New Parental Oversight For Media - Is This the Future for Protecting Kids?

As someone who is very serious about protecting kids online, and informing parents how to be knowledgable of online trends, imagine my surprise when I found out that Snapchat, the video and 24-hour photo-sharing application, would be implementing a Parental Oversight feature.

While social media has its benefits in social development, there are risks with addiction, mental health, and vulnerability that can develop if not looked after properly. The latest updated settings for the platform will assist parents in looking at what their kids are watching and typing and the settings they have set.

This will assist in Snapchat's not-easy-to-understand UI, or user interface, which has a history of not being user-friendly. There is also a feature called "Family Center" that is now easier to locate for parents by allowing it to be a searchable function (since most social media platforms now have embedded search engines).

Lastly, we have discussed in previous blog posts the different types of AI that are available for us to use. From multi-modal AI, to Chatbot GPT, and now Snapchat's "My AI", what all of these have in common is that it requires for the user to make an input and then the machine will create an output from the cataloged data it already consumed. However, there was no feature to turn off or disable it in case the user no longer wanted to read it. For Snapchat, the new features rolling out in the latest update allows parents the ability to disable the My AI tool, after concerns of it responding inappropriately to children.

Is this the new future of protecting kids from online threats? There is the hope that something like this can be implemented for Instagram or TikTok, so parents can be assured that their kids and young teens aren't traversing murky online places.

In June of 2023, I had the opportunity to give a lecture at the Secaucus Public Library. I called it "Internet Crash Course: Modern Media Habits". The goal of it was to inform parents that the internet is such a vast and unpredictable space, and with the proper protection and guidance, a kid or young teen can thrive on there. My initial assumption was that the main culprit for young children getting into trouble online, harassed, or in a conversation with someone far too old for them, was restricted to only the social media platforms.

However, after talking with parents, I came to find that this is not entirely the case. The problem lies beyond social media -- gaming systems, such as Roblox or Fortnite, have chat features and search engines in settings to find other players. Among Us, for example, which had its heyday in the early 2020s while we were all in lockdown, had "lobbies" and a voice-chatting feature but no way to monitor and ensure that kids were talking to other kids.

The broader spread of publicity is so fast to say "social media is the problem" or "Instagram is addictive and causing our kids to be depressed", when there are other factors at play. Unfortunately, as it stands right now, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to protect kids and prevent them from talking to unsavory people. The important takeaway is for the parents and the older generation (that's us) to stay knowledgeable about the changing trends and policies that are rolling out daily.

It also might be valuable, where if you are a parent with a young child online, to have open and honest conversations with them about who they are watching, what they are seeing, and if anything upsets or bothers them, to pull them away from that situation.

Conversation and knowledge can go a long way.