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Social Media Participation of Teenage Children

14 November 2012 By Teresa Martinez

The world of social media seems to be a place where many teenage children are participating.  Most of them have junked other forms of communication in favor of the social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.  The main concern of parents of children who are frequently interacting through it is whether or not they are doing so in an appropriate manner.

The leading social networks have expressly disallowed users who are below 13 years old.  This age requirement has produced at least two undesirable effects.  It is either the parents allow their children below 13 to lie about their age or the denied children to access such platforms outside the home, far from their disapproving parents.

Allowing children to lie about their age is not really a great way to introduce them to social media use.  Parents are often caught up in a dilemma of how they should go about it in keeping their child safe from the existing risks and threats of the environment.  Experience tends to show that children will find ways to participate in social media with or without the approval of the parents.  A teenage child’s participation in social media is best done under the guidance and limitations set by parents.

Dependence on social media interaction has affected to a large degree the ability of teenage children to talk to people face to face.  Social skills are lacking.   Social media use also tend to eat up time for rest, recreation, and other activities in life.  Parents can still protect their children from the ills of social media without totally invading their children’s privacy.  Children of this age need to know the basic online safety rules so they can protect themselves.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: social media, teenage children and social media

Avoid Twitter Spam

26 January 2010 By Saran

twitterI have become more active on Tweeter in the past months, mainly due to a self-imposed Facebook hiatus. I just found Facebook to be so tiresome and irritating (not just the platform but the people using it). I have had my Twitter account for many years now but I rarely use it. Now that I have been using it a lot, though, I realized that it is NOT exempt from spam.

What am I talking about?

Direct message spam. This is one of the most common things I get. I receive DMs from people I don’t know.

Retweets. I love how you can retweet messages on Twitter but sometimes, they just clutter up my timelines! What’s even worse is that I am not even interested in what some people retweet.

Tweets from those I follow. Yep, they can inundate my timeline as well.

The bottom line here is to KNOW who you follow and who follows you. Every single day, I get “follow” e-mails and many times, I have no idea who they are. Now I know better than to follow people I don’t really know. Once, I even got a “The Real Carrie Underwood is now following you” e-mail. Guess what? It wasn’t the real Carrie Underwood.

More so, disable the autofollow feature. This doesn’t make sense as you get all sorts of followers trying to fish for their own followers. Again, filter those you follow.

Another thing you can do is go to this link: http://twitter.com/spam. They have some practical and useful tips that can help you address Twitter spam issues.

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: social media, spam, Twitter

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