Social Networking
What is Social Networking?
Social networking is the phrase used to describe the activity of chatting with friends or making new friends on the Internet
How is it done?
There are a variety of websites that allow people to easily talk to other people on the Internet.
Amongst the more well-known of these are Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.
By entering these sites people can chat with their friends on-line and, if they wish to do so, make new friends.
A person will enter the site and create a personal profile which consists of information about themselves.
Once they have made their profile they can view the profile of their friends and talk to them if they are on-line.
What are the dangers?
Despite setting a minimum age limit of 13 and 14 to create a profile, more than one quarter of 8-11 year olds in the U.K. are on Bebo, Facebook or MySpace. This is based on a survey by Ofcom and was based on a sample of 5,000 adults and 3,000 children.
Although advised not to give personal contact details, a lot of younger users will give their name, address, school and often include a personal photograph of themselves.
The dangers of this are obvious. Would you allow a child to give those personal details to an unknown individual in the street? The answer is obviously no. The Internet usage of these sites should be no different.
The children will profess to be 'aware of the dangers' and try to assure adults that 'only their friends can see them' but at the very least the children must be lying about their age to be able to use the sites.
Profiles of 14 and 15-year-olds are automatically made private so that users are protected from adults they don't already know but it is very easy for a person to claim to be someone they are not in order to make friends with a younger person.
What can you, as a parent, do about it?
Be aware of what your son/daughter is doing on the internet.
If you know they like using one of the social networking sites then ask to look at their profile and check that you think it is suitable.
Children are becoming increasingly adept at hiding their activity on these sites from adults.
They will often engage in a system of coding within chat rooms that will make it clear to other users that they are being observed by an adult.
'PIR' meaning 'Parent In Room or 'POS' meaning 'Parent over Shoulder' are two examples of this.
Banning the use of such sights leads to the possibility of your son/daughter using the sites covertly.
If they come across something they are not happy with they will be less inclined to tell you for fear of getting into trouble.
It may be better to teach sensible guidlines and make the young person aware of any dangers in a way appropriate to their age.
Of course most of what happens on the internet is just harmless chat between friends or teenagers fooling around but let us remember that we are responsible as the adult.
Research has shown that an increasing number of predatory sex offenders regularly use these sites to further their own interests in ways that are becoming very sophisticated so a few precautions might be sensible:
Other relevent pages on this site:
Using the Internet: Advice for parents
Using the Internet: Advice for Children
