Hi folks, it's Shelly. It's popular to hate on tech these days, whether over monopolistic policies or the spread of fake news. But nowhere is the techlash more warranted than when it comes to social media's youngest users. It's abundantly clear that the tech industry has a serious kids problem.
Back in April, I spoke with two dozen children and their parents for a piece I worked on about the wildly popular short video app, TikTok, and how its fast growth, Chinese ownership, and complicated relationship with young children had made it the subject of scrutiny.
My resounding takeaway: Even the most well-meaning parents were on the losing end of an intensifying battle. One mom I spoke to woke up at dawn every morning to log into her daughter's TikTok account and remove all the nasty comments left while her child slept. Another mother, writer Anastasia Basil, went so deep down the dark hole of TikTok videos featuring young girls provocatively dancing, self-mutilation, and anorexia, she banned her 10-year-old from the app. Kids I spoke to talked about the anxiety of keeping up appearances on their social media sites and all the naked photos that strangers -- and friends -- would ask for on a regular basis.
The most illuminating person I met throughout the reporting, though, was Officer David Gomez, a policeman in Idaho whose job it is to keep kids at the schools he works at safe. When he started working as a school resource officer seven years ago, he thought it would involve breaking up schoolyard fights or keeping drugs out of the classroom. Besides an outdated Myspace page, he knew little about social media. But he quickly realized it subsumed the kids. It was at the root of all their problems.
In our latest episode of Bloomberg's Decrypted podcast, my colleague Pia Gadkari and I peek into David's world. He shows us how he quickly got up to speed on social media and how he uses accounts on Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram (created under fake names) to keep an eye on who his students are talking to and try to head off trouble. Take a listen here.
Recent articles about pedophiles on YouTube, drugs on Instagram, and tech executives looking the other way in search of profits highlight the industry's struggles with keeping children safe on the internet. Despite attempts to do better, companies are just not working fast enough to fix it.
That's left parents, educators, law enforcement and regulators grasping to protect a generation that spends more and more of its waking hours in a virtual reality from some very real-world repercussions.
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