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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| This week, Facebook unveiled Messenger Kids. | |
| It's a new version of its popular Facebook Messenger, and it is meant to safeguard preteens who might be using social media unauthorized, unsupervised. | |
| But a lot of critics are saying that this is actually just a way for Facebook to target kids as young as six years old and get them hooked on its services on social media in general. | |
| So Facebook unveiled Messenger Kids with all sorts of parental controls. | |
| It's supposed to give parents control of who kids are allowed to accept friend requests from, and the friend requests have to go through the parent's Facebook account in order for them to be able to access the child's Messenger Kids account. | |
| So this is great for kids who want to use the filters and things like that to talk with their grandparents. | |
| They're really selling this as a way for kids to have fun. | |
| Oh, isn't it so boring after a while when you're a grandparent trying to speak to your seven-year-old grandchild? | |
| Well, now you can play with all of the facial tracking devices that we have built into these filters. | |
| In a way, this is a great thing because, of course, we know that social media use by underage kids is actually on the rise. | |
| A lot of parents aren't even aware of the fact that these social media accounts have age limits to them. | |
| And we also know that there are predators. | |
| That are grooming children online that are targeting them in their direct messages, getting them to dance provocatively, using certain apps like Musically, where kids have no idea, they think they're just having fun, but really they're doing a pretty little kitty kissy face with a predator. | |
| So this is supposed to give parents a little bit more control. | |
| Now Facebook says that Messenger Kids is not going to be collecting data on your child in order to advertise to them. | |
| They're not going to have any ads on this app. | |
| Advocates who are focused on marketing to children aren't really convinced about this because there's a lot of kind of curious language in the privacy policy. | |
| The company does say that they're going to collect the content of children's messages, photos they send, what features they use on the app, and information about the device they use. | |
| And they say they're going to use this information in order to improve the quality of the app, and they're going to share that information within the family of companies that are part of Facebook. | |
| And they're going to do this. | |
| Just because they want to improve the quality of some of the features on the app that maybe these outside companies are providing. | |
| Right. | |
| But the people who are advocating on behalf of these children are saying, look, Facebook cannot be trusted with this type of information, especially now even younger children. | |
| And they point to a leaked memo that was revealed in May. | |
| May. | |
| It was a 23-page document that was being prepared for a potential advertiser, and it was selling Facebook's ability to know the psychological vulnerability of 6.4 million young people, some as young as 14 years old, down to the moment. and it was selling Facebook's ability to know the psychological And they were pointing to things such as when they felt worthless, insecure, stressed, defeated, and anxious, and like a failure. | |
| So of course, this is because Facebook is tracking those keystrokes in real time, and then they're using this information to then sell it off to advertisers, which is why many parents are so concerned that Facebook is now targeting these young people. | |
| Something else that's really concerning... | |
| There are a lot of studies coming out showing the correlation between teenage depression and suicide and smartphone use. | |
| A new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science found that in just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless, which are classic symptoms of depression, surged 33% in large national surveys. | |
| Teen suicide attempts increased 23%. | |
| The number of 13 to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31%. | |
| So they were trying to figure out what the heck happened, you know, sometime around 2012, and that was the surge. | |
| In smartphone use and the links to increase new media and screen time, there was a recent story that came out about a 10-year-old girl who hanged herself after a suspected bullying incident was caught on camera. | |
| So this is a 10-year-old girl, she's being bullied, and the video is shared online on that app Musically, which I mentioned earlier. | |
| A lot of underage kids are using this app because parents think it's just fun. | |
| Their kids are just dancing and singing along. | |
| To music, not understanding that predators are saying, ooh, dance to this Britney Spears song or whatever. | |
| Or we see in this instance that people are uploading videos and maybe they're setting fights to music. | |
| But this girl's parents said that that was just... | |
| Too much bullying and embarrassment for the girl to endure and that she went home and hung herself, a 10-year-old girl. | |
| So let's not forget the very people responsible for creating this technological reality that we're living in, they themselves limit the amount of screen time that their children can have. | |
| Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, as well as other tech elites, consistently reveal that Silicon Valley parents are strict about technology use. | |
| Their kids also go to schools where the... | |
| These computers are not just ubiquitous in the classrooms. | |
| That should have been a red flag years ago. | |
| If the very people who are creating these things are saying, woo, this is too dangerous for my own kids, that should have been a red flag for parents everywhere that it's too dangerous for you. | |
| And your kids. | |
| This is where Mark Zuckerberg comes in. | |
| He's got two young children now, so he's wanting to create this safer version of social media reality for his children's future. | |
| But really, what it appears to me is that Zuckerberg and Facebook are going to be setting the future and children of the future up to understand that Big Brother is always watching. | |
| Their pictures, their content, everything is being observed in real time by your techies over at Facebook who are saying, don't upload that. | |
| You can't be friends with that person. | |
| On the one hand, you want to give them credit because they're trying to make it a little bit safer for kids out there who are being targeted on these social media apps. | |
| But on the other hand, Facebook has already proven itself to be an application that is only concerned with the bottom line. | |
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