The Good, the Bad, and the Filtered: A Social Media Primer for Parents

[Dr. Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra]: Hi and welcome. I am Dr. Pam Hurst-Della Pietra, founder and president of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development and host of the Ask the Experts Webinar Series. Today we have a special treat for you. We have brought in five leading social media experts to familiarize us with Tik Tok, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. What makes each of these platforms tick? What are their unique challenges and opportunities? What should be avoided? What are the best ways for kids to engage with these platforms? When should we be in the driver’s seat, and how necessary is it to monitor how our kids are using these apps? How can we teach our kids to regulate their own social media behaviors for their health and well-being? Some of these questions were submitted when you registered for today’s workshop, and over the next 90 minutes, our interdisciplinary experts will try their best to answer them. If you think of a question during the webinar, you can feel free to type it into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. Today’s program is being recorded and will be on our YouTube channel next week. For your convenience, we’ll also send you a link to our YouTube channel, which features more informative conversations from over 40 webinars since the series began. We hope you’ll share these resources with your network of parents, educators, friends, researchers, clinicians, and policymakers. Now it’s my pleasure to introduce you to today’s moderator, Dr. Linda Charmaraman.Dr. Charmaraman is a Senior Research Scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and Director of the Youth Media and Wellbeing Research Lab. Her research focuses on risky and resilient digital behaviors within vulnerable peer and family contexts. She is currently conducting a longitudinal study funded by the National Institutes of Health to follow middle school students and their parents to determine the longer term health and well-being effects of social technologies, including smartphones, social media, YouTube, and gaming. Welcome, Linda.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you so much for inviting me, Pam, it’s a pleasure to be able to moderate this conversation ahead. And I’ve been given the task of providing a very brief five minute intro about all the social media sites before we zero in on particular sites that the experts will be focusing on. So I’m going to share my screen right now. So it’s no wonder that parents want a primer of what kind of social media sites that their youth are on because they are usually on different sites that their youth are on.The most popular site for adults, especially over age 30, is still Facebook, even with all the current controversies involved in that site. But when you look at teens, especially early teens, when they’re first starting to move on to social media sites, they are on these top four sites, the ones that we’re going to be focusing on today in this primer: YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. So, TikTok is only used by 20% of adults, and look how popular it is here: 76% of our youth are on it. And so we are here today to try to help out with some of the considerations.So, positives and negatives. Most of the media headlines focus on the negatives because they are attention grabbing. And I just wanted to kind of take a step back also to see to show that there are positives that teens say that come out of being involved in social media sites that they’re more connected, they can show their creative side, they can explore, you know, their identities, friends can help support them through tough times and they feel a lot more included than excluded. Now, the negative side does come into play. It’s all just like it is in the offline worlds of peer networks and the school walls. There’s always negative drama that goes on with peers and sometimes youth feel overwhelmed by their online drama. And they feel a lot of pressure to post, you know, things that make them look good and get a lot of likes and comments, which some of our panelists will probably mention and talk about quite a bit. And just a quick overview of some of the beneficial aspects and maladaptive aspects. According to research you know, there is just as I said before, this sense of belonging, it can increase your self-esteem by showing your sense of agency. You have control over your expression with other people. You can explore your identities and social identities that might not be as available in your offline worlds. You can increase your social capital and network and promote trust with other people and engage in civically aware activities. Maladaptive aspects, of course, could include a sense of alienation and isolation, or feeling socially anxious, disordered eating because of body dissatisfaction, because of unrealistic beauty ideals, triggering of emotions and unwanted sexual content. Some of the sites have a lot more of either the positives or negatives, depending on what sites you’re on and what your young people are actually doing on these sites. So sometimes it’s a function of what are the affordances of the sites, and sometimes it’s what the youth are actually gravitating towards.Now, this is my one data sort of slide, and then I’m going to pass it on to our distinguished speakers. Just a little bit of evidence to talk about, a lot of parents ask, you know, when is a good time? You know, is it too young, you know, to start a social media? And currently the federal government has one particular age, age-related restriction of 13. You’re supposed to have parental permission to be on sites and have, you know advertisers collect your data. You know if you’re under 13 they need to know about this. Parents need to know. I mean you need to be able to make an informed choice. And a lot of people wonder, okay , is it really that bad to start social media younger than 13 you know above 13. And you know there’s very little evidence about this topic and it’s just emerging. So I’m not trying to say any particular directive here. I just wanted to make sure that parents and caregivers and practitioners have, you know, some evidence to show that age-related, you know, differences in youth starting social media at different times could affect their own behaviors. In our sample it just so happens that most people start social media before age 13, 11 or 12. It’s the most common. And actually only 9% of them start at 13 and up. And so if you think that you’re the only family that started social media at a younger age, you’re not alone. This is a sample of almost a thousand people. And when you look at some of the pros and cons, you know, most of our studies that are just coming out are that the difference between 11, 12 and 13 isn’t that as big of a deal as the difference between ten and younger and 13. And so you can see some of the problematic things that kind of start happening if you start too young, secretive online behaviors like telling, having secret accounts that parents don’t know about, secret friends that parents have no idea about, you know, feeling, being, feeling fixated and feeling addicted kind of being mean online and also people being mean to you. And it affects sleep as well later at bedtime and shorter sleep duration, and these emerging findings, we found one pro-social aspect of starting really young is that they learn how to be socially supportive of their peers at a young age. And when you think about it, when you think of nine and ten-year-olds, they’re pretty nice to each other at that point, everybody’s getting along, you know, everybody’s kind of friends with everybody else compared to middle school years.Let’s just say so in a way, it’s a nice, safer environment to even kind of like log on.I would say if your peer environment is already in a safe space. So that’s just one thing I wanted to just kind of mention. As we start the ball rolling with the different sites now, all these experts have a lot of knowledge and background and experiences on all the sites, but they’re going to focus in their lane today on particular sites. So we’re going to start the ball rolling with Marc Berkman. He’s going to be focusing on Instagram, and we’re going to have a chance to answer one question from the audience after he goes and after everybody else goes and then we’re going to save all the questions for Q&A that you’re going to put your Q&A box at the bottom at the very end. So don’t be shy. So, Marc Berkman serves as the CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety, which has provided Instagram social media safety skills to thousands of students, parents and educators across the country and developed essential social media safety legislation like Jordan’s law, the nation’s first law to deter social media motivated violence. Welcome, Marc.

 

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you so much for having me. Let me get my screen up here. There we go.Excellent. So thank you, Linda. As was just mentioned, I am the CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety. We are a consumer protection organization focused exclusively on social media. That means our mission is to protect against all social media-related dangers from cyberbullying to hate speech to human trafficking, and unfortunately, a long list of others. We do that work through three departments. Sp first is technology. We work on software and apps that provide real-time protection against any and all social media-related dangers. We do advocacy work, so we work at all levels of government to enhance public policy around social media safety. And of course, we do educational work. So we’re in schools across the country, teaching students and parents, and educators, essential social media safety skills. So let’s jump right into it. Instagram and safety. Let me note here that I’m just going to be covering the highlights of the essentials given our time constraints. I’m going to be speaking really fast to get those in. At its most basic, Instagram is mainly a social media platform where you can post pictures on a public feed that you scroll through. They’re moving a bit more into featuring video as well, trying to catch up with the growth they’re seeing in TikTok, which one of our experts will be talking about later. I’m gonna show some screenshots as I go on, as well, to show what Instagram looks like. As you see here, Instagram has a lot of users, a lot of teens are on Instagram at the moment. I would note that I would not be surprised, though, that if we start seeing a drop off in Instagram users among these younger demographics, much like we have seen in Facebook, that’s what we’re starting to see on the ground. Teens spend on average about 9 hours a day online, according to some published studies. Based on our own unpublished findings at the moment, we are seeing that about 4 hours of that time on average is spent on social media, including Instagram. So, given all that time on Instagram, what dangers are our children being exposed to on this platform? Here is an incomplete list. So the answer to the question, at least by the threshold of all the dangers on the platform that our children are being exposed to and being harmed by, the answer is yes. I want to highlight very briefly two dangers we are particularly concerned about when it comes to Instagram. The first is mental health impacts. Here are some very concerning findings from some studies. I will let you read them. I will caveat that this is part of a larger universe of research. We are cherry-picking here for the purposes of this conversation. I would note that the first two studies you see here, which are surveys, should actually hold some weight in our collective minds because they are actually from Instagram itself. So, why might Instagram be having a potentially severe negative impact on its young users? There are three social media driven dynamics that may be impacting our children’s mental health when it comes to Instagram. First, our kids are just plain wasting time and Instagram use generally displaces activities that are significantly more beneficial. So activities like exercise, reading, being outside, etc. Second, Instagram ironically, can be socially isolating. We’ve all seen that group of teens at the table next to us at the restaurant with their faces buried in their phones, silently swiping away. And finally, we have what we call reality distortion. So four plus hours a day that our teens are scrolling through images and posts on the platform. This is what they’re looking at on Instagram. Here’s a picture of actress and talk show host, Busy Philipps. Nice picture. Typical of the selfies put up now by both our kids and celebrities on Instagram. Here’s a real picture of Busy without editing software like facetune. Many of the pictures that our teens are looking at all day on Instagram are edited by apps. They are not real. So this is warping our kids’ sense of beauty and reality. Here’s a selfie of Jen, she’s a trainer from that old show, The Biggest Loser. It’s a standard fitness selfie you might see an influencer take, an influencer take and post on Instagram. Now here’s Jen’s before picture, but do you know how far apart in time these pictures were taken? A minute. Just a different angle, a different pose. This is called photo curation. This is what’s happening on Instagram. Here’s another problematic one. Your teen is sitting at home studying on the weekend, peeking at their Instagram account, looking at all the wonderful things their peers are doing. This young woman is off hiking in a field, seizing the day. Not really. She is in a parking lot. You see, people are only posting the best moment of the weekend, the best moment at a party, the A that they get. Nobody’s posting the failures or the hard work, and that’s dangerous for developing teens who will not get to fully understand the role that failure and hard work play in learning and achieving. So all three of these dynamics are theoretically made worse with longer social media use.The more time our children are on Instagram, the more pronounced the effects of these dynamics are. But once we hand over the keys to Instagram, we expect them to self-regulate the amount of time that they are on it. Some can, most can’t. Why? Because Instagram is designed by the smartest minds in the world to be addictive. Your child’s time is how they make their money. Meta wants them on as long as possible. That’s why we have features on Instagram like the vivid, colorful hearts and thumbs up.It’s a color burst. It stimulates our senses. It’s a vivid message that someone out there likes you. That can be addictive. That makes you keep checking after you post something. Most of us have done that on Instagram.Another concerning danger: substance abuse. This has recently emerged on Instagram. This is a new and exploding danger. You could see here in research done before the pandemic that illegal drugs are being advertised on social media generally by drug dealers was an issue. We’re waiting for new research, but we would note we think this number has probably grown substantially over the last two years. This is Dr. Laura Berman, member of our board of directors. This is her sixteen-year-old son, Sammy. He was bored one day, went on to Snapchat and connected with a drug dealer. And this is happening all the time. Now, I know I just said Snapchat. This is an inter-platform issue. So what happens is children will typically identify a drug dealer via Instagram, and then turn to Snapchat to communicate with the dealer. In our tests on that process, it takes us about 3 minutes to connect with a drug dealer who we, of course, have no previous connection to. So this is a serious ongoing risk with Instagram and multiple social media platforms that we’re very concerned about. So those are just two of the many dangers lurking on Instagram, which leads us to question at what age should we allow our child to be on Instagram? This is a complex question. I could spend a ton of time talking about it. I’ll just say briefly that first, Instagram does not allow users under the age of 13. So let’s be clear that no one under 13 should be on the platform. Now, given the risks, the mix of two of which I talked about, many of which I didn’t have time for that Instagram poses, we would prefer older teens using Instagram if that’s the choice for them. But I’m going to caveat that that is our opinion. There is insufficient evidence at this point to make a hard age recommendation. Now, of all the safety strategies to discuss, if you decide you’re going to let your child on Instagram, we have time here to cover a few of the safety settings to calibrate on Instagram. So here’s the home screen on Instagram to get to the settings, click on these three lines here and then click on settings that’s how most of these platforms work. First, let’s note notifications. You’re going to want to talk to your older teen about shutting off notifications. These notifications are designed to keep you coming back to the platform. They foster the habitual use we just talked about, so minimize them as much as possible. So next, privacy here. You’re going to want your child’s account set to private.There are a number of other options here for privacy. We, of course, like to maximize the privacy choices throughout for children. I’ll highlight one here, which is they give you this option of filtering offensive comments. Your child should have this set to the on position. Security settings, teach your child to use two-factor authentication on all social media apps when it’s offered. Children get hacked a lot. This will help protect their accounts. This is our last slide here so supervision. This is a brand new feature that gives parents some additional safety choices. This literally came out about three days ago. We admittedly have not had time to fully test out these features. But I want to note that our initial assessment is that these are likely mostly window dressing, given the concerns that have been talked about in the press about Instagram. We don’t think they’re markedly going to increase safety, but two features to note one is you’re going to have the option to set a daily time limit. This is great. Set a limit that you think is a healthy amount of time for your child. But I would note this already exists in your operating system for iOS and many Android models and through third-party software. Set both of those. It goes a long way towards mitigating the potential effects of excessive social media use. And then too, it gives you the option now of seeing the accounts your child follows and the accounts that follow them. For older teens, the ones that we think might be able to safely use Instagram, we just don’t see this as being a very powerful feature. But at the very least, it can’t hurt. And it might be very helpful in certain circumstances. Sorry this is the last slide. So the child initiates the new features of this supervision on their own account then the parent gets an invitation that looks like this. I would note if you have a younger child starting out on Instagram or a child with certain risk factors like behavioral issues, a history of substance abuse, problems at school, we highly recommend considering third-party safety software. This is software not necessarily connected to Instagram. This type of software can analyze your child’s social media account and send you alerts when problematic content arises so you can provide the right intervention at the appropriate time. Instagram does give access to those third-party software companies and platforms. So again, these have just been some highlights of Instagram safety concerns and interventions. I look forward to answering some questions.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you so much for that wonderful overview of Instagram.

And it was interesting to note that a lot of your slides showcase girls and women having

a lot of problems with their photo filtering aspects. And I don’t know if you subconsciously included only girls and women in those slides. But research also shows that it depends on gender, you know, how you use a lot of these social media sites. And Instagram especially is popular for girls compared to boys and that they have even more body comparison issues a lot of times than boys. One of the questions in our audience that has to do with some things that you were talking about is if there’s research showing that social media can be addictive, as you had mentioned, why aren’t there more strong policies related to minimum legal age to use these platforms?

 

[Marc Bekman]: This is an excellent question. I spent most of my career in Congress and working in the California State Assembly as well. And this advocacy is something that the Organization for Social Media Safety is actively tackling. Now, we have legislation pending in Congress called Sammy’s Law that would require all social media platforms to give access to third parties safety software. We think that’s going to be a game changer in terms of safety when we’re able to get that passed. The issue with regulating social media is that we are talking about speech and it is exceptionally difficult to regulate in this area. So I don’t think and I don’t want parents to be interpreting the fact that we don’t have more regulation right now on social media platforms to be an indication that the public and policymakers think that this is safe. We work with policymakers federally and statewide every day. The overwhelming consensus is that there’s very serious safety issues with our children. Unfortunately, you can’t put age verification requirements on platforms. The Supreme Court said that that’s a First Amendment. No, no. And you essentially as the federal government can’t put an age limit on when kids can use platforms. You can do other regulations that like Sammy’s law and a number of initiatives that are being considered in Congress right now. We’re going to see a bunch of those likely passed in the coming year or two

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you, Marc. So next up, we have Diana Graber, who’s going to be going over TikTok for us. Diana Graber is the author of Raising Humans in a Digital World Helping Kids Build a Healthy Relationship with Technology and founder of Cyber Wise and Cyber Civics, two organizations devoted to teaching digital literacy, both in the U.S. and internationally. Take it away, Diana.

 

[Diana Graber]: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, as you heard I’m Diana Graber. I’m really happy to be here today to talk about TikTok. I was listening to a podcast yesterday and they said if you don’t know what TikTok is, you’re officially old.So hopefully we all know what TikTok is. It’s the hottest app right now. If you asked kids, It features user-generated videos that kids make and post. It was originally called Musically, which was required by a Chinese company called ByteDance. It experienced a huge growth during the pandemic. 180%. It now features 1 billion monthly active users. Super young kids on this app, believe it or not, ten to 19 years old, 37% of the market. And, as Marc just mentioned, like all the other apps, you have to be 13 to open an account and kids lie all the time about their age because it does not use age verification tools. I included this little chart to the left that shows you the top three apps that we’re going to talk about today. And if you look at the little line for TikTok it’s almost like a meteor going straight up into the sky, which reflects its huge growth over the last couple of years. Alright. So it kind of started out as this Lip-synching dance video, but that’s really changed. Today, there’s all sorts of videos on TikTok, everything from fashion tips to funny skits, news, pranks, etc. Still, it often uses popular music, so you can expect to hear a lot of swearing and foul language on the app, and a lot of sexually explicit material. And there was a great article, I believe, in The Wall Street Journal not too long ago that found that things that were more sexually explicit were more likely to be shown on the app and recommended to others. So kids know that that’s where you see a lot of this kind of imagery on the app. Okay. So there’s two main features on TikTok. There’s the for-you feed, and that’s kind of the central part of the app, it uses algorithms to suggest to you videos it thinks you will like. It’s pretty funny. I went on yesterday and this was recommended to me by Jennifer Lopez. I am not a Jennifer Lopez fan, so I think its algorithm is not perfect. It also has what they call the follow feed, and it will show you videos from people you follow. I don’t follow a lot of people on TikTok, but I do follow this fellow friend of mine Bradley Shearer, who’s a privacy attorney who shares little TikToks and has become quite a TikTok influencer. All right. So over the pandemic, challenges became really popular on TikTok. All kinds of challenges from funny ones to scary ones to downright dangerous ones. One that was particularly dangerous was the blackout challenge, where kids would try to hold their breath until they blacked out. So a couple of deaths have been as a result of this. This was the most recent one. A little boy in Colorado left brain dead after he used a shoelace to choke himself doing that. Two years ago, there was a nine-year-old girl in Italy who died after doing the blackout challenge. So I will point out here that both of those kids were not 13 and yet they were using the app. All right. So this is an example of a dance challenge on TikTok. I’m just going to play a few seconds to kind of get an idea of what’s very typical on the app.

 

[TikTok video plays]

 

[Diana Graber]: I think you get the idea there. All right. So as part of my work, we have a curriculum called Cyber Civics that’s being taught in schools around the United States.

And I still go into a classroom once a week and teach it myself. Last year, when I was teaching eighth graders, I walked in this area on Zoom. So I walk to my computer and the kids are like, Mrs. Greber, you’re not going to believe what we saw over the weekend. A man committed suicide on TikTok. And I thought that can’t even be possible. And lo and behold, it did happen. I ended up writing an article about it for Psychology Today, but I felt so lucky that I was able to talk to the kids about it. We sort of discussed it. But what was interesting is the chat they were having meanwhile in the little chatbox, I saved it here. I won’t read the whole thing, but towards the end, the kids are saying things like, It’s really graphic. I’m scared for life. People on TikTok were disguising the video as puppies and kittens to trick kids into watching. Student six “I had to watch Peppa the Pig for an hour afterward to feel better.” So really disturbing stuff can slip on this app. And part of the reason it’s so instantaneous, I mean, even if you hire a million moderators and have the best algorithms in the world, there’s going to be stuff on this app the kids are just not ready for. Here’s an example right now with the Ukraine war happening, there is a ton of information about Ukraine on the app. You can imagine kids that are curious if they’re going to look up this word and they’re going to get all kinds of videos like this one. Play a second of it for you.

 

[TikTok video plays]

 

[Diana Graber]: So pretty sad, right? And I think about what we learned earlier. Kids as young as nine using these apps. Imagine a nine-year-old alone in his or her bedroom watching this without a parent there to provide guidance or comfort or explanation. You know, it really contributes to this thing that we’re hearing that kids are really struggling with their well-being right now. So I believe a lot of it is the content that they’re seeing on these apps. So I will say this, for every terrible thing that you see on TikTok, there’s probably nine or ten wonderful things. And here’s an example. So the White House recently, this was a skit on Saturday Night Live if you happened to watch a couple of weeks ago that happened in real life. The White House did indeed invite TikTokers to a meeting where they gave him a press briefing on what is actually happening in Ukraine. And then those high profile TikTokers went back to their audiences and provided them the actual information, which is wonderful because it’s a way to cut through the misinformation on TikTok, of which there is a lot, because they don’t have good mechanisms to detect misinformation. So they’ve got these kids out there talking to their audiences, giving them actual information about what’s happening in Ukraine. This is another thing that I like. There’s some really interesting young influencers who are doing positive things on the app. This is one I like to follow. Her name is Abbie Richards. She’s like a one-person misinformation fighting machine. She has some wonderful little Tik Tok teaching kids how to detect misinformation, which I think is really wonderful. All right. So all of these apps, as Marc just mentioned on Instagram, all these apps have pretty good mechanisms for safety settings. I will say a lot of them put them in place after getting their hands slapped since that happened with Instagram, which is why they have their new settings out. TikTok, same thing. Two years ago, they got slapped with some pretty heavy violations for privacy infractions that they did. So now that right after that, they came out with some safety features. Here’s just an example of some of them. Accounts for users aged 13 to 15, default to private. That’s a pretty big deal because on most of the other apps, nothing defaults to anything good. You have to actually set it up. But this starts out as private. So that means that if other kids want to see their videos, they must be requested and approved as a friend. Now users ages 13 to 15 will not see notifications after 9 p.m. and users 16 to 17 won’t see notifications after ten, which is great. Kids can get a little bit of sleep now, hopefully. And then TikTok was really the first one to come out with this idea of family pairing. This allows a parent or guardian to link their account to their teen’s account on TikTok so that they can control all of these things that you see on the screen. Now, a couple of things here. You have to do this together with your child, and this requires a conversation. So what I’m always telling parents is when your child turns whatever age you think is appropriate, that at least 13, open these things together. You download TikTok, they download TikTok, put your accounts together, and that way it becomes a discussion that you can put into action on this app. And it’s really easy to use if you go into their settings and privacy, you’ll see something called family pairing, and it has screens that will take you through all the steps to set this up. A couple of things are happening out here in California. Snapchat, I’m sorry, I meant to write TikTok. I don’t know why it says Snapchat. TikTok is in the crosshairs right now. So the California attorney general right now opened up an investigation into TikTok’s impact on children. They’re going to be looking into a lot of things including how much time kids are spending on this app, the idea that there’s addictive things in the app that are keeping kids there, which goes hand-in-hand with the California bill that’s just been introduced that will let parents sue social media companies for addicting kids. Now, I’m not crazy about either of these pieces of legislation. I think the second one is especially problematic. I mean, in my mind, it’s a lot like suing Hershey’s because your kid eats too much chocolate. So I think there’s a better way to go. We’re huge advocates of education. I know it works because kids need a reason to control their time and what they do on these apps. For example, if you were to set up a safety setting with a middle schooler or a high schooler, chances are they’re going to go in and disable it unless they have a reason why. And so you’ve got to do that through education. So we offer them so many different lessons on this. This is just one where we have the kids actually read the privacy policy of TikTok. And I can’t tell you how powerful this is because they discover for themselves the things that TikTok is asking for them. And most young people do not like to be tracked, followed or told what to do. And when they find out that it’s TikTok saying, hey, I can use your picture for advertising in another country. Generally, they don’t like that so much. So it’s super effective. We give them these worksheets where they actually start learning the terminology of all these different things that TikTok wants. They learn for themselves how egregious it is. And a lot of times kids will decide, hey, not worth it. We have a little piece on the Today Show that says kids’ reactions after doing this lesson. So in short, I really think all of these apps, you know, there’s pluses and minuses. We are not going to scare kids away from using them as much as maybe some of us would want to do. So it’s more important to give them reasons to protect each other and themselves when we use these apps. So I hope that we can work together to make that happen. Thank you.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you so much, Diana. We really appreciate some of the snippets that you might be talking about in your Cyber Civics, you know, curriculum, and it’s just good to hear a little bit of the balanced perspective too, some from the good, some from the bad. I liked your focus on discussion elements between parents and youth and how much it’s important for them to understand the privacy controls and why there are restrictions in place. And I know a lot of parents will want to know if, you know, there’s the discussion-based, you know, sort of ways of preventing harm, but are there any automated ways in which you can monitor filters and inappropriate content that you have talked about in the beginning? That you might want to showcase to parents for this site in particular?

 

[Diana Graber]: Well, I mean, that’s the thing. Like all of these apps have pretty good controls built in and I’m surprised sometimes when I talk to parent groups that they’re completely unaware of them. So I really think it could be like an exercise together, you know, “Hooray you’re X number of years old. Let’s sit. It’s time you’re wise enough and you’ve learned enough to open your own TikTok account. Let’s do it together. Hey, check this out. They have a family pairing. What does it do?” And really take time to walk together with your child through these settings and learn how to use them. I mean, it does a couple of things. Hopefully, you have that trust built in so your child will keep the settings intact in that app. More than that, it shows them that anything you use on the Internet, you should be wise about how you use it. I mean, from Google, to Zoom anything like what are the privacy settings? What are the controls that I have over my app? And that’s the thing. It’s empowerment. We have control over the stuff people, you know, we can’t wait for Congress to pass laws. Good luck on that. Or we can wait for the tech companies to decide to do better. You know, their businesses, they’ve got to make money. So the only option we have is this control that we have, like set up your settings, talk to your kids, wait until they’re old enough. I really think those are the things that work and education, teaching kids to take care of themselves.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Absolutely. Thank you so much for your powerful presentation. Really appreciate it. Alright. Next up, we’re going to have Snapchat with an overview by Josh Ochs, who’s the founder of Smart Social and author of six books that teach professionals, parents, and students how to shine online. Josh has traveled the nation speaking to over 30,000 students each year, sharing with them tips that they can use to create a positive online presence. Take it away Josh.

 

[Josh Ochs]: Hello, everyone. Welcome. I’m so honored to get the chance to do this.

And Marc and Diana, excellent, excellent job. So well put. We’re going to talk about Snapchat.

Now, this is an interesting app for me to present. I got my start at Walt Disney Studios many years ago, and then I ran for politics, believe it or not. I was the youngest person on the ballot, the most positive. I had enthusiasm and I was able to use social media in a reverse way to get people to understand the message and everything else. I lost by only a few hundred votes to the incumbent mayor, but the way in which we presented our campaign was so positive that companies all over the country picked me up and said, will you fly to our city? Will you teach us how you did this on a shoestring budget? Now, what I’m going to show you is a little bit of safety and a little bit of positivity. And that’s really what my life is all about, is teaching students how to shine online. We had Smart Social reach about 2 million people a year through our YouTube channel, our webinars and all the other things that we do at smartsocial.com as we provide districts, school districts with content that they show for parent education, so we’re going to talk about navigating Snapchat. And what I also want you to know is in just a moment, we’re going to do this together. If you grab your phones, we’re going to do a few tips that you can actually turn on and off right now. I’m a practical and tactical guy, so I want to leave you with a few tips. Now if you don’t know what Snapchat is definitely one of the top three apps being used right now. It’s a popular photo, video, audio and live messaging app. The app is popular because of the private messaging feature that allows users to send private videos and private messages. In other apps, it’s called DMs. You know, Marc was so right. He said it’s an intra-app. A lot of these trends you’re going to see are inside of all the different apps. It’s not just inside of Snapchat. So these PMs or private messages features allow users to send videos, audio, photos to one another that will quote-unquote disappear after being viewed. Right. Your red flags are up. Wait, that doesn’t actually happen, Josh, does it? And then posts made, the public posts, made on the app are called Snaps. Snaps can be used, and can be sent to a user’s story to their friends in one on one chats. Group chats were publicly posted for anyone who follows you. And Snapchat is known for its filters. We’re going to look at one of them and laugh at me together, which creates effects over photos and videos. The most popular filters change the user’s appearance. Now, how does Snapchat market to our students? I think this is a really fascinating thing to look at. Number one, they say snap, take a snap, and then add emoji or captions and you’re going to notice they shortened their company name to Snap. Every company gets shorter and shorter and shorter because that’s where kids are at. Chat, send a chat or live video. Stories, keep up with friends in live events every day. Live, watch events through the eyes of millions of snapchatters. This is where it gets interesting. And then the discover tab. We’re going to talk about this. Discover, explore handcrafted stories from the world’s top publishers. We’re going to lean into a few of these. Now, let’s look at some stats, right? All of you experts, Marc and Diana and some of our other people are going to talk about how  Snapchat currently has 293 million daily active users worldwide. 67% of snapchat daily active users are based outside of North America. So this isn’t just a U.S. thing. You can interact with people all over the world. Now, Snapchat reaches over 75% of the millennial and Gen Z population in the U.S. and on average, 5 billion snaps are created every single day. And it is they, as a company, have generated 2.5 billion in annual revenue just in 2020. And that’s as things are now gearing up and so on. And we’re going to talk a little bit about drug sales now. Marc mentioned this. I want to take a quick look at Dr. Laura Berman. Such an outstanding, amazing person. She warns of social media dangers after her son passed away from an overdose. In this video, learn what parents had to say about their son’s tragic death and the role of Snapchat.

 

[Video on Snapchat News Clip]: How did you know that he got the drugs from Snapchat? I didn’t even know that’s possible. Help me understand. What exactly does that mean? I didn’t know this was possible either. I thought it was a place where kids hang out with other kids and maybe do a couple of, you know, risque things with each other because of the way the app is designed to disappear as each post is seen. But his friend was kind enough, you know, as I was trying to figure out what happened, his friend was kind enough to share a screenshot that our son had sent him of a drug dealer that he had connected with or had connected with him on Snapchat, who, you know, had created a menu and would and had a Twitter and Snapchat handle to reach him and would deliver it to your door. So, you know, on one of his little quick walks around the neighborhood to get some air between classes, he must have, you know, met a dealer. In his, outside our home and brought it into the house that way.And we all think Snapchat is the place for kids to do what they want to do because it’s suited where other kids are. But the reason the kids are there is because of the functionality that allows things tobe secret. But a screen grab has whatever you do on Snapchat, tag you for the rest of your life.And it’s turned into a place where kids bully and sext and drug dealers find them.And that means it’s dangerous.

 

[Josh Ochs]: Guys that’s so devastating. I hope your heart, if it’s anything like the way, every time I see that video, I just my heart drops. The sweet family with their child was able to have access to drugs in their home. Now, according to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, drug use among eighth graders has increased 61% in the last five years. 86% of teenagers know someone who smokes, drinks, uses drugs during the school day. That has not changed. If you’re on this webinar you knew people when you were younger who maybe had tried drugs or cigarettes or stuff. But now we have a platform to get it much easier. And we have a platform, as Diana said, on Tik Tok that can have misinformation. And as Marc stated so well, that you just never know the truth behind the information. Now, Snapchat’s location feature, as if that’s not enough, is dangerous. Every single app has a little bit of this.But on Channel Two News in Atlanta, they reported that a restaurant employee used Snapchat to track teen customers. Police believe that a cook at the restaurant spotted these girls while they ate lunch at the restaurant and then they used Snapchat location application to find them, send them messages, and the 23-year-old suspect admitted that he asked the girls for photos and for money. I deleted the word and sex because I present this to students a lot. But I want you to know it gets pretty bad. Now, what is Snapmap? Snapmap is a feature inside of this I want you to know so much about. Snapmap is this feature inside of Snapchat, and is not a separate app. It is used to see where your friends and those who you follow are on the map. Unfortunately, it will help any of your followers see where you are and where you live in great detail. Guys, look on the right-hand side. You see Josh’s house? Do you see me right there? That’s literally the home I saw not that long ago where I lived. You could not only see that, you could see the exact same as Long Beach, California, you could see the exact quadrant of the home I was in. You can see where my home office was. And this we tell this to you because we tell this to students and it scares them. Lots of students are scared. They’re like wait, I don’t want my followers to be seeing where and I know that a few of them are not who they say they are. Now, how do you turn off Snapmap, grab your phones if you want to or take a screenshot of this when snapmap is activated, others can see your real-time location every time you check the app if you’re not careful. Now, item number one, I want you to consider turning on the map in the lower-left corner. As you can see down here, that is an item one. And number two, tap the gear in the upper right corner. Number three, you’re going to want to toggle ghost mode on. There’s a few features here that you probably can’t see, but there’s a few features, my friends, I only want to show it to my friends except and I always tell students, you don’t really know who your friends are online because that Billy 14-year-old down the street might not really be Billy the 14-year-old might be Billy the 44 year old. So we turn on ghost mode together but here’s where unfortunately it bullies us a little bit into FOMO. FOMO, being the fear of missing out. It says, “Are you sure you want to enable ghost mode? Are you sure you want to miss out? How about you just do it for 3 hours, 24 hours or cancel it?”  Well, we want you to consider selecting until turned off.This is going to keep your kids from sharing their location in this app. If you allow them to be on it. Now, another addictive quality and one of the things that we as adults know is if you have an American Express card or you are shopping with points and you are racking up those points, or if you fly American Airlines only or Southwest, you’re going to get those points. And we as adults have been gamified for decades but now students are gamified. Right. And as we know, these apps want you to open the app. So apps make money when they show their advertisers they have users who open the app every single day to check on content. That’s how they make their money. We have monthly active users. 289 million or something like that for Snapchat. Now, this is why they invented Snapchat streaks, a feature inside of Snapchat to keep us engaged and make us open the app every single day. I have to tell you, this is what when I interview students all over the country and we look at the trends on anxiety, this feature is really bad. You see snap streaks, snap streaks are an artificial way of showing friendship. If you are stressed, we tell students all the time, tell parents, tell students it’s okay to let your snap streaks end and spend the time elsewhere. Now, what is this snap streak? Well, if you see this person right here, with all these different people, we’ve hidden their names. If you message this person now and let’s say this is Marc right here. If you message this person right here and they message you back, you’ve started a streak. Basically, you message them in the day, they message you back, and you keep doing that every single day. This number, plus the fire emoji, which kids love, then grows every single day and students realize they go, oh, no, I have to keep this up. 942, that’s about three years they’ve been going back and forth.Got to send something in. It doesn’t matter what it is. But I got to check in. This gamification is how they make a ton of money, and we give students the permission to, hey, you can drop that and your real friends all of a sudden will rise to the top. You’ll know who really likes you. And not it’s not a number, it’s a relationship. One more feature we’re going to look at real quick, stories are a feature in the bottom right. Stories are designed to be addictive and consume most of your time. Consider being aware of how they make you feel and how much time they take away from your day. Now we tell people number one tap stories in the bottom of the screen and as users scroll they’ll see paid ads, top stories and possibly explicit content. A lot of parents ask, If I download this app, how do I turn off certain features? And unfortunately, it’s just all or none. Now anyone can pose as teenage girls. I know we talked a little bit about gender and everything else. I’m just going to use the news to tell a story. The prosecutor says South Jersey man blackmailed youths in four states and demanded nude Snapchat photos. This happens on every app. The investigation revealed that the man would adopt the persona of a teenage girl and use Snapchat and Instagram to begin a conversation with a student introducing himself as Julie Miller. Here’s the key take away the moral of the story is please make sure that you’re looking over your students shoulders and they know that if they send something inappropriate to someone that they think disappears because that person is nicer to them than your parents, that the parents can come can are there to listen at any time. And if parents are saying right now, I don’t want to be on this app, I don’t have time for this. This is what the bad people want you to say. They want you to say, I’m too busy. I’m too successful for Snapchat because they want to be able to chat with your students without you. Here’s some considerations. You’re going to think I’m off the wall here, but I teach students how to shine online, focus and talk to your students about what they want to do for their career in the future. Consider using Snapchat with their intention and understanding and guidance.cSnapchat’s not going to help you improve your Google results to shine online, but it can’t hurt your results if someone screenshots or snaps shares it outside of Snapchat. Make sure we remind your students not to send nude photos. Oftentimes they will forget or if you don’t tell them, other people might not. And remember, remind them to only chat with people who your family knows. And this is a key thing. Either your family knows him or you met him at school. Stranger danger is something that we talk about but they don’t really understand it sometimes. Now, let’s just take a quick look at Snapchat and then I’m here to answer any questions that you have. I’ve got it open right here on the screen, and we’re going to do some fun stuff. Now, just really quickly, I want you to consider downloading that. I want you to consider I just got a phone call only during the time of live events. And this is where we left because we’re all living right now. Now, in the bottom left, you’ve got this is my snap map. This is me on the map. And you can zoom in, my friends, and you can see exactly where I’m at. But I’ve done exactly what I told you I would do, which is go up to the setting up there. And I have ghost mode on, which is really important. That’s tip number one. If you’re going to let your kids be on Snapchat. Number two, you’re going to see my chats. I went down here in the bottom left and you’re going to see Jeff Brown and all these other people. I’m not on Snapchat very much, so I haven’t done this for a little while, but I’ve got all the features enabled. One more thing. If you’re going to do this with your family, and your kids are dying to do this. We’re live right now on Snapchat. And if you hold down this big button, that’s where you create content. They want you to create content. But right here, what you’re going to see is this little happy face. This is the most fun thing to do with my nieces and nephews. This is where you can actually build positive screen time. You click on that little guy right there and now it gives you the opportunity to go turn on filters. Let’s go ahead and flip it around. To flip it around, you go up to the upper right up here. And when you flip it around, all of a sudden, I’m bald. Now you can see the real me and the fake me, but this is how advanced these apps are getting. Now, let’s go ahead and exit out of here, right here in the bottom center. This is absolutely incredible. And then you can see some of your friends in the feed down here on the right. What are the biggest things you’re going to see on every single app? And this is the trend I’m going to leave you with, is, if you’re not following very many people they’re going to put other content in here that you probably won’t approve of. They’re going to do this as dating advice, genius or insanely dumb. And they’re going to try and get your kids information. They’re going to try and forgive me. Other people are calling me at the same time. So they’re going to try and make sure that they can get like, look at this. This is probably inappropriate, but this is stuff that if you allow your 11-year-old to be on Snapchat, you are going to notice that it’s unfortunately going to be some inappropriate stuff. And then there’s more over here as well. I was watching something earlier right before this that was just unfortunate, and you have access to it all. All right, my friends, I want to thank you for allowing me to present. I’d like to open it up to some questions now.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you so much Josh for your lively talk. And speaking of snap maps, you know, a lot of sort of talk is about preventing strangers from having a negative influence on you. But in terms of people that, you know, like your peers who may be congregating at a party without you and they’re noticing it on snapmap, you know, the FOMO kind of kicks in the fear of missing out. And also, maybe your parents kind of want to know, keeping tabs on you and maybe want to know where you are because you don’t really tell them where you’re going. And so there’s all these different other uses that unless you get comments about other uses of snapmap.

 

[Josh Ochs]: Yeah. There’s a tremendous amount. You know, part of the thing that I do and I know Diana does as well and many of the people, the experts on this, is we actually listen to a lot of students. And one of the things we listen to is there’s a lot of comparison theory.

There’s a lot of stress and there’s a lot of, Linda, what you’re hinting at is FOMO, the fear of missing out.cHey, they went to a party. And as we talked to districts all over the country to partner with them, to put our content into their parent education. Our parent education platform is “Smart Social.” It’s powerful. And one of the things we talk about in our platform a lot is group chats are in every single app. It’s not just in text messages. And a lot of students will post here I was and I think Marc hit it on it really well in his presentation. It is a highlight reel of how popular I am, but it makes other students feel not so great. And if they don’t have a purpose, this is a key takeaway if you want it. If you don’t have a purpose on social media, I say this in a lot of my books, then it will turn into a pastime. And if your students are given a pastime just like a vehicle, they don’t know where they’re going or how to drive it successfully, they will do donuts in the parking lot because they’ll be seeing like, how does this thing work? But if you give them that purpose, they’ll be a little safer with it. And that’s super important.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you so much. Josh. All right.  We have our final presenter, Vicki Shotbolt, who will be focusing on YouTube. She is the founder and CEO of Parent Zone, an organization that sits at the heart of digital family life. She also sits at the executive board of the UK Council for Internet Safety and is the co-chair of the Digital Resilience Working Group for the UK Government and co-host Tech Shock, a podcast that looks at the impact of digital technologies on Family Life. She is zooming in from the UK right now. Take it away, Vicki.

 

[Vicki Shotbolt]: Oh, thank you. And I cannot believe you made me go last after all those Americans who have been fantastic presenters. In the UK, we always feel a bit rubbish about ourselves and our inability to do presentations. And I’m really just going to highlight that first because I am the expert speaker who’s turned up those slides and that’s because I’m a slide phobic. I think slides are sometimes not as exciting as actually living in the moment and seeing the real thing. So I’m going to do something that is actually making me feel a little bit nervous, a little bit nauseous here. But I’m going to share what’s actually on my phone at the moment and what’s actually on my phone at the moment is YouTube open there for you guys, so you can see YouTube in the corner. And I haven’t done walk-through slides of YouTube because I kind of figure that we all know YouTube pretty well. It’s so much part of everybody’s life. It’s massive. 15% of all consumer broadband traffic globally is as a result of people watching YouTube, about 2 billion monthly users and I think Linda you showed in one of your slides. 89% 11 to 15 year olds are on YouTube. In the UK, about half of five to 15-year-olds say that they use it for two and a half hours a day, which is, which is quite a significant amount of time. And actually I’ve been doing some mental arithmetic because other speakers have been talking about how much time young people are spending on some of the platforms that they were talking about. And if you add it all up, it feels a little bit as though there must be more than 24 hours in the day because these kids are spending a lot of time on these devices. And I think that’s one of the things with YouTube that makes parents feel so queasy. We’ve kind of all been there when we’ve observed young people seemingly spending more time. Oh, look at that, my phone’s going to sleep, seemingly meant spending more time on a device than actually being in the moment. And I’m just doing a little bit of scanning there on YouTube. And kind of this is the experience, isn’t it? Your child is in the room with you. They’re chatting away or you think you think you’re talking to them about something really very important like your day or whatever and their heads down and they’re doing this and you think on earth are they doing and they’re doing what I’m doing now, which is, oh, that looks interesting. They’re like bubble cash for free. Wow. That’s got to be amazing because one of the things that technology does so well is grab our attention. And I think that’s one of the things that YouTube does incredibly well. I’m going to focus really on the practical stuff, the useful stuff I hope parents will be able to get some takeaways from. So basic stuff. We know that Google recommends that users are 13 plus, but of course you can use it without an account, an important thing to think about. You can just pick up anybody’s device and watch YouTube and it ever happens to be logged in at the time, then they will get those settings for that YouTube account. So as you can see for me, I’m logged in from my work account, which is my parents’ own work account. If a child picked up my device, if my son picked up my iPad, it would be my account that he would watch YouTube on. So top tip, remember to log out and get your older siblings to log out. If they happen to share their devices. And I know sharing devices is not always something that kids do comfortably or easily. There are three things, three practical things I want to talk about – time, content and well-being. So let’s do the first one first. Been there, bought the t-shirt, you look at your child they’re on the screen. You go to check what they’re doing they’re supposed to be doing an assignment or supposed to be doing their homework. And actually what they’re doing is gaming or they’re watching YouTube. My favorite, particular favorite one of that is this place to be watching movies together on Family Movie Night. They’re physically in the same room, but I realize that my son is actually watching a different movie on his device to the movie that we’re all supposed to be enjoying in the same room. So I have a couple of tips for you. And the first one is not going to be something that we can find on a device. The first one is to do with boundaries. And I put this on first because I cannot stress enough. I am the CEO of a parenting organization. Tech comes secondary to parenting for me in all of my thinking. I cannot stress enough how important it is to agree on boundaries with your child before you start allowing them to use technology and it doesn’t really matter what those boundaries are. They’re going to be different for every single family. They’re going to be different for every child, potentially. But having them is the thing that is really crucial. So one of mine was that my son wasn’t allowed to do his homework in his bedroom so that I could see if he was drifting off. You might say no devices after a certain time, you might say no devices at meal time. You might just set a time. You might say no devices between 2:00 and 4:00. It’s analog time in this house doesn’t matter, but you have to set a rule and then you have to stick to it rigidly because as soon as a rule becomes a habit, it becomes less stressful for you as a parent to enforce. What you’re trying to do is get your child to internalize those rules, and it’s going to be tough. So you may as well start as soon as as soon as you can and definitely as soon as they start using devices independently. So you’ve got the boundaries in place and they confess that’s a parenting thing, but the tools are there to help. So there’s a tool on YouTube, which I think is quite a cool one. And it’s called taking a break. And we are in here, and you can see on my phone, you click on your profile picture. In my case, it’s a little P because I’m using my work device and you go into settings and up they come, you can do this with me. If you put your phone in front of me, in front of you, click there onto general settings and there you go right at the top. Obviously I have reminded myself to take breaks, but you can if you want to turn on take a break and there you go. You can choose how much time before you want to take a break. I might decrease it because an hour feels about right to me. So there we go. You’ve got to take a break. What’s interesting about that tool is if you can encourage your young person to turn it on, about 90% of users keep on. And I think that’s kind of encouraging because it shows that this isn’t going to be about you constantly saying to your child, what are you doing? Stop doing that. Time to take a break. If you can get your child to choose to do it, then the chances are that they might actually stick with that. Another super quick one that I’m going to show you there, and I’m sure you’ve already got this set up, but it’s really, really important and here we’re moving on to the content that your child’s going to see, and that’s restricted mode. So there we go. I haven’t got it turned on. I’m going to turn it on there. And that’s a really simple, very simple filter. Restricted mode is just a filter. And no filter is 100% perfect. But enabling this feature is a really sensible first step for protecting your users your younger users. So just make sure that that’s turned on. And then if you share a device with your partner or any other adults in the family, remember to turn it off again because there’s a lot that they won’t be able to do when that’s turned and that’s turned on. I’m going to stop sharing my screen for a minute actually no I’m not I’m going to show one more thing so here we go. Let’s have a look in the search YouTube and I think one of the things that’s important when we’re thinking about social media is that we don’t just concentrate on the attention-grabbing scary Mary oh, my goodness, my child is going to be murdered by a weirdo, even though that obviously is utterly terrifying. The things that kind of terrify me are the young person that just pops in something innocuous like losing weight and coming up with loads and loads of stuff. Now, the thing about this is it’s not all necessarily bad. Some of it could be super good advice: should I exercise more, eat less to lose weight? I don’t know. Oh, look at that one. Should I eat avocado and what looks like poached egg maybe, could be a good tip. The point here is there is so much content that for a young person who’s trying to find an answer and is worried about that question, what you don’t want them to be doing is going to YouTube to get the answer. You want them to be coming to you. And if you choose to look at YouTube together, then that’s fantastic because there’s loads of content. But you don’t want them going down a rabbit hole on a subject, and it’s not necessarily the most scary subject. Here’s another one that I really, really worry about. Oh my goodness. You’re seeing how bad my typing is and we have big arguments about this. Oh, no, this isn’t too horrible, here we go, children’s makeup tutorial. Now, this really frightens me because there are children here who, you know, do we really want our young people figuring out that they need to be wearing makeup? When does that little girl look? She looks about, I don’t know, are we gonna, she looks about six or seven. And you take my point when it comes to things like YouTube, what you need to think about is not necessarily the most terrifying content. It’s the volume of content and the rabbit hole that your child goes down and the questions that they could potentially ask YouTube that you really want them to be asking and dealing with yourself. And I have one final tip for you. And then I will shut up because I realize I’m running out of time. Supervised accounts, new feature on YouTube. And basically what it means is that you can hold your child’s hand as they walk their way through YouTube. You have to set up an account for your child first. And that might bother you because it does mean handing over data to people, but it does mean that you can then use something cool, explore, explore more and get the most of YouTube. And those different settings allow you to have some control over what sort of content your child might have. I’m going to stop speaking. I said that British people didn’t speak too much, and there we went. I’ve just proved myself to be a liar. I will stop there and take any questions.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: You’re fine, Vicki. Thank you so much for your helpful tips. And I really appreciate that you were talking about the educational and entertainment value

of YouTube and that parents need to parent and there are tools that could help with that parenting process of setting boundaries. And I was wondering if you – we had a pre-submitted question about online resources for parents that you might recommend for them to keep up to date with the latest social media sort of things to know about for parent’s sake, do you, could you recommend any online resources for parents?

 

[Vicki Shotbolt]: I’m based in the UK, so obviously I’m going to be a little bit rubbish

and a little bit biased. But we have a website that does loads of regular content about it, but there’s one in the US which I am going to look at for you and I’m going to put it in the chat and then you can pass it on because it’s a great one that we recommend frequently. And obviously now I can’t remember what it’s called.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: So we usually recommend Common Sense Media. You know, we have a lot of toolkits for parents, you know, if that helps jog the memory a little bit.

 

[Vicki Shotbolt]: Alright so well on Common Sense Media, it’s made it over here and we think it’s, it’s a really good site. And what’s so good about it is that it’s so up to date.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your wonderful presentation and this launches us into the Group Q&A that everybody has been holding off, waiting for us to kind of come back to the speakers about that, topics that are still kind of on their mind that maybe we didn’t get a chance to get around to answering them in the Q&A as the live questions were coming in. So I was wondering if, so let me see. I’ve got a question that just came up here. Let’s see something about Discord. Any quick tips or recommendations for the site Discord, since we haven’t mentioned that yet, anybody knows of anything up top their head. Josh?

 

[Josh Ochs]: Hey, everyone. So Discord can be a bit dangerous. It is an incredible chat system that is typically happening beside other games and apps and everything else. But it moved into being a social media site recently, it was recategorized in the App Store. We have a whole app guide on it. It’s smart, social, not plugging us, but it is that important to where every parent is asking and there’s all these secret apps that are like, well, my kid uses that, so I’ll worry about this stuff, but I guess this one’s safe. And that was the way Discord was viewed for a long time. So you have to be really careful. Be on it with your students. There is a whole lot of chatting. There’s very little checking of actual ages and who people really are. That can be a whole lot of I’m not going to say violent talk, but there can be some grooming and they’re also especially can be a whole lot of four-letter words So you got to be really careful on that.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Yes. Anybody else on Discord, Diana?

 

[Diana Graber]: There I am. So it’s funny because I just had a conversation about Discord with some sixth grade boys because they love to play games. They all talk to each other on Discord. And even the kids are saying they’re like, you’re not going to believe the words I learn on Discord. Like I thought I knew how to curse. I went on Discord. I have a whole new vocabulary. So from the mouth of sixth grade boys, quite a lot of language development on that out, let’s say. So parents, I agree with Josh, parents really should listen in and hear what these kids are talking about. They just need guidance.

 

[Marc Berkman]: Yeah.I would just echo that. What we’re finding is in the fifth grade, about 90 plus percent of kids are now being exposed to hate speech, explicit hate speech. It’s becoming normalized.It’s creating a lot of issues down the road. Discord is kind of a big perpetrator of that exposure. So that’s one of the many dangers that you can find in discord that unfortunately, younger kids are being exposed to and harmed by.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Yes. And now that we’re talking about specific apps that we didn’t cover today, a question came up about WhatsApp. Any thoughts and ideas about pros and cons of WhatsApp for you today? Josh?

 

[Josh Ochs]: So let’s talk about WhatsApp. A lot of parents will say, my kids aren’t on Facebook. That’s where old people are at, right? Your kids are actually on Facebook if they’re on WhatsApp or Instagram, they’re owned by the same company. So WhatsApp is a free messaging app for all of you wondering that allows students to use Wi-Fi or their data plan to really bypass SMS and text messaging features and directly communicate with other users on the app. The reason why we like it a little bit and we don’t get paid by Facebook to say this, but the reason why we like it a little bit is there’s a barrier to entry in that you have to have a real phone number if you kick messenger as a competitor of it, where you don’t really have to have a phone number, you can burn through usernames and just chat with students. WhatsApp is a little bit more difficult for that reason. It has messaging stickers, group video chats. It has a few stories now. It can be accessed on any smartphone and even on the desktop so that’s where you’re going to want to be careful. It’s a green phone logo that has a chatbox around the phone, so it’s a green logo.

 

[Vicki Shotbolt]: And I can jump in on the WhatsApp question. We don’t like WhatsApp at all for one very important reason: it’s end-to-end encrypted. And what that means is that there is no moderation. It isn’t possible for WhatsApp to be cross-platform. It’s end-to-end encrypted. So if you want to know where naughty stuff happens, it’s probably happening on WhatsApp because what happens on unencrypted platforms is that’s why you do the meeting greeting and then you get taken onto an encrypted platform where you actually do the deal. So encryption is a really, really big worry. The other thing about WhatsApp and this may be a UK weird thing, so it might be very different in the US, but when we hear from pupils about when they’re feeling overwhelmed it’s when they find themselves in big WhatsApp groups that might be connected to their school or might be connected to their class, and they feel if they’re not keeping up, they might be missing out on the home, an important homework assignment or something else that’s really critical. So they’re checking WhatsApp first thing in the morning lasting at night, and it’s a really stressy push app. So WhatsApp makes us really nervous, which, you know, we may feel differently.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Yes, thank you for pointing that out. So for Marc, a general question from the parents in the audience today, when should they be worried? You know, because most of the time, they’re hoping in their mind that everything’s going fine. You know, I’m not, I’m not monitoring as much as I should be, maybe. But when is the point in which they would be able to notice something about their child in which they should be more worried and to look into it more it could be across any social media site. Who wants to go first?

 

[Marc Berkman]: I can take that. First of all, we would say, and obviously in this format, we didn’t we don’t have time to go through our entire curriculum for parents. But before your children are on those apps, you really need to maximize safety intervention. So you need to have your conversations about the various social media related dangers that your children are exposed to, you need to set the rules and you need to calibrate the settings which we all talked about today in some various formats. When to be worried. Now, when it comes to social media, what’s different from the past is that if your child is exhibiting anything out of the ordinary when it comes to behavior, so if there’s a drop in school performance, a sudden unwillingness to socialize or be with friends, any manifestations of depression or anything like that, you have to ask the full range of questions to take the full range of interventions that now includes looking at social media as a potential cause. They could be cyberbullied, a sext might have gone viral. There’s a full range of things that could be happening on social media. So any time that something looks out of the ordinary, parents have to think maybe it’s social media, maybe it’s not. But at least let me screen for what might be happening online.

 

[Diana Graber]: And one more thing if it’s okay in regards to this. So so the thing is about kids, if they’re experiencing problems and it’s happening on social media and if they think you as a parent or already freaked out about it and worried about it, chances are they’re not going to come to you with their problems because they’re going to say, my mom hates social media anyway. The first thing she’s going to do is take my phone away. So it really puts the onus on parents to remember to be curious and to remember that kids use these apps because they’re creative and fun and it’s where their friends are. And so to try to keep that mindset, like we said, danger about a thousand times in the last hour and a half, and kids hear that word out of our mouths and it shuts the door. So be curious, be playful. What are you doing? Talk to me. Because if there is a problem, we want our kid to come to us. We don’t want them to shut us out of that world. So it’s so hard for parents because I know our initial thing is to worry about everything. And, you know, please remember the data shows there’s more good things happening on these apps than bad things honestly, which all the research supports. So, you know, keep that door open so that when the bad things do happen, your kids will talk to you.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Well put, thank you, Diana. So what should parents do when they, you know, they’re trying to monitor fake accounts or private accounts that young people sign up on without telling their parents? Do you have any tips on figuring those kinds of things out? Josh.

 

[Josh Ochs]: Diana, great tip. So true. It’s not all gloom and doom, right? I mean, there are good things. And I think that leads into this question, Linda, it’s and Marc kind  of hit it earlier. There’s things for free online. And every one of the experts here right now has one. And it’s called a social media agreement, a cell phone contract, whatever you want to call it. You would never move into an apartment or buy a home without some kind of a legal agreement. So you know where the boundaries are of what you’re allowed to do. Everything we do, whether it’s starting a new job or buying a cell phone, uses sign-in agreements with boundaries. But oftentimes parents, there’s no shame here when we give these Ferraris, yes, I do consider them a car because they go 200 miles an hour and they can hurt your kids. It is really good to give them driver’s ed. And essentially what that is, is a little bit of a social media agreement. There’s free ones all over on the Web. We can throw one in the chat box and essentially say, here’s what’s safe to do, here’s what’s not safe. Here’s the apps you’re allowed to have. We will always have your password, your passcode. We will be able to look over your shoulder and check it. Here’s how much we paid for it. Here’s the replacement cost. Here’s your pro-rated family version section of the payment. All this stuff, it’s better to be there’s an old saying and we can be old school here. Simple agreements make great friends. And if you’re a little bit difficult up front with your kids right before you give them this, it’s never too late. Even though you gave it to them, it’s going to be okay because it may fix things in the long run. And once again, I’m going to repeat it. If you have a purpose with these devices, it makes it less likely that they’re going to use it with just a pastime, and then all of a sudden they’re a little bit better at what they’re doing.

 

[Marc Berkman]: I yeah, I would jump on to that. I do. I love that philosophy because when we talk about the benefits of social media, Josh is exactly right. If you’re going on with intentionality, there are certain benefits that you can accomplish. I would you know respectfully say, and I love that we have a diversity of opinions here because I think that’s really important because the state of research still is very poor when it comes to social media safety. But our opinion as an organization is that particularly when we’re talking about tweens and younger teens, that that the risk do seem to significantly outweigh the benefits at a moment when you look at the totality of the risk and the totality of the harm that their children are being impacted by when it comes to the various social media apps. On that specific question of how to monitor for fake accounts. Some platforms are easier than others. A lot of them you’re really going to have a hard time, especially as your children get older, locking down the ability to hack around control settings and setting up fake accounts, TikTok’s restricted mode as was talked about, does have a good ability of preventing a child from logging out on their specific bias and using a different app. Again, third-party safety software for the apps that allow access also can give you an alert when children sign out of their account. So it’s another option for a number of these apps.

 

[Diana Graber]: Just really quick like on Instagram. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. But if a parent wants to look at their child’s Instagram account and hold on to the picture on the bottom left right-hand corner, if they have another account, it will pop up so they can. That’s an easy task for a Finsta, which is a fake Instagram account.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you. Thank you for pointing that out, Diana. I also want to go back to Marc’s comments about the risks of outweighing the benefits and I’m thinking it also depends on who you’re asking. Are you asking the teens their opinion? Yes. And the parents? Yes. And educators and clinicians who see only the people that are in trouble? So I think it really depends on what kind of risks you’re talking about and at what age they’re accessing the sites and so on. And the context, the social context. Josh?

 

[Josh Ochs]: I think they’re both right. And I agree. I think they’re both experts. And I think Diana is right. When you are with your kids online, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Sometimes because you’re looking at Diana’s assuming that you’re looking over their shoulder, you have a healthy dialogue. Number one safety app in the world is not Google and Microsoft. No offense, it’s your healthy relationship and dialog with your students. And that’s what Diana is essentially saying is have that healthy over the shoulder. Make sure they know that you’re going to be loved when they come to you. Marc is also right in that if you let your kids roam free on the Internet, there’s going to be a lot of bad things that approach them. And that’s what the bad guys really want, is to not have that healthy relationship with your students so they know how to drive this vehicle safely. So I agreed with both of them. There’s a lot of good, a lot of bad. And we hear from a lot of people saying because a big part of what I teach in the world is how to shine online.We take all the Disney branding tips and show students how to build a little website that will help them someday to build a little resume in high school so they get launched into their career and college and everything else. A lot of people are really afraid, like, oh, no, I don’t want to be online.Your kids are already online. Have you Googled yourself and seen your home address, your cell phone number and everything else and the people who got arrested, that look like your kids. They have the same name. So there is a lot of hesitation in certain areas and there’s a lot of opportunity. There’s a lot of people who are just giving untethered access to their kids to chat with other people. I would say that the key that brings them both together is just to have that healthy dialogue and really come to your kids. It’s an ongoing thing. It’s not a one and done.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Speaking of untethered kind of supervision and access, you know,

the COVID-19 pandemic kind of put a spin on this whole story, this whole narrative between

parents and youth and how they’re able to supervise or not. Did you see any trends that changed how kids were using social media and how parents were adapting to the social distancing and the increased time online?

 

[Vicki Shadbolt]: I might jump in on that one and share some positive news I guess.

We saw an enormous change in the questions that came to at parent zone from parents who

stopped being primarily worried about risk and harm. And what we haven’t talked about today is the difference between risk and harm. So being at risk online is something that most of us will experience at some time or another, not necessarily just kids, but that does not mean that we will all come to harm and I think teaching children how to manage risk is a really important thing, scaring them about the harm is perhaps counterproductive. What we saw during lockdown was that parents were proactively looking for positive things for their child to do online and proactively looking for ways to help them continue their friendships and help them continue their relationships with relatives and help them continue their education. So it became a really positive conversation and that positivity in the end is a thing that’s going to carry forward and help them have productive conversations about the risks.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you.

 

[Diana Graber]: So funny because having this conversation, I just got an email that Common

Sense Media just issued a report. We spoke about Common Sense earlier- just issued a report today that two years into the pandemic, media use has increased 17% among teens and tweens. So we know that media use has increased substantially. But I also think that we have to take a look at how they’re using it, because for many of them, they’re using it for schoolwork. Schools have largely started giving more activities online and also to connect with family and friends that they didn’t see during the pandemic. So it’s a mixed bag.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Absolutely.So we want to be mindful of time. We are almost at the end of our time here. And I wanted to do a very quick lightning round and just a few words from each of the panelists about what is one takeaway point that you want a parent to just hold onto from any of the things that we talked about today. Who wants to go first? Josh?

 

[Josh Ochs]: I’ll go first. First of all, always be on the same apps as your students. The number one safety feature is going to be you having a healthy dialogue and being where they’re at. One extra tip is that some parents say my kids deserve privacy online based on the 300 experts we’ve had on our podcasts, psychologists, therapists, counselors. They often say you should know the passcode to your kid’s phones and check them at random times. People respect what you inspect and that’s an unpopular opinion. But typically it’s something that if you bought them a car, you would have keys to the car because you’re the one paying for it, and you would want to be able to look in the trunk to see if one of their friends had put something inappropriate in there.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Who’s next? Marc? You wanna go next?

 

[Diana Graber]: Oh no, let Marc go.

 

[Marc Berkman]: Sure. Sure. So I think that before you riff on Josh’s metaphor, before you hand the keys to social media over to your child, you really need to understand the full range of threats that your child might be exposed to on social media. And we didn’t have a chance to talk about that full range. But, you know, from hate speech to sexting to predation and to the mental health impacts that I talked about a bit, you can’t protect your child and your child can’t protect themselves unless they understand these dangers and understand either how to avoid them or most safely respond to them. Some of these are rare, dangerous. Some of them are frighteningly common.So have an understanding that social media does have a significant amount of risk and approach it from a safety mindset.

 

[Diana Graber]: Those are both great tips. And I think another thing that would really help is to be mindful of age that’s so important. I mean, it takes kids 12 to 13 years of life to have abstract thinking skills, which are the prerequisite to ethical thinking skills. So they cannot think through the consequences of their actions when they’re younger. You will eliminate so many problems if kids were just honest about their ages, and also there’s age gating that happens on these apps, a nine-year-old cannot be protected if they’re lying to whatever Snapchat or whoever it is and saying they’re 67, which a lot of kids do. Funny how good kids are at math when they’re about their age. I think great mathematician. So just be aware of age. Every child’s different but at the minimum, wait till they’re 13.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you, Diana. Vicki, I’m so sorry, you’re last again.\

 

[Vicki Shotbolt]: I’m last again. Remember recovery. We very often tell our kids that what goes online stays forever. If you make a mistake, it’s a terrible, difficult thing to put right.

Children will recover. And it’s really important that we tell them that you can always recover from the things that have gone wrong. And recovering and getting back online and being able to benefit from all the opportunities that digital brings is super, super important.It will be okay in the end.

 

[Dr. Linda Charmaraman]: Thank you so much to everybody for coming here today.Now, back to Pam to close us out for the day.

 

[Dr. Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra]: Thank you so much, Linda. Marc, Diana, Vicki, you’re not going to go last. And Josh, for joining us today and teaching us about social media platforms that some of us don’t engage with on a daily basis and how to guide our kids to using them in safer and healthier ways. Thanks too to our wonderful audience for taking the time to tune in for today’s workshop. As you leave, please take a moment to answer the survey provided we want to hear your thoughts about today’s presentations and suggestions for topics you’d like for future webinars. To learn more about children’s digital media use and their cognitive social-emotional and physical development, be sure to visit our website at children and screens dot com. As a reminder, you can rewatch today’s webinar next week on our YouTube channel. To stay up to date with future programs. Follow us Children and Screens on your favorite social media platforms. We invite you to join us again on Wednesday, April sixth for our 45th Ask the Experts webinar: The Birds and the Bees, Screens and sexuality. A panel of psychologists, therapists, researchers and legal experts will share both research and practical advice for parents, clinicians, educators, and lots of others seeking answers about the media’s role in youth’s still developing sexual interests, identities and behaviors. Thanks again for joining us today. Be safe and be well.