what’s buzzing or to express our voice and connect with like-minded people, social media has become a huge network that has got a bit for everything for everyone. In this day and age, along with adults, young people have grown quite fond of social media too, and it has become very hard to keep them away from it.

While there can be some positives from using social media, unfortunately, it is also full of toxic and unsafe elements that should not be exposed to young people. In this blog, we’ll look at how you can ensure your child has a safe and pleasant social media experience.

Why Social Media Safety Matters

Kids and young people are very susceptible to being victims of cyberbullying, misinformation, scams, and exposure to inappropriate content and interaction with strangers. It is important to make sure their space and privacy are protected to ensure that they have a pleasant social media experience. To do this, there are a few settings that you can enable on their social media apps to make sure you have supervision and control, some of which are:

Parental Supervision - Enabling the parental supervision feature on their meta (refers to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) or other social media apps helps you track which apps they’ve been using and for what duration. Also, this feature helps you to check safety features like voice mode and personal boundaries.
Content Restriction and Content Filtering - parents can have the option of disabling certain features on social features, including calling, sharing photos or chatting and disabling the creator mode for their children. By using the content filtering process, you can limit the type of content your child is seeing and potentially remove inappropriate or harmful content.
Blocking and Reporting - After a young person has blocked and/or reported someone, they can send a notification to their parents. Parents also have access to see if their child has changed their privacy settings.

Establishing Safe and Open Communication with their Children

It’s important to have a conversation with your child, not only to explain to them all the rules on social media but also why they exist and why it's important to follow them and be safe. Try to establish a relationship of trust with them and make them feel comfortable coming up to you and talking to you about their problems and their experiences on social media - both good and bad. To do that, try not to make tech or social media a taboo subject and encourage honesty and open-ended conversations.

Learn and understand the platform they use

There are several social media platforms to choose from, and your child may have one or two favourite social media platforms to use. Make sure that you learn the features of those platforms, such as “DM, disappearing content, privacy settings” and then read up or learn about the parental control settings on those platforms. Check the platform terms and conditions or settings from time to time and adjust the privacy settings accordingly as social media platforms tend to update their privacy settings from time to time.

Set up safety and privacy features

It’s important to check the privacy settings of your child on social media and ensure a few things:

Make sure their location is turned off and enable settings that give control over who can contact them.
Use third-party parental control apps such as Bark, Qustodio that help monitor and provide danger alerts.

Set healthy Boundaries on Social Media Usage and Screentime

Setting healthy boundaries is vital to protecting young people online and ensuring that they maintain a balance between school, screen time, playing outside and engaging in out of school activities. It can be helpful to create a mutually agreed social media planner or a daily schedule with your child to provide structure to their daily routine. Adding some device-free time, such as family mealtimes, books and reading sessions and parks and playtime, will allow them to enjoy some device-free time to rest their minds and allow them to connect with others offline.

Helping Young People Fact Check Misinformation and AI-generated content

It can now be difficult to identify the difference between AI generated content and human content. The new AI tools and practices such as “deep fakes” can create realistic content. A viral AI-generated post, “Goodbye Meta”, went viral on Facebook and other social media platforms and was reshared by James McAvoy and Tom Brady, making it seem much more authentic.

So, if your child tells you about a post or shares some information that seems a bit odd, you can always cross-check the post or information on certain software that helps you detect AI content, such as Deepware Scanner, Google Reverse Image Search, TinEye, and Clarifai. If the information turns out to be fake, you can choose to report it as “false information” from your account to prevent it from affecting others.

Growing Up Online: How Social Media is Defining a Generation

The style of media and communication changes every now and then, a shift in the digital communications pattern can be anticipated every 10-20 years which changes the way we interact with each other. This shift can bring a new era of connectivity and creativity while also presenting privacy, safety, and misinformation challenges. The way social media has changed over the last few years post covid may seem like a lot to take in at once, but with time and consistent practice you can improve your child’s relationship with social media and teach them how to embrace it with caution and care.

Parental Controls on Social Media Platforms

Snapchat - Snapchat’s Family Center feature and supervision tools share insights into the activities of their children (teenagers) and provide control options to moderate the privacy and time settings. The minimum age required to join snapchat is 13+ for young people. And their parent can set daily limits of time spent on snapchat and view time spent on the app. They can get notifications when their child reports a user and restrict or limit age sensitive content. Manage privacy settings - sharing location with friends, among other features.
Facebook - Facebook has the Messenger Kids version for young people under the age of 13. Parents can manage who can contact or friend their child and monitor friend requests and privacy settings. They can also control or restrict who can see the profile and posts of their child. Facebook also provides supervision tools to parents with children between the ages of 13-17 to safeguard their experience on facebook. Parents can see how much time their child has spent on facebook and set up sleep mode to limit the time they spend on Facebook during certain days and hours. See their friends, manage and approve the privacy settings and sensitivity preferences of their teenager. See people and pages their teenager has blocked along with many other features.
Instagram - Instagram’s Family center also offers supervision tools to parents to be able to limit time spent on the app, see followers and the people who follow their teenager, and get notifications when their child reports someone, and limit or restrict sensitive content.
TikTok - TikTok has its own Family Pairing tools that help parents to set screen time restrictions, disable or restrict direct messaging, filter potentially inappropriate content with “Restricted Mode”, and manage privacy settings among other features.

Helpful Resources:

By Roy Ghoshal

WellbeingChildren's Mental HealthMental health

Amy Holland