Impact of Social Media on Children: Essay

In recent years, the amount of people who own a mobile phone has skyrocketed, with 95% of households owning at least one since 2015, and a further 70% of children aged 5-16 having their own personal mobile phone. These statistics show a massive number of children from a young age being exposed to and having access to different forms of social media on a vast range of devices. This causes a plethora of young children to be vulnerable and easy targets of cyberbullying, predators, hackers, and many more malicious acts online. Therefore, given the overwhelming evidence that social media has negative effects on children, in my opinion, young children should not use social media.

Young children use social media on a day-to-day basis. This has a risk of kids being exposed to unsuitable comments online. This can 'brainwash' kids into thinking these disgusting remarks are normal and okay to say from an exceptionally youthful age. A recent study of 12- to 15-year-olds showed that 1 in 3 of them had encountered sexist, racist, or other discriminatory statements online, while another study of 11- to 16-year-olds showed that 56% of them had seen explicit material online. Seeing these types of inappropriate content from an incredibly young age may influence their still-developing minds into thinking this is okay. In turn, this may cause them to repeat some of these racist, sexist, and discriminatory words in real life and online, offending those targeted without realizing its impact, which is simply not acceptable.

More and more children are using mobile phones and social media each year, this in turn shows an increase in bullying online. A recent study carried out in Wales in 2020 showed that 1 in 5 of 10-15-year-olds experienced at least 1 type of cyberbullying during the year, and 72% of them said that they had some of this harassment carry over into school time. This a big problem as it can have a massive effect on children's mental health. Which can affect their schoolwork, social life, and home life. Also, this may cause them to lash out at people who are trying to help them and who have done nothing wrong. Therefore, it is unacceptable that there is not enough support and help for young people who are struggling with their mental health, and there should be facilities put in place to help young people at school or online to overcome these depressing situations. There are many things you can do to help your child deal with cyberbullying. One expert advises to help your child “Don't keep quiet - if you voice yourself you take away from the power of the bullies”. This is one of the multiple ways that you can help save your children from the grasp of cyberbullying.

Hackers and scammers have been around for a long time, and with kids now using technology from such an early age, it has become even easier to steal all kinds of information from unaware and easily manipulated children. With hacks and scams becoming smarter and harder to detect, it is now even more important to inform your kids about the dangers of the Internet and the disguised malicious acts to look out for. Apps and games on many devices that young people use include manipulative tricks to trap children into buying their online items in exchange for money. A recent study was done on the 135 most popular apps for kids. They found these games routinely engage in several manipulative advertising practices, like forcing kids to watch ads or make in-app purchases to advance in the game. This shows the sketchy acts that these companies participate in. Therefore, I think that there should be a law to prevent the immense amount of advertisement these games show to children.

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Children are exposed to advertising every day online, whether it is on social media or websites. Sometimes these adverts can be very misleading and lying to you about their service or product. This can affect young children's minds and thoughts on different things being advertised to them. Advertisers spend billions of dollars per year making their products and adverts eye-catching on TV, the Internet, apps, and many more to lure kids into wanting these products and influencing their parents to buy them for them. Advertisers can also track your searches across the Web to target you with adverts of products you have been looking at to make you more likely to buy from their shop. This can happen to kids as young as 13, recommending a product many times to kids to 'brainwash' them into buying the product. This is not acceptable as it is companies taking advantage of the children's still developing minds to implant positive thoughts on these products into the children's brains before they can create their own personal views on a product that the companies use for their own profit/benefit.

A relatively new phenomenon, TikTok has skyrocketed to become a big part of young children's day-to-day lives. In succession, this has caused a mass amount of child predators and groomers to use this platform to target vulnerable and unsuspecting young kids to influence their thoughts and actions for the offender's personal gain. Like any social media platform that has a direct message or commenting feature, there's always the possibility that your child could be chatting with anyone, including strangers; these are an easy and dangerous way that people can infiltrate young people's lives. Direct messaging on many social media, including TikTok, is a way for strangers to talk to your child and send photos, videos, and messages through this feature. This can lead to your children being manipulated by people online. Another route is the comments feature on TikTok, this can be a centralized place for a lot of hate and bullying on many TikTok videos, where anyone can put a message below your child's TikTok videos, this can lead to a lot of hate and bullying for your children from sometimes hundreds of people with TikTok's 1 billion active users, haters, and predators online can massively affect children while on social media and even going about their day to day lives. Parents or guardians can prevent this from happening by monitoring their children's usage of the Internet and behavior to check for anything odd happening to their children. TikTok offers a way to turn off comments on videos and make your account private so people cannot reach your children or target them online. Parents or guardians can also educate themselves on children's online safety and what signs to look out for, so they can tell if their child is being preyed on, cyberbullied, or groomed.

Some may argue that social media is an effective way for a child to easily communicate with friends and family members. There are many other sources to communicate with friends and family online via the use of messaging services such as WhatsApp and the messaging built into many phones, FaceTime and Skype are extremely useful for people who want to talk to friends and family face to face which allows away to still be able to see others online. Social media offers a lot of privacy settings within their apps to avoid strangers talking to your children online by making accounts private, so you have to accept who you want to see your posts online and blocking meaning that it stops someone you do not want your child talking to from reaching them. This point is invalid as there are a lot of diverse ways to communicate with friends and family while avoiding the use of social media, and there are many ways to just allow your children to talk to certain people on social media with the use of privacy settings built into these apps.

To sum up, there is an overwhelming body of evidence that suggests the negative impact of social media on children. This still reaffirms that they should not use social media until they reach the recommended and appropriate age to understand all the risks and dangers of social media and the Internet in general.