12/15/2022
How safe is it for young teens to use social media?
Every day I would come home from school and the first thing that I would do is run to the family computer and log into my Movie Star Planet account. I would sit for hours and customize my avatar in the most unrealistic way, and chat with people all over the country without actually seeing anyone’s face. I had a sort of “best friend” on this website that went by the username “onedirectioniscool9”, and we would hang out in chatrooms and message each other back and forth for hours on end talking about everything and nothing at the same time. One of the first things that the site told you went first creating your account was to not use your real name in your username and eight-year-old me completely ignored that and still decided to make my username “isangelrockstar”, How original of me. I also ended up telling my “best friend” that my username was actually my real name and she told me hers which was Katie.
Now that I’m older, I see how seriously unsafe and dangerous that could have been because anyone could have been behind that profile. I was also unsupervised whenever I was playing or on the internet. Luckily, I had half a working brain and never gave out any real personal information. This was my form of social media at the time. This led me to think about the safety of kids and young teens that use actual social media and newer games that are similar to Movie Star Planet, the most popular today being Roblox which has a similar concept of creating and customizing an avatar, chatting, and playing with other people around the world behind these characters.
It is a known fact that the evolution of the internet and social media has taken over the world in the past few years. You could find literally anything on the internet with just a quick Google search or find out what a past acquaintance has recently been up to just by typing in their name into a social media website like Facebook. But how safe is it really, especially when a young person is on their own? Yes, they ask you for your age but anyone could just put in any year or number. I know I did. And the young kids using these sites could be exposed to highly inappropriate things that are most definitely unsuitable for their ages. An example of this could be seen on the Hulu original series The Kardashians when Kim Kardashian’s 7-year-old son Saint West was playing Roblox and he found a game claiming to have unseen footage of Kim’s sex tape. Kim was obviously in distress about this and no child should be introduced to that at such a young age. Roblox put out a statement saying that no such content was ever on their website but even then a small child was still exposed in some way to it, and Saint is only one child imagine how many others have been exposed to similar or worse things.
It is not just children that are at risk on the internet it is also young teens. Social media provides a wide platform for bullying on a huge scale. Anyone could say anything on the internet even with all the new restrictions that come out every day. Not to mention the horrible effects that social media could have on someone’s mental health. With beauty standards being blasted and shared all over the internet young girls all over the world are developing body image issues which then leads to things like them trying to fit that standard that then leads to things like depression and eating disorders. It is also very easy to influence young people. There have been many instances where people have impersonated celebrities and well known people to scam or trick young people into doing things for them.
Also, young people make mistakes all the time. It’s a part of life to do something that is probably not right and then later regret it. But the important thing is to learn from it. In this day and age forgiveness is not a thing with cancel culture. People tend to dig up old posts from years ago and bring them back to light. In a way, this is a violation especially if these posts were from when a person was underage. Very easily could this completely break and destroy someone’s career. I have seen it happen with my own eyes multiple times. Mostly people that have big followings online but once again this could very easily be anyone that posted something ignorant in the past and it probably has happened but the general public does not hear about it because it is not some petty influencer drama.
Even with all the privacy settings that all social media websites have people can still have their privacy invaded and violated, unfortunately. There have been countless documentaries have been made and articles have been written about the horrific things that have been put online because of this. Most of them are of people that are of age but that does not mean all and if this could happen to an adult it could just as easily happen to a child.
With all things said no one is 100% safe on the internet but just like schools have slowly been teaching children more and more about sexual education they could do the same thing when it comes to using the internet. If I could go back in time and talk to 8-year-old me I would tell her to be very careful about what she says to people when playing online games and I would also stop 13-year-old me from creating a Musical.ly account and posting the most absolute cringe videos ever, that she would then forget the password to, so when Musical.ly rebrands to Tiktok the account still exists with those videos still posted for everyone to see.
