The Risks of Social Media to Kids and Adults
Children and social media. Gah! Is there something worse for a parent than this? The perils of social media for youngsters appear to be boundless, ranging from harassment to online predators. But, here’s the thing: Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram shouldn’t be holding you awake at night and may jeopardize their IQ – get free IQ tests with instant results.
Worried about your phone-obsessed child’s exposure to social media? Professionals offer advice on how to avoid eight of the most frequent social media risks.
The first danger is oversharing.
Although it is obviously not recommended for children to share information about their education or their impending travels on social media, cyber predators often operate in much more devious ways than just showing up at a site they learned about online (more on that in a bit).
Believing that being private equates to being safe.
While setting accounts to private provides some safety, the fact is that it isn’t much.
“Kids believe that if they turn their social media to personal, they are protected,” Getz explains. “However, it’s a different story when they approve requests from friends of friends, common friends, individuals they may know, and people with whom they’ve played games.
Interacting with a predator is the third threat.
On the internet, there are a lot of creeps.
“Cyber-predators don’t simply see a kid online, search out their address, and go steal them,” Getz explains. “That’s an opportunist predator.” Internet predators groom their victims. They form online connections with children and then have the children come to them, avoiding the perilous strategy of tracking down the children to kidnap them.”
Enabling your youngster to use social media too early is a danger #4.
Given the possible detrimental psychological and physiological impacts of mobile and social media usage for kids who are young, the nationwide campaign Wait Until 8th recommends that parents delay from giving their children phones until they are in eighth grade and data access until they are 16.