https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8exz56j9pdo
Darragh thinks young people should be involved when social media companies are developing policies
Though social media sites are used by millions worldwide, they can be lonely places to navigate, according to 15-year-old Darragh from Downpatrick.
He and other young people from across Northern Ireland have come together to call for more support and protection online.
They also took their message to Northern Ireland Assembly members (MLAs) at Stormont by taking part in a unique Cyber Cafe.
The young people were brought together by NSPCC Northern Ireland and the Children in Northern Ireland organisation.
Darragh said that when social media companies are developing policies affecting young people online, young people should be involved.
He has been meeting other teenagers from Limavady, Portadown, Belfast and Dungannon to talk about what they want.
Similar worries kept cropping up among the youth groups.
Maria, 15, from Portadown, could not understand why it is so easy for someone to create a fake profile online where they can post material or make comments under a false identity.
She told BBC News NI that she thought "stricter regulations" should be in place when signing up so that someone cannot make a fake profile.
"It's so easy to make a fake profile and fake that you're another person online, this could be so dangerous for people," she added.
"You might be being friends with a really old man when you think you're being friends with someone your own age."
For Darragh, cyberbullying and online abuse are big concerns.
"There's a lot of issues such as groomers online or inappropriate content that young people shouldn't be seeing, or just people being bullied online," he said.
"Online bullying's a major problem."
He also said anonymous or fake accounts are too easy for people to create.
"Anyone could start talking to you, try to get in touch with you, can pretend to be anyone, just hiding behind a screen," he said.
"If you're in real life you can see who you're talking to but on a screen anyone can be anyone."
For 17-year-old Eimear from Moy in County Tyrone, the social media giants do not think enough about support for the young people using their products.
"I think one of the things that would make a difference is for young people to actually have support on the apps," she said.
"If they have advice on the apps they might feel a bit more confident, as well as knowing who to report and how to block."
She said that online bullying or abuse was "one of the biggest issues" young people face on the internet.
"It can happen to anyone."
According to Phyllis Stephenson from NSPCC Northern Ireland, yes they do.
She said that message had come through strongly from all the teenage participants in the Cyber Cafe.
"That's one of their key messages to parents," she said.
"Engage with us about the things that we're doing online, so that we can and feel that we're able to talk to you if something goes wrong.
"They were absolutely saying that parents have a key role in keeping them safe online."
Definitely, according to Eimear, who said that online safety lessons were currently dependent on what school you went to.
Her school taught online safety, but some schools her friends went to did not.
"Because it's not really in the curriculum, it means young people are going out there and not knowing what could happen to them," she said.
"It should be something that's taught from Year Eight to at least Year 10, because they might not do it in GCSE."
She said that mobile phone restrictions in schools could help, but that social media use and online harms went far beyond school.
"It would be more so outside of school, because you're spending most time at home," she said.
by ThePrincesNewGroove
5 comments
Speaking as an old enough person who worked in the tech industry from the Internet bubble burst until now and also an early adapter of many things like social media, I personally think it’s a scourge on society.
An echo chamber for unsavory opinions, ran by companies that often don’t even do the bare minimum of moderation and will take anyone’s money to let anyone espouse any ideology, because the bottom line is profit.
It should be outlawed. Entirely.
Also where did they find an operating cyber cafe? I used to go to one in belfast sometimes to play Warcraft back in the 2000s but it’s been gone for years.
Younger generations have been guinea pigs for these platforms. Should have been stricter regulations a decade ago.
Whistleblowers have spoken out about Facebook in particular, ran by Sociopathic individuals with zero regard for the social harm their platforms cause.
Darragh is the reason why we don’t let kids have greater influence on this kind of legislation. The Online Safety Act which is the starter towards the kind of stricter guidelines that these kids want has proven to be a quantitative dumpster fire of a solution, with data leaks and blackmail going from something that was already quite a serious breach in user privacy to an absolute ethical nightmare
If this were to go ahead, activists would be at significantly higher risk of backlash from the government, as has been seen over the past couple of months with Palestine Action, and both of them could run the risk of being blackmailed later in life if a data breach were to occur on a site that focuses on more carnal activities.
There’s no easy way to stop cyberbullying, but eroding people’s right to privacy isn’t a solution that’s worth entertaining. Updating school curriculumns to address the issue and establish better ways to report this kind of harassment is the best way forward
Social Media sites are active tools of the political class that are used to spread misinformation and hatred, the proliferation of fake identities and bots is not an accident, it’s a feature and enables the worst kinds of people: Scammers, grifters, pedos, criminals and bad actors of all stripes. They ceased being meaningful communication tools a long time ago and their targets are often vulnerable, young or old people who lack the tech savviness and critical thinking skills to be able to defend against manipulation, financial and sexual abuse. It is LONG past time for these companies to be held to account. Cambridge Analytica should have been a mass wake-up call, but instead we see America and Britain courting the techbro wankers instead of holding them responsible for their insidious actions independently from Governments and private interests. It is the single biggest issue of our time as it drives literally every social issue, it drives many of our environmental issues due to massively increased power consumption and draw (Especially with AI being embedded in these systems now) and the people in charge of policy are old, out of touch and not nearly technically savvy enough to know or recognise the problems that ordinary people, the vast majority of users out there face.
Far from protecting people, the Online Safety Act was actually just serves as a censorship tool that is both woefully easy to ignore and wholelly inadequate at curtailing the actions of platform holders in their design and deployment of engagement algorithms that are almost uniquely designed to prey on negative content as well as the obvious abuses of botting, fake accounts, stalking, misinformation/disinformation, astroturfing, doxxing and cyberbullying/harassment.
We need to face facts, everyone has a high powered computer in their pockets and we are being manipulated, negged and advertised to every day of our lives and as more and more critical servoces become tied to our phones China-style, they will see even more screentime and even more danger in the years to come.
Imagine a group of teenage children lobbying government to keep all drinks and spirits below 5% because strong drinks make them sick. There’d be mere seconds of discussion before they get told to eff off, and the drinking age becomes strictly enforced.
We’re probably only a year or two away from needing government ID to use an anonymous Reddit account; we don’t need ‘but the children’ excuses to speed that up. Boot the U18s off every form of social media and have devices verify age anonymously and locally if it must be enforced.
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