I recently had one of those moments on Facebook that make you stop and re-examine your life, up there with your mom joining or your long-ago ex posting wedding pictures. This time it was my 12-year-old cousin, who I’d watched grow from toddler to teenager, sending me a friend request. I accepted (I was friends with my mom after all), but I was soon barraged with her updates on my news feed, many in a mysterious language of acronyms. Then I started learning new things that surprised me -- like that her favorite movie is “The Hangover,” that she already has as many “friends” as I do, and that she has a boyfriend who posts hearts on her wall.
So, when I saw a recent New York Times report that a majority of parents help their kids lie to join Facebook, I was intrigued. As it turns out, my 12-year-old cousin was one of these rogue Facebook members, sneaking in under the legal age limit of 13. This limit is set by federal law under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998, which aims to protect kids from organizations that would exploit them for commercial purposes. As Clara Shih's book "The Facebook Era" shows, businesses see immense opportunities for targeting audiences through social networks. But another reason for this law is that, as U.S. President Barack Obama succinctly put it in a recent Q&A with middle-school students, “when you're young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff... and then suddenly (you) go apply for a job and somebody has done a search.”
Of course, my cousin isn’t the only pre-teen breaking the law. According to a recent survey by Consumer Reports, over 7.5 million Facebook users are under 13, and more than 5 million are under 10. Whether they understand what they’re doing, these kids are offering up a huge amount of personal information, some of which may hurt them.
As 9 out of 10 teens have chosen Facebook as their social network of choice according to Pew, one would think founder Mark Zuckerberg might bear some responsibility for this situation. But it seems that Zuck is actually a big supporter of having young kids on Facebook. In an interview earlier this year he said Facebook is an “education” and should be used from “a really, really young age.” He also said he planned to “fight” to have COPPA reversed.
Facebook may or may not be educational, but worries still remain over the risks it brings to young kids. In addition to commercial exploitation and “stupid stuff,” there is also the threat of online bullying, which has become such a big issue that anti-bullying advocate Lady Gaga recently teamed up with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society to fight it. A recent Pew survey showed that while a majority of kids found that their peers were mostly kind online, a sizable 27% minority felt the opposite -- and many of these were among the most vulnerable groups which includes young, poor and mostly black girls.
So what’s a young kid to do? Perhaps this question should be directed more towards parents, teachers, and even older cousins like myself. If kids are going to be on Facebook, it may be up to us to help guide them through this social minefield with helpful advice and friendly wall posts. We are friends after all.
