Media has been buzzing with the recent news that Facebook is working on technology that will allow kids under the age of 13 to create an account on the site. With government officials, NGO's, online safety experts and others weighing in on both sides – good or bad, I felt compelled to jump in and voice an opinion.
What Needs to Happen
In order for Facebook to allow kids under the age of 13 on the site, there are several things that need to happen.
To begin with, Facebook must address the COPPA concerns. For those of you who haven't heard of COPPA, it's the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal regulation that requires prior verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information online from children under the age of 13. Facebook needs to obtain parental permission for kids under 13 to create a Facebook account.
It is essential that Facebook fully explores the preteen age range they're targeting and provides an age-appropriate experience for that age range. Not all existing Facebook features are appropriate for a preteen audience regardless of parental consent and oversight, and some may even vary depending on the age of the preteen. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Facebook is more interested in capturing the 10-12 year old audience as that's the audience most interested in being where their friends are. And, I imagine at this point, Facebook has a pretty good idea of what that age group is now doing, albeit covertly, on their service. This information could be used to help protect them on a legitimate Facebook account.
Hand-in-hand with providing an age-appropriate experience, Facebook must provide parents with the means to monitor and supervise their children. For instance, Facebook could offer a predetermined, baseline experience for kids under 13 and provide parents with the tools to customize the experience making it either more restrictive or less restrictive based on a combination of factors including their children's age, maturity level, family norms as well as time parents are willing to commit to micromanaging the experience.
Facebook needs to embed a strong educational program into the experience focusing on both digital citizenship and online safety. Embedding education into the experience takes it beyond safety tips at the bottom of a page or a link to Facebook's safety site, but rather places teachable moments throughout the experience, especially at the point of interactivity when crucial decisions are being made.
Lastly, Facebook will have to make it easy for kids to report potential problems and, at the same time, should also employ technological solutions to proactively identify problems.
The Benefits
Assuming all the above needs are met, let's look at the benefits.
Facebook is ultimately offering a solution to the growing problem of underage users on their service, either there with or without their parent's consent. We've heard from Facebook that they remove 20,000 underage users daily from their service and these are only the ones they identify. These children are currently in an environment that offers them no protection for their age group – parental, technological, and/or educational. Creating an environment specifically for children will address these issues.
Connecting parents with preteen children on Facebook starts the parental involvement early on in the child's social media life-cycle. It brings the child into an environment that the typical parent of a preteen has used and has knowledge of, ultimately making the parent the expert if only for a brief time. This is a time when children are still willing to listen and learn from their parents, and less likely to push boundaries.
Relying on parents to oversee the social networking experience early on creates a platform for ongoing conversation. It provides valuable insight to the parent as to the child's expectations with respect to online social interactions. It builds an online collaboration between parent and child that can continue on as the child ages.
Gradual graduation to Facebook from the preteen to teens will make for more informed teens who are well aware of digital citizenship and online safety, including managing their reputation.
Additionally, some of the tools designed for the preteen experience could be utilized for parents to keep a closer eye on their younger teens on Facebook; those ranging from 13 to 15 who typically jump in without any guidance at all. Facebook for under 13's will produce teens who have matured in the social media realm with the expectation that parents play a significant role.
If correctly implemented, Facebook could offer kids and parents a shared platform that would afford kids a safer environment to explore, learn and ultimately understand the responsibility that comes along with social media. Think of it as a virtual 'kiddie pool' of sorts.
With this said, I don't think 'Facebook for Kids' is a bad idea. What do you think?
Facebook for Kids: Is it such a bad idea?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Hannah 6-10-2012 @ 6:29PM
For many reasons, I do agree that many things that are posted on Facebook are not age appropriate for children who are younger than thirteen. Facebook uses its database to collect information from billions of different demographics that use their site each day to make their site better and easier to use. It is very difficult for a parent to control every website that their child uses. And in many ways, parents should allow their children to be social over the internet and share their opinions. But as many of us know, preteens especially make mistakes and state many opinions that they wish they could take back. What many preteens and teenagers do not know is that anything they post on the internet and especially Facebook will remain as property of those sites permanently.
I have personally learned about privacy issues and the dangers of the Internet after joined the social networking site when I was only thirteen years old. I was a member of MySpace, and spent a lot of my time decorating my profile and posting funny pictures. It was very easy for anyone to become a user on MySpace. Looking back now, I do wish that I was more educated about the dangers of the Internet. Today our social media has become a lot more developed and has opened to a lot more users. Today we are now able to know the dangers of social networking sites and can come up with many solutions to protecting our children.
Because social networking sites were new at the time, my parents were not aware of what exactly MySpace was and didn't hear about the issues of sexual predators until years after I deleted my account. At the beginning of high school, I became a member of Facebook. When the Facebook website first opened, it was originally created only for college students. In order for order for new members to sign up for an account, they had to be accepted and approved other college students to be on Facebook. As Facebook became more popular, it opened up its account users to high schools and later middle schools. Eventually Facebook ended up making networks optional and did not require approval from other users.
Now that Facebook has gotten rid of its required Network system, its made it much more difficult to keep track of how old it's users are. There are many websites like YouTube that try to protect underage users from using or seeing inappropriate things on their site. But many people can get around these age requirements by simply lying about their age. Even before Facebook opened their site to allowing a younger audience to use their site, teenagers would lie about what school they attended. Though I do agree that Facebook should help prevent preteens from making personal accounts without parental permission or involvement, Facebook will have to find another way to require their users to give their appropriate age without breaking privacy rights.
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Mythjen J. Trias 7-03-2012 @ 6:05PM
Childproofing just about applies to everything, including teens and social networking. While the youngsters in the family get their kicks mostly from making new friends on Facebook, our major concern is when an unknown person applies as a friend (funny how young girls can easily be bombarded by such requests even when their photos are not published, their profiles sanitized, as the rule for letting them have an account). Another observed protocol is to not accept FB friends unless they are personally known.
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Kidswatch Sales 7-12-2012 @ 4:18PM
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stev 9-18-2012 @ 5:16AM
If you thinking that the Facebook is a bad idea for kids,try this link http://www.minormonitor.com/
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Scott 9-26-2012 @ 3:49AM
Hey Stev,
Your site at minormonitor.com is fantastic. Is there a way we could work together? I just launched http://www.monitoringspysoftware.com/ perhaps we could set something up. Let me know!
The offer goes out to safetyclicks too. I loved this article about Facebook. It covered just about every concern I had when my teenager first asked about signing up with Facebook.