Internet Moral Panics : The Social Media Predator Essay

We share our feelings, exact locations, and activities so easily through means of social media. These types of posts generally give away too much personal information which can further result in safety issues. Privacy isn’t such a big deal for teenagers now. They don’t realize the implications that comes with posting all of their life details.. This is where privacy needs to be of greater demand to keep children’s lives and secrets safe.

Even with the dangerous developments in social media over the past several years, many parents have chosen to allow their children to use these sites despite age restrictions. There are three reasons to argue for age restrictions on social media sites: lack of supervision by parents, targeting of children by pedophiles, and the prevalence of children falsifying their age. The ability of pedophiles to conceivably target children with social media proves that this is an issue that parents need to examine so that they may better protect their children. The threat from pedophiles causes an enormous problem for millions of children on social media sites. Unfortunately, Western Daily Press states that “Pedophiles can get away with grooming young teenagers on social media sites.” My essay will argue that age restrictions need to be in place, and additional regulations should ensure that law enforcement agencies have the tools required to supervise underage children 's use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter. Quoting from Business Wire, “three out of four parents feel that social network sites are not protecting children.” According to Irish Independent, “four out of ten children falsify their age” when using social media. I will also argue that additional research on this topic can be used to raise the awareness of parents, and can also help to alert the children themselves to the danger. My essay will also examine questions, such as: How can social media sites protect

Online predators and Stalkers can easily gain access to social media users’ personal information by either requesting to be a user’s friend or simply finding a way around the user's privacy settings. According to June Ahn, chat rooms are public and is an unmonitored space where online predators are more likely to be. “Adolescents are less likely to be targeted for unwanted sexual solicitation in social media than chat rooms.”(Ahn, June) I have found that, 412 adolescents were more likely to talk with strangers. This is hazardous for young children and adolescents because their lack of life experience leads them to blindly accept all friend request. The effort to seem popular by having many friends online can damage credibility and truth worthiness.

Social media has emerged and has been rapidly expanding since the development of the internet. Many people use this free internet application to read news, keep in touch with friends and so forth but it has some effects on the young generation. As apps like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter continue to get popular there are an increased amount of young kids who create accounts to be recognised as cool. They want to be like older brothers, sisters and or friends who seem to have hundreds if not thousands of friends on these applications. However social media plays a critical role in stranger danger, privacy and cause kids to have access to vulgar content and can cause addiction and or depression.

However, “the big difference in today's electronic world isn't what at risk children may say - but where they say it. For many school districts the answer is social media monitoring.” (Richez, 2015). However, it is not as simple as it may seem. Privacy and trust in online social media monitoring is a very controversial issue. With all the security leaks and hacks that have happened, online users are more than ever reminded of the need to protect their information.

Checking the news, keeping up with friends, and sharing quips of witty posts of a hundred and forty characters or less are the normal things for anybody to do while using a social media network. With ages ranging from the very young to the old, therein lies an assimilation of individuals whose information, location, and almost anything else are within their profile, just far enough away to keep the average stalker at bay, but close enough for a person with immoral intents to reach out and simply snatch. As the article, “Social Networking” observes, “…as Internet socializing grows, so do fears that the practice exposes the vulnerable – especially young people – to sexual predators” (627). Sexual predators are not the only people prowling around the Internet, for the range of criminals run the gamut, from potential murderers to vicious kidnappers, with their greatest weapon being something nearly everyone has access to in this modern era. Thus, through social media platforms, alone, these websites contain the information of millions upon millions of unique individuals, where, sometimes, it is as simple as scrolling down to select someone to hack into next. Often enough, these Internet forums are places where even a high school kid can do some damage, but not in the form of using personal information for selfish

When it comes to teens using the Internet and social media applications, there are many opinions people have in regards to security, privacy, and addiction for these luxuries. It seems that every day, I see news articles, blogs, and other posts about teens and the way they use the Internet. Mainly, the concern that parents need to have in order to protect their children from being personally identified or having an addiction to apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. When reading this book, I found that this whole concept of teens using this type of network goes deeper than people may think.

The posting of location and where they live has gone from 61% to 71% in 12 years. 71% of teens post their school name, which went up from 41%. All this poses a threat to identity theft or stalking. On social media profiles 92% of people post their real name and 82% put their birthday. 12% of teenage twitter users don't know if their tweets are private or not. 19% say that they have posted a photo, video, or comment they later regretted. Almost 60% of 18-35 year olds think people share too much info about their personal thoughts, experiences and location. 24% of teens confess that they don't actually know or like all the people the accept follow requests from. From all the posting, sharing info, and interacting online about 27 hours per week is

In our society today, social media is a monster because it has created unrealistic social expectations and unhealthy relationships with ourselves and others. Social media has become a central platform to everyone in our society today and can cause many problems for a large portion of the users. Many of the problems that associate with social media can cause mental and physical harm to users such as, depression, which can lead to suicidal thoughts or actions, eating disorders, and even lowered self-esteem due to the unreasonable comparisons that people make when compared to popular and successful people. One major issue that social media has brought up is the exploitation of the anonymous identification which bullies use to hide from their victims. This can single handedly cause the issues that was recently stated. The social media crowd is now influencing young teens and kids to do drugs. It causes a sort of pressure for some adolescents to engage in illegal activities such as, smoking and drinking. This can be a real danger because they are too young to realize what they are doing to their bodies and could truly put their lives in danger. Social media also causes a learning deficiency in a large portion of students. These students are constantly on their phones and it takes their full attention away from the task at hand. This causes procrastination of assignments and can lead to lower grades. They are not disciplined enough to control themselves and stay away from their

In a research article by Alice Marwick and Danah Boyd (2014) discuss this connection between young adults and social media. They explore this myth that teens and young adults do not simply care about their privacy when online. Marwick and Boyd (2014) note that, “We argue that the dynamics of sites like Facebook have forced teens to alter their conceptions of privacy to account for the networked nature of social media” (p. 1051). Along with what they are arguing Marwick and Boyd use their past practices and experiences to offer a sort of model of networked privacy to thoroughly explain hpw privacy is achieved in networked publics. In their article Marwick and Boyd (2014) quickly debunk the myth that teenagers do not simply care about their online

It’s no coincidence that a 16-year-old teenage girl, who thought she was meeting with her teenage pen pal, met with a 43-year old man and came up missing the next morning. It’s also no coincidence that a 13-year-old homosexual boy, who was constantly harassed with cruel messages online, hung himself last night. CNN reports that teenagers in the US spend approximately nine hours on social media a day. That’s over 250 total hours of average social media usage a month! Meanwhile, within the countless hours that the typical teenager spends online, it only takes one second for trouble to transpire. The large amount of time that teenagers spend online paired with the millions of users on major networks leave the door for social media abuse wide open.

Online predators are a very real danger for internet users, especially young people, who need to be careful about how they share information about themselves and how that information may be put to use. With so much information on the internet, it is possible to trace the home address of a person without too much information. Posts on social media or use of location tracking apps, may alert predators to a child’s movements, routines, address and even when they are at home alone. Even though there is a common perception that vulnerable children and girls are most at risk, this is a very real danger for all children.

In relation to privacy, social networking and many other genres of the internet are one of the main and easiest places to track down people, many naïve victims, posts up their details on their profile, making it easy to enable stalkers or strangers to have advantage of virtually meeting you. This problem has caused many families to live in fear, not knowing how vulnerable they are to the outside world, where

Over the past few years something has taken a toll in most people’s lives, we use it, love it, talk about it, and check it almost every hour of every day: this thing is called social networks. It was only a few years back, in 2003, when MySpace was discovered, and in 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg established Facebook, and soon after in 2006 Twitter followed. These sites became more than just an online destination, but a way of life. Notifications, follower counts, friend requests, photo comments- all what might seem like silly things that teenagers and adults alike await the moment they come home to check. We scroll unconsciously through feeds and pictures of people we barely know, from the inquisitive human nature. At school everyone is

Society is constantly changing and will continue to change in the future. The change is predictable because people change their ideas, routines, and views frequently. One of the topics that is typically brought up when discussing the influences on how society is changing, is social networking. There are two sides to every story. One side of the effects of social networking is that it is beneficial to society by informing people on particular situations in the world and on current important events. The other side views social networking as dangerous and drama filled. While there are benefits and dangers to social networking's effects on society, I will argue that social networking has changed society more negatively than positively.