The recent Ofcom Children’s Media Literacy Audit has shown that 25% of children aged 8-12 have a profile on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace. This comes despite the fact that the minimum age set by these sites is 13 years old. 83% of these children say they have set their profile to be seen by friends only. However this still leaves 17% of the age group that have profiles that are significantly underage, and open for all to see. Alarmingly one in six parents of the age group had no idea their child was involved with a social network, although it should be added that of those that did, 93% said that they checked what their child was doing on them.
Facebook has continually refused to install a panic button on it’s site allowing users to report suspicious activity directly to CEOP (Child exploitation and online protection centre), citing that it’s current security is sufficient, however the site has agreed to install a pop up that allows users to report to CEOP when reporting abuse through the normal Facebook channel.
Whether this will work remains to be seen; if these underage uses have lied about their age in order to get a profile, will they risk losing this profile by reporting someone? It seems unlikely Facebook would shut down all underage profiles, as without demanding proof of age, there is little that can be done online, whether the underage users know that is a different matter. There is also the fact that the likelihood of coming to harm through meeting someone online is very low. Of children that are harmed by people they meet online almost all of them have met up willingly, and almost all of the criminals have pretended to be someone else. This surely leads to a conclusion that a structured reporting system is of course necessary, but that education is the way forward. It would be great to see sites such as Facebook putting their name to education and training systems, perhaps encouraging children to attend voluntarily, or running classes within school. These sites have a brand that children recognise and are likely to listen to; as opposed to the warnings of parents and teachers which may just get muddled into the warnings of don’t speak to strangers/don’t smoke/don’t take drugs This article is taken from the April edition of the Interaction newsletter. In one of the articles, Laura Sweeting wrote a piece about social networks and children
