Minors and social networks: dangers lurking

Translated by Angela Tagliafierro

In one of the offices of the senators placed on the north of the American Capitol Hill, along the Constitution Avenue, precisely in the building Dirksen, on January 31^st, 2024, a commission of inquiry called “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis” had a meeting. The deposition led by the Senate has not gone unnoticed because it was joined by the Ads of the most known social networks as witnesses: Mark Zuckerberg, AD and founder of Meta, Shou Zi Chew, AD of TikTok, Jason Citron, AD of Discord, Evan Spiegel, AD of Snap and Linda Yaccarino, AD of X.

In the room, other than the Ads of the big tech, there also were some families of the group “Parents for Safe Online Spaces", a group of common citizens sharing sad family tragedies. Each one of them lost a young son or a grandchild because of events which are often related to the digital reality and fed by the social networks: cyberbullying, body shaming, grooming, extreme challenges. They have several negative consequences on mental health.

Some young people said they have been sexually exploited on the networks Facebook, Instagram, and X. Moreover, the relatives of other young victims made clear and obvious the existence of a problem of security for the users when using social networks. Maybe it’s more serious than we thought.

On their side, the Ads declared their total availability in collaborating with the institutions, legislators, and parents while exposing a range of measures, already applied and in the implementation, aiming to protect more and more minors on social networks. In particular, Mark Zuckerberg affirmed that Meta spent 5 milliards of dollars only in 2023 for security systems, while Shou Zi Chew declared that TikTok has planned to spend two milliards of dollars in 2024 to face the issue. However, the concern showed and the promises for more investments did not convince the Republican senator Lindsey Graham at all. She considered as evasive the ADS’ answers and blaming them for having "the blood of the victims on their own hands" for the damages caused by their products.

We are now getting back in line, and we will try to analyse the reasons of the spectacularization of this commission of inquiry. Only in the third trimester of 2023 Meta’s revenue increased of 23%, reaching the 34,15 milliards of dollars, while ByteDance ‘s revenue, TikTok’s parent company, is supposed to have accumulated an operating profit to around 6 milliards of dollars only in the first trimester of 2023. Even with some setback, these earnings are destined to grow as the users of these networks increase. All this has been attracting for a long time the attention of the politicians, not only American, making urgent the need to regulate these situations, with a particular attention to the usage of the data of users and the protection of the privacy.

However, the usage of social networks is an integral part of our daily life, and they are such a powerful weapon of interconnection among people, easily overcoming the national borders. The social networks can be used as a mean of information, of entertainment and even launching commercial products or online business, contributing to creating a virtual world full of possibilities. Like in the real life, it hides dangers and unpleasant situations.

However, the sad witnesses collected during the deposition of the American Senate “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis” have anything to do with earnings, politics, and normative processes. Perhaps, the element that has not been highlighted sufficiently is the human side of the situation. This shows the extreme fragility of the new generations, often victims of the online exposition, and notices the presence of a terrible bug in our society more than in the systems of control of these networks.

The whole situation cannot be solved by just filling the normative gaps or looking for someone to charge with it. This dangerous tendency can be reversed by creating safe spaces for communication destined for the young people, encouraging the education, even for the parents, to the dangers their children may bump into when surfing the Internet. Finally, carrying out a tight collaboration between the summit of the Big Tech and the institutional and juridical ones.

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