In the News

As social media use continues to increase, the need for education on safe usage is heightened. In To win back teens, Facebook launched a website, Rachel Kraus discusses Facebook’s newest feature, a youth portal, designed to contain tailored material for teenagers and provide content on safe social media practices. Kraus explains that Facebook’s appeal to teenagers is declining and the new ‘youth portal’ is designed to regain trust in Facebook by creating a safe space for teenagers to engage with each other and learn about current issues.

Our Take

Though the ploy to expand their user base and improve their public image is obvious, in light of Facebook’s recent series of scandals, the creation of a ‘youth portal’ designed to promote safe social media usage and practices isn’t a bad idea. It is important for adolescents and social media users of all ages to understand the risks and benefits of social media platforms, and if the adults in their lives don’t use much social media, they won’t receive that information any other way.  Adolescents today face a much more public and long-lasting record of their activities and mistakes than previous generations; learning good online behavior early is incredibly important.

This portal may also foster interaction amongst peers, rather than throwing adolescents directly into the larger (cess)pool of social media users. If Facebook’s ‘youth portal’ is able to secure the platform for only adolescents and increase use of Facebook by the teenage demographic, the platform will be a success…but eliminating harmful agents and content may be harder to ensure in practice than in theory.

Recommendations

Adults can themselves learn some lessons from this story:

• Be cognizant of what you post online, especially when it is publicly available–your habits and schedules and answers to your security questions can be trivial to track if you aren’t careful about your privacy
• Take care when clicking on articles that link to sites you don’t recognize:  some sites may be malicious
• Don’t download social media integrations or apps you are unfamiliar with just to take a brief quiz or play a quick game
• Recognize that social media newsfeeds operate via algorithms intended to get you to spend time and click on things:  avoid using an unvetted echo chamber of articles intended to entertain you as your sole source of news
• Help the young adults in your life make good online choices