Age Restrictions on Social Media

Within this blog post I will be developing my further thoughts on the impact of social media and how it specifically influences children.

It can be considered that age restrictions could benefit social media, due to some of the content which can be accessed by anyone, via the internet. Therefore, it could be seen that by ensuring children wait until a certain age before they are granted access to these social media applications, it could protect them from viewing content which they are better off restricted from.

Already, social media applications have age restrictions. Such as twitter and Facebook which have age limits of 13 years old. However, if a child wants to create an account on these applications, who is under the age of 13, all they have to do is tick a box and fill in the correct information to falsely state that they are of age. These social medias obviously believe that these accounts should not be used by those under these ages, otherwise, they would not have any restrictions. Therefore, should they not consider being stricter when allowing access to these pages?

Could there not be a way for these applications to get their users who fit the restrictions, by being over the age of 13, to enter a cereal code from their ID and ensure that those using the medias are of age? I feel that this would ensure that children are being protected by the potential harms of social media, such as; bullying and other harms of social media which I have discussed within this blog.

However, it can also be seen that if we are creating age restrictions on social media due to their harms, should we even consider shutting down social media applications all together? If these tools are causing disruption so strong for those under the age of 13, can adults be trusted to post sensible and un-harmful content? This could be considered to solve a lot of problems, such as jealousy over who’s photo your partner has “liked” or who your friends indirect tweet was about.

Therefore, I feel that it can be seen that if age restrictions are to be set for social media accounts, it should also be considered their true worth and harms to civilisation.