Social media is an essential part of life. Whether it is a force for good or an altogether more complex feature of our lives is open to question and debate. Certainly, unchecked scrolling can have quite an effect on even the most mindful adults. With this in mind, do parents believe social media is safe for their children to use?
To discover which platforms parents’ find unsafest, the website All About Cookies surveyed 1,000 parents and asked them to weigh in on how they believe their kids are being affected by social media.
The survey conducted relates to the view of parents who a residing in the U.S.
Coming in top place for concern was TikTok. Here, over half of parents said that they considered the short video presentation site TikTok is the most unsafe social media platform. In contrast to this finding, YouTube was considered the safest
Such is the concern about TikTok, its stands that 33 percent of parents believe TikTok should be banned entirely due to privacy concerns. This is a very sizeable proportion and this will reflect a divide between the views and expectations of parents and of their children. Such a view may well push more young people to use the service if they think their parents do not approve of it.
Further with TikTok, over 1 in 3 people surveyed believe lawmakers should step in and create new privacy laws specifically for TikTok. This is not quite the same as seeking to ban the service, but is represents a large proportion of which to restrict the operation of the site in terms of its relative freedom to operate.
Many security professionals have found security vulnerabilities in the TikTok app. They range from hackers using SMS messages to gain unauthorized access to accounts, through to issues surrounding the use of HTTP and HTTPS when delivering videos.
In terms of general parental concerns, a minority are sufficiently concerned to seek to supervise what their children are doing online. The survey found that 23 percent of parents of guardians check their child’s Internet activity at least once a day.
Apparently, 30 percent of adults with children do not allow their child on social media at all. This is a surprisingly larger proportion of people. However, the survey authors indicates that stratified “across age and gender to create a nationally representative sample.”
The proportion who are seeking to ban social media use exists despite such as the Kids Online Safety Act being passed. It would seem that the views of some parents as to the effectiveness of this type of legislation is very low.
The Act will require all online platforms, including social media platforms, to provide parents with “easy-to-use” tools to protect their children younger than 16 from harmful images, sexual exploitation, bullying, and product recommendations. These measures are not considered strong enough by a large proportion of parents surveyed.
