CLibra’s Blog

When you sign up for a website, be it an email service or a social network, there’s a certain element of trust involved; do you trust that website with your data? Equally, does that website trust that you’re not lying to them? Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to lie about your age on websites, and as such, there’s a boom in children using social networks. There are good reasons why Facebook users need to be 13 years of age to sign up for it, and I think it really says something about the youngsters of our generation who seem to have no problem in inputting a false birthday and lying about their age; are the children of today people who don’t find any trouble whatsoever in lying?

And also there’s a certain censorship element involved in Facebook; imagine that, for example, a friend’s 10 year old daughter added you on Facebook. It’d make me rather uneasy about what I should and shouldn’t post online, solely centred around this one youngster. There is also a large amount of quizzes, apps and groups that feature sex-orientated content heavily, and a lot of parents wouldn’t want their children to partake in such things. Facebook’s demographic isn’t the said age group so it shouldn’t need to censor it because its target users – aged 13 and above – are generally mature enough to deal with such themes, but more and more ‘age faking’ could result in Facebook needing to change.

What I’m finding is that because young people (and by that I mean under 13) as a whole haven’t developed enough as a person, they aren’t fully aware of social conventions, and as a result, this is carried across onto the internet. It’s obvious that you don’t friend every person that you’ve either seen or heard the name of, but to a younger person on a social network, they may not realise it, and proceed to involve themselves in every aspect of that person’s online life. And to top it all off, a lot of people don’t know how to work their privacy settings on Facebook anyway, so I doubt that younger children will be able to protect themselves with highly tweaked privacy, and will probably be more naïve towards strangers adding them as friends, which can lead to all sorts of dangers. Is it the innocence of children, or irresponsibility of parents that is in the wrong here?

I feel very strongly about youngsters on Facebook and I don’t think that it’s a safe nor wise thing to do. I’m in no way criticising Facebook, but I think that people should enjoy it when they’re older and more knowledgeable about the internet and the world around them, otherwise there could be serious regrets in the future of the consequences of social networking. Although Facebook is a prime example of where you can find children disregarding rules set up to protect them, it unfortunately takes place all over the internet because the system relies on trust and so is strongly flawed.