Abuse of our children can occur on any social media

‘IT’S the small networks that are the dodgy ones’. I might be paraphrasing what Communications Minister Denis Naughten is saying, but his basic point is Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter and Snapchat are putting more effort into safety initiatives than smaller, newer services.

In one sense he is right. Because of its size and pervasiveness, Facebook is now ploughing more resources into online safety than all of the other networks combined. This includes hiring some 10,000 extra people this year (some of them in Dublin) to focus specifically on safety issues.

He is also correct to say some of the most systematic safety lacunae exist on smaller services and apps that are more aggressively focused on growth at any cost than balancing issues of protection for minors.

An early example of this was Ask.fm, which became Ask.com (and gradually improved its record). That service encouraged teenagers to anonymously pass comment on their peers. That inevitably led to victims of bullying, up to and including instances of self-harm. On the other hand, some of the most troubling recent cases of child abuse facilitated online have involved a crosssection of big and small social media outlets.

The most disturbing case this year has been Matthew Horan, the young Dublin man convicted of coercing girls as young as nine to send explicit photos of themselves. Horan used Snapchat and Instagram, two giant social networks, as well as smaller niche services such as Kik and Musical.ly to criminally blackmail kids and teens into upsetting sexual activity.

There are numerous other examples of the bigger social networks being used to achieve similar criminal goals, often making victims out of children.

This problem isn’t going away. Recent figures show that 40pc of kids aged 11 or 12 have a social media account and teens spend an average of 7.5 hours each day on the internet.

Even if the evidence suggests that much of this activity is spent in small communication groups on services such as Snapchat, and away from public attention, it’s clear that bad people are still able to reach and hurt them.