Social media has opened up a world of opportunities for people. Even people not particularly great at anything can offer their everyday life to the public for voyeurism in the form of social media reels and posts. If it clicks with the audience, they become what you call social media influencers, earning in a year what a highly educated white-collar worker in a country like Bharat would be able to earn in probably five years or even more.
That is precisely the lure of social media-the chance to earn quick bucks in literally no time. But this unregulated paradise of umpteen promises comes with its own set of risks. The unregulated world of social media is full of abusive, pornographic, disturbing, and violent content. The rosy phase of social media seems to be over as it’s becoming a huge threat to the safety of children worldwide.
Different countries have different regulations regarding the use of social media by children. Many countries have banned social media for kids under 13. But with kids having widespread access to smartphones, there is no real way to check if the ban is in place. Moreover, many kids can easily access social media through the devices of their parents. So a lot of it boils down to parental controls. But is it fair to place the burden of censorship on parents and give a clean chit to social media companies who take no liability whatsoever and pretend to be just a medium facilitating interaction to evade regulations while they are minting billions of dollars?
Many western countries are now considering regulating or outrightly banning social media for kids. A federal Bill proposed in the US Senate, if passed, would ban children under 13 from creating accounts on social media apps. The UK government is now also planning to limit the usage of social media for children under 16 years of age.
According to various media reports, the UK government might soon bring in laws to ban social media access for children under the age of 16. UK has recently enacted the Online Safety Act which makes it mandatory for social media platforms to protect minors from harmful content. The act lays out a mechanism for imposing fines on the concerned social media company depending on its global revenue. But amidst rising parental concerns in the UK about their children’s safety in the online world, the UK government is reportedly considering further action to regulate social media.
The British government would reportedly launch a consultation in the new year to explore various risks children were exposed to while using social media.
The whole debate on the detrimental impact of social media on children in the UK began with the tragic death of a 14-year-old British girl Molly Russell. Molly Russell committed suicide in 2017. In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a British court ruled out that social media platforms contributed to the death of the British teenager. Molly Russell reportedly interacted with more than 2,000 social media posts related to self-harm, suicide, and depression in the 6-month period leading up to her death. The teenager mostly consumed content on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
In Molly Russell’s case, as the court observed, the content related to suicide and self-harm she binge-watched and scrolled on social media acted as a trigger ultimately leading the teenager towards taking the drastic step to kill herself. Molly Russell’s case exposes the unregulated dark and dingy world of social media. Leading social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have no age verification policies. Prime facie, they have a rule that their users should be at least 13 years old. However, due to the lack of any age verification mechanism, the rule means nothing. Anybody can lie about their age and create a social media account.
An article published in the British Daily Observer says that according to various surveys, about 40 percent of US children aged 8 to 12 years use social media, and the number climbs to an alarming 95 percent for 13-to-17-year-olds. If these are the statistics for a country like the US, we can imagine the alarming situation in Bharat. Bharat is a lucrative market for social media platforms, and it only serves their interest to tap into the huge pool of child audience and user base. Bharat has recently seen many cases of individuals being arrested for circulating child pornography material on social media.
According to an article published in Fox News media publication a couple of months back in June 2023, AI is now being used to generate child pornography and blackmail teenagers. The article says that the usual modus operandi of the people running child pornography rackets is to edit the images of a fully clothed child or teenager to generate nude images. But there is also an increasing trend of creating completely fabricated images of child sexual exploitation, warns the article. That is, one would increasingly see on social media platforms pornographic images of children who don’t exist in real life. That is, these images are self-generated by AI.
Molly Rose Foundation, a charitable founded by the family and friends of British teenager Molly Russell after her death to focus on suicide prevention, targeted towards young people under the age of 25, recently published a research report on its website. The report claims that social media companies deliberately amplify content promoting suicide and self-harm.
The report studied content from popular social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest. It highlights what it calls the “shocking scale and prevalence of harmful content” on these platforms. According to the report, some of the most viewed posts on TikTok that reference self-harm, suicide, and highly depressive content have been viewed and liked over 1 million times.
The report says it collected and analysed data from 1,181 of the most engaged posts that were publicly available on Instagram and TikTok and posted using well-known self-harm, suicide, and depression hashtags. “In the context of the report, posts were considered harmful if they promoted and glorified suicide or self-harm, referenced suicide and self-harm ideation, or contained relentless themes of misery, hopelessness and depression”, says the report.
Most importantly, the report claims that the algorithms of these social media platforms function in a way that content glorifying suicide, harm, and depression is easily discoverable as it is highly recommended by the algorithms. That is, harmful content has a higher chance of being discovered by audiences than less harmful content, says the report.
Now, why would social media algorithms recommend harmful content to a huge base of users, one might wonder? One plausible explanation is the algorithms are designed to bolster user engagement and traffic on these social media platforms, so they deliberately promote clickbait and sensational content. When the prime motive is profit, the safety of children and teenagers is the least of their concerns. It is the same logic by which sexual or pornographic content is highly promoted by social media algorithms. Such content appeals to the basest of people’s instincts and has a huge possibility of going viral soon. Therefore, one can say it’s the easiest growth strategy for social media companies, if not the most ethical.
In Bharat, TikTok is thankfully banned, but the popular social media platform Instagram has a huge child user base. If one were to research the number of Bharatiya children using Instagram, the data would reveal that a huge chunk of Bharatiyas in the age group of 13 to 16 are using Instagram, I am sure. It’s a very delicate age group when kids are getting exposed to all sorts of things and the desire to grow up and experiment with one’s body is at its peak.
The voyeuristic world of social media minus any regulations seems like a paradise to the kids in this age group. The reels and the live video streaming feature of social media platforms like Instagram are especially dangerous for kids. It not only exposes kids to all sorts of vulgar and pornographic content but covertly encourages them to upload such content themselves.
It’s not uncommon to come across videos of skimpily clad Bharatiya teenage girls on Instagram making highly provocative videos almost bordering on soft pornography. Some of these kids have millions of followers, and they are probably making money through Instagram. This is the most worrisome aspect. Social media not only promotes sensational content amongst its user base but actively encourages them to make sensational content themselves and become social media influencers.
Now I am not suggesting that all teenage Instagram influencers of Bharat are creating disturbing and objectionable content. But I do feel that the whole idea of putting kids out there as some sort of a commodity in the public gaze to earn money is highly problematic and can be detrimental to their mental health in the long term.
A Google search result of the term “Child social media influencers India” yields many results. When one visits the Instagram accounts of these kid influencers, one can see that many of them are literally 10 to 12 years old or probably even younger. Perhaps, their parents are putting them out in the public domain as influencers. But this is highly problematic and that is why stringent social media regulation for children under 16 years of age is needed in Bharat as well.
A couple of months back, a highly disturbing video had gone viral on social media. The video was of a 19-year-old Bharatiya girl called Rhythm Chanana, and it showed her traveling in the Delhi metro wearing a bikini. The video went viral overnight and she became famous as the “Delhi metro girl”.
The girl had apparently come from Punjab to Delhi to study acting, and when one saw her Instagram posts, one was shocked by the enormous transformation she underwent in a couple of months. From her initial posts where she looks like an innocent and cool college goer to an over-mature kid who seems high on drugs or something, the transformation is massive. The mainstream media, instead of being concerned about her health and safety, and investigating if she fell prey to some racket, glorified her apparent choices calling it freedom and liberation.
Her official Instagram handle has more than 50k followers now. Probably she just wanted to get famous and in a desperate bid for that, she tried the Delhi metro histrionics and other soft pornographic content she uploads on her social media. The point is if a 19-year-old can get so influenced by social media, imagine the plight of kids and teenagers. That is precisely why Bharat urgently needs a law to regulate social media and make social media companies comply with ID checking requirements to get Bharatiya users registered on their platform. It’s the need of the hour.
