![]() None of the questions around kids’ use of devices and social media are easy. I don’t want to demonize parents who have allowed their kids to use social apps at young ages. ![]() Unlike Facebook, most companies don’t have the luxury of making choices that could slow user growth, or time spent in-app, as Facebook just remarkably did. Because Wall Street strictly judges social networks on growth metrics, they’re often scared to purge fake accounts and underage users. Snapchat and Musical.ly, for example, are heavily used by the under-13 crowd who have learned to lie about their ages in order to participate.īut Snapchat has been seeing slowing user growth, so its first priority will not be making sure all its users are of age. What’s worse, I think, are the other messaging apps that have for years turned a blind eye to the fact that they have user bases filled with children – not just minors under the age of 18, but actual children, under the age of 13.Ī number of social apps are troublesome, too, because they have messaging components built-in. The app has even been compared to cigarette companies advertising their products to minors.īut as a parent myself, it’s been difficult to for me to dismiss Messenger Kids as an entirely evil product. That’s pretty bad timing.Ĭhild health advocates have called for Facebook to shut down Messenger Kids. Into this new understanding of technology’s downsides and dark nature comes Messenger Kids. The messaging solution with built-in parental controls has arrived at a time when there’s mounting concern over how use of social media has detrimental impacts on people’s well-being, as well as concern over how technology companies have irresponsibly developed products aimed to addict their users without understanding the negative consequences of those actions. There are plenty of reasons to hate the idea of Messenger Kids, though. She didn’t know that Kik was one of the worst of them all in terms of its adoption by child abusers, according to a 2017 investigation that dubbed it the “de facto app for grooming children online.” (I filled her in.) Her friends were on the app, and she wanted to be, too.Īnother friend of mine recently installed Kik on her daughters’ Android phones because they wanted to message their friends, and their phones didn’t have cell service. The child told her parents she installed the app to talk to school friends about a game they were playing. (The police were called and are now investigating.) The child was almost immediately contacted by an adult man, whose conversations indicated he was a child predator in the early stages of grooming his victim. This point was drilled home for me a few days ago, when a friend discovered her daughter downloaded the messaging app IMVU without her parents’ knowledge. No one wants to surrender their kids to online social networks, but children can be exposed to even more danger by going around their parents’ backs. ![]() I wasn’t sure I had done the right thing. I sat with her as she typed her first message and sent a selfie. I’ve been struggling with whether or not to download Facebook’s new app aimed at children, Messenger Kids, onto my daughter’s iPad.
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