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Truly, with half a billion users, monitoring all content on the site would be difficult by anyone’s standards. Still, I suggest a three-pronged approach.
1. Facebook must tighten up its security. Either install a panic button for kids to quickly report a problem, monitor uploaded and linked content more carefully, or screen applications for subscription more stringently. If not, stop pretending that Facebook is an air-tight, safe site. It isn’t.
2. Law enforcement needs to track the online activity of convicted offenders. Call this a draconian violation of civil rights, but if you violate the civil rights of an innocent child in any way, your access to your addiction should be permanently restricted.
3. Parents, Parents, Parents. Be informed, be aware. Be in the game. Realize that the internet and all related networking is here to stay and make decisions accordingly.
Try envisioning social networking sites as having a “real-world” counterparts: a public park, a door or window through which we allow others to observe our thoughts and lives. Would we wantonly open the doors to our homes or windows of our kids’ bedrooms to anyone who might be passing by? We diligently instruct our children never to talk to strangers. Yet if we understood that the information shared on Facebook is akin to telling unknown persons in a public park the intimate details of our lives, perhaps we’d reconsider our actions.
Internet ubiquity requires our vigilance, and the unprecedented reach of Facebook itself should not be underestimated.
A friend aptly described it as the riskiest venture:
It’s the most comprehensive framework of cyber-relationships to come to the internet. It surpasses chat, email, online gaming. Your entire life is put out there, your ability to express emotions, impulses, passions and reactions is optimized. The strings are there to manipulate others for those who choose to pick them up. It’s an alternate society, and it shows the darker side of people’s malevolent natures. In real life, there are consequences. Facebook bypasses that. I’m not just talking about children. I’m talking about people in general. The primary issue is that children are especially vulnerable to emotional manipulation, therefore it is even more dangerous to them.
Sobering.
