![]() ![]() Younger children are simply not ready to have social media accounts. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the ACLU of Massachusetts, Common Sense Media, the Badass Teachers Association, Inc.(!) and others all urged Facebook to kill Messenger Kids, arguing: Shortly after the app was released, there was a public letter of protest signed by an impressive array of organizations. So while Messenger Kids avoids some of the troubling dynamics of performing on social media in front of the entire world, it will run into smaller versions of the same problems of gossip, exclusion, bullying and compulsive reputation management. Parents who aren’t heavy users of modern messaging apps might not realize how often messaging chats these days involve not just two or three people but a good dozen at a time. It’s essentially glorified SMS texting, plus an updated way to call your friends - and don’t we all have fond memories of that? Where Messenger Kids falls short lower frequency of notifications and responses.posts won’t be seen by everybody you know.The choice to make a simplified version of just Facebook Messenger, and not the main Facebook experience, means limitations that parents should welcome: (I wanted to tag my kids in photos, so I registered them with false birth years long ago.) According to Facebook’s own research, most parents report that children start using messaging and social media apps well before 13 - often at 7 or 8 years old.įacebook’s answer to this dilemma is Messenger Kids, a recently launched app designed from the ground up with kids, and parents in mind.īut I think the even bigger deal is that this isn’t Facebook. But they’ve long known that tens of millions of younger users get in by simply lying about their birth year. Which means parents only have a brief window to influence how their kids first encounter social media, before the cat is out of the bag.įacebook officially requires users to be at least 13 years old. In the real world, kids are finding their way to social media apps on their own. No one would stare at a screen feeling empty instead of living life. In my ideal world, social media would never be addictive and kids would have the autonomy they had a generation or two ago, together with only the good things about the Internet. Snapchat is probably the worst offender Facebook Messenger one of the most innocuous, and most legitimately useful. “Social media” is a very broad category apps can vary widely in their usefulness, their tendency to emphasize exclusion and status, and their cravenness for attention. As Anya Kamenetz points out in her excellent book The Art of Screen Time, most kids seem to do just fine navigating technology and social media natively. So are other social media networks like Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Twitter, WeChat, Line, Kik, Telegram, and whatever new hotness is too cool for me to have heard of yet.Īnd for all the alarmism about the ill effects of social media, it’s important to remember that what we don’t know dwarfs the little that we do know. The fact is, Facebook is really, really good at connecting us to people we care about. But here’s a reason you should take my criticism with a grain of salt: the main place I turned to to share it with people I know was… Facebook. You hear complaints like mine frequently about Facebook. There are studies that suggest kids experience more body image issues and more depression the more they are pulled into the game of who appeared in what photo with whom, who liked what post and who didn’t, who kept up your streak in Snapchat or didn’t. That amplification can have a seismic effect on kids, given how all-encompassing issues of identity, belonging and reputation already are in adolescence (and even earlier). The social media slot machine also amplifies complex personal dynamics. In his words, Silicon Valley has “put a slot machine in a billion pockets” by making smartphones into devices that provide just the right frequency of reward to keep us coming back. ![]() Social media may be eroding our families’ privacy, but the far, far more important problem is that social media is destroying our families’ freedom.Īs Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, puts it, “The ultimate freedom is a free mind, and we need technology that’s on our team to help us live, feel, think and act freely.” In my post “ Why parents should be worried about Facebook”, I laid out the problem as I see it: it’s not privacy that should keep parents up at night, but rather social media’s corrosive effect on all of us: ![]() I’m glad you asked, because I’ve been checking it out myself. I know you’re warning parents about Facebook, but what about Facebook’s new Messenger Kids app? Is that good or bad? I was thinking of trying it. ![]()
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