Bright Appiah
The dangers of social media exposure on teens are lost to most Ghanaian parents, including the educated.
While the unlettered could be pardoned for their ignorance, not so the educated who should know better the social drawbacks of allowing unfettered access of kids to sexual contents on social media yet turn their backs on the trend.
There is a credible story about a woman who while dressing up in front of a large mirror gave a mobile phone to a kid who is used to fidgeting with the gadget courtesy of her mother’s ‘show of love’. Unknowing to her, the kid had acquired a rudimentary knowledge of mobile phone usage through everyday access to the gadget.
Her semi-nude image were inadvertently posted on her Facebook account. It took a friend to call her attention to the anomaly, and she quickly snatched the gadget from the kid, having rather a bitter lesson but too late.
Some parents release their mobile phones to kids when they want to keep them busy, and with the passing days these children acquire basic knowledge of the smart devices, graduating easily into the social media space.
Access to the dangerous social media space has impacted negatively on families in the developed world, hence the recent demands for a regulatory legislation.
As noted in a previous editorial, we cannot fold our arms as the dangers posed by an indifferent attitude towards an omnibus social media access.
In the developed world, families have lost kids through avoidable suicides by teenagers, unfortunate occurrences attributable to exposure to dangerous social media contents. Australia and Malaysia have taken the lead in denying social media access to kids below 17. The United Kingdom is on the verge of doing so too.
It is auspicious that Child Rights International (CRI) has embarked upon a robust advocacy towards such a restrictive legislation in the country. This we are supportive of given the available negative data about the unrestricted access to social media by kids.
The outcome of a study as put out by CRI regarding social media engagement by kids is telling. Kids between the ages of five and twelve developing online habits is a trend which should trigger a national parley.
With no age verification for certain adult sites, some kids now have appetite for sexually explicit images. We are destroying a future generation unknowingly, for which posterity will query us.
Extensive hours online by vulnerable kids as noted in Australia and applicable locally too indicate that children with such access, and they are many, become largely detached from outdoor activities and for that matter physical contacts with their peers, losing thereby the advantages in such interactions. The society being nurtured through this is not what we want for our country which is steeped in age-old social values.
It is regrettable that some teenagers are lured by male predators into engaging in sexual engagements through negative social media access. Some adult predators even gift smart phones to such kids, with their parents not posing relevant questions about the sources of the gadgets.
The subject under review is double-edged one; a few persons would oppose a restriction on smart phone access to kids, their reason being that the internet is now a source of learning for children.
Technology is laden with mechanisms for restricting the kids to what are relevant to their learning process. A legislation would cater for this.
