Children On Social Media Negative Effects

Negative effects Child’s Privacy. Your Social Media Posts Might Be Used for Bullying. Social Media Messaging Could Impact Your Child’s Future. Attraction of Dangerous People. Arguments in favor. Part of identity. Sense of community.

Therefore, one can state that everybody is familiar with parents on Facebook or Instagram, that post the pictures or videos of their children, some of them only sometimes, like on celebrations, and some of them posting their children almost every day. There are different ways of people doing that, sometimes, for example, when the baby is really small, they put an emoji on their face, but still – they are posting it. Moreover, influencers even use the children for the paid advertising of some particular products and etc.

No matter how often, parents share their children’s achievements, funny videos, and etc. because it is important to them, they want to share it with everybody. But what about the child himself/herself? There are different opinions about posting/ sharing the image of children. Some people don’t see nothing wrong in it and there are others who criticize it. Therefore, this paper deals with a discussion what are the negatives effects of posting your children on social media? Are there any benefits in it? How the law is protecting children in this case? The terms of sharenting, digital kidnapping, bullying, child’s privacy would be explained in this essay.

Additionally, article eight of the European Convention on Human rights and Fundamental Freedoms offers protection of privacy rights:

As one can state, children are protected by law, although does it work in practice? The most vulnerable are the young children, toddlers, and babies. If the children are too small or young to speak, they will not be able to communicate or articulate concerns to the adults comparing to older children or teens. What is more, the small ones are not actually aware what their parents are sharing of them online, therefore: “a young child is extremely unlikely to be concerned legally competent and will therefore be unable to initiate legal proceedings” (Murray, Swadener & Smith, 2020). So, the youngest ones are totally reliant on the third party to defend them legally. Thus, the majority of the parents consider their children as their possession that they can decide for them, therefore, it becomes difficult to initiate legal procedures without the interference of the third party.

In addition, the negative effects of sharenting will not necessarily be immediately apparent at the time that images or information are posted on social media, problems might materialize in the future (Murray et al. 2020). Things that can be considered normal now, not necessarily will be after ten of fifteen years. Therefore, it is recommended to avoid the pictures, that later could be embarrassing to the child or to become a reason of bullying. And there are already some grown up people who suits their parents for using their pictures of childhood on Internet.

Commonly parents together with the picture of the baby post the full name, birth date – and then there is a danger of identity theft. There are cases in USA, when the person becomes 18 and tries to get the first credit card, they realize that it was already created by his or her name. The collected information can also be use by data brokers and be sold to companies of marketing purposes (Murray et al, 2020). Murray et al (2020) claim that: “Anna UK report Barclays suggested that by 2030 sharenting will account for 2/3 of identity throat information exposed about a child when they’re young might be recorded and stored until the child is an adult when fraudsters could open accounts using the details”.