While a lot of teens probably struggle to contemplate life without Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram, they might have to prepare for a few years away fromsocial media.
The EU is voting today on whether the age of ‘digital consent’ should be raised to 16. If the vote goes in favour, any company wanting to handle the data of the under 16s would have to get explicit consent from their legal guardian.
So no more Facebook statuses. No more snapchat selfies. No more instagrams, tweets, or vines.
Can you imagine?
Child safety experts have warned that banning children from social media platforms could serve to harm them: it will severely restrict their internet access, and as Larry Magid argued:
“Social media services are frequently used by younger teens to seek help or just let others know about their distress. I have heard of numerous cases where suicides have been prevented as a result of teens reaching out, along with even more cases of teens seeking or getting help when dealing with such things as physical abuse, sexual harassment, bullying and self-harm.”
Plus, we’re literally not sure what we would do if, back when we were 15, somebody took the internet away. How would we awkwardly flirt with our classmates? How would we postembarrassing selfies that would come back to haunt us years later? How would we know every little thing that all our friends were doing at any given time?!
To be honest, we’d most likely just lie about our age and do it all anyway.
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