Children using social media after midnight every day
Children as young as 11 are so addicted to social media that they log on after midnight every night, research has found.
MPS and leading charities warned that almost two thirds of young people had fallen victim to cyberbullying but admitted they would not tell their parents if they experienced something upsetting online, telegraph.co.uk wrote.
Their report accused social media platforms of failing to effectively tackle cyberbullying and offering only a ‘tokenistic’ response to the problem, placing children’s mental health at risk.
It called on the government to include online safety lessons in the school curriculum and force social media companies to report data on cyberbullying.
The report, based on the ¿ndings of an inquiry that included a poll of more than 1,000 young people aged 11-25 and an evidence session, said cyberbullying was ‘inescapable’ and took a number of forms including mass ‘unfollowings’, the sharing of embarrassing photos and threatening, intimidating or nasty messages.
The report warned that not enough was being done about cyberbullying
A 15-year-old-girl said: “You kind of expect to experience it: Nasty comments on the sel¿e, Facebook posts and Twitter posts, people screen-grabbing your Snapchat story to laugh about it ... I feel like it’s something people don’t take seriously.”
The report, called Safety Net, highlighted how children and young people use social media for hours every day.
Alex Chalk, the Conservative MP who led the inquiry alongside charities The Children’s Society and Youngminds, said: “Cyberbullying can devastate young lives, but to date the response from social media companies has been tokenistic and inadequate.
“It has failed to grip the true scale of the problem. For too long they have been marking their own homework and it’s time they become far more transparent, robust and accountable.”
The report found that three in ¿ve young people had their ¿rst social media account aged 12 or under, more than a third believe social media has a negative impact on how they feel about themselves and many described feeling inadequate if they did not have enough likes or followers.
One in ten admitted logging on after midnight every night.
It said social media companies should be faster to respond to reports of bullying and take tougher action against those who break platform guidelines.
There has been mounting criticism over social media sites’ approach to children.
In December, it emerged that the government had agreed to legislate for a code of practice setting out minimum standards for the ‘age-appropriate design’ of websites, with companies failing to abide by the rules facing the possibility of large ¿nes.
In evidence to the inquiry, Snapchat, Facebook, Google and Youtube insisted that they had measures in place to remove any content that violated their guidelines.