American psychology group issues recommendations for children’s social media use
- The American Psychological Association (APA) has issued its first ever health advice on social media use.
- The report addresses concerns regarding how social networks designed for adults can negatively impact children and young people.
- The APA also outline how online social networks are “not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people” but should be used considerately.
- The APA’s recommendations are primarily aimed towards parents/carers and cover a range of issues, for example reasonable age-appropriate degree of “adult monitoring” and adults improving their own digital literacy.
- The advisory condemns algorithms that push young users towards harmful content.
- Regular screening for “problematic social media use” in children is encouraged to flag behaviours that signal addiction.
- For more please see the Tech Crunch website.
EU Lawyers say plan to scan private messages for child abuse may be unlawful
- Internal legal advice services have said that EU plans to screen social network sites for child abuse would probably be annulled by courts for breaching users’ rights.
- Under the “chat controls” any encrypted service provider could be forced to scan billions of messages, videos, and photos for “identifiers” of certain types of harmful content.
- National bodies would be required to alert police if they found evidence of suspected child grooming or harmful content being shared.
- The proposed EU regulation has seen experts warn that the removal of end-to-end encryption services could see WhatsApp disappearing from Europe.
- The legal service of the council of the EU has said the regulation poses a “particularly serious limitation to the rights to privacy and personal data” and there is “serious risk” of it falling foul of a judicial review on multiple grounds.
- EU lawyers believe by clamping down on the solicitation of children, age verification technology and processes for encrypted services would further interfere with users’ rights and freedoms.
- For more on this story, please visit the Guardian News website.
College creates world’s first TikTok prospectus for students
- Glasgow Clyde College (GCC) has created a series of ‘ProspecToks’ which are giving potential students a real-life insight into college life.
- This has stemmed from the finding that around 40% of 16–24-year-olds state that TikTok is their go-to app for social media.
- GCC is also opening up enquiries through TikTok where applicants can start the sign-up process through direct messaging.
- These ‘ProspecToks’ were created with input from former students and include information on courses.
- More videos that are styled as short insights into student life are set to launch over the next ten days.
- For more, please visit the STV News website.
