New Facebook rules aren’t the real issue

Published 9:38 pm Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Parents are upset that Facebook plans to loosen privacy rules for teen subscribers. But after what we’ve seen in recent days and months — such as the suicide of a young girl who was bullied at school and on the website — what we should really be asking is whether Facebook is appropriate for our teens at all.

This isn’t a blanket condemnation of Facebook or teens’ use of the site. Some handle it fine. But many find themselves in a situation their parents would never place them in, if the Facebook world wasn’t virtual. They’re alone, unsupervised and unguarded in an environment full of victimizers and traps.

It’s time for parents to parent — not look to Facebook to do the job for them.

“Facebook is relaxing its rules for teenagers,” CNN reported last week. “The 13- to 17-year-old set now has the option to share photos, updates and comments with the general public on Facebook. That means strangers, and companies collecting data for advertisers and marketing companies, will be able to see select posts. Teenagers will also be able to turn on the Follow feature for their profiles, which would allow anyone they’re not friends with to see their public posts in the main news feed.”

Here’s how Facebook justifies the change:

“Teens are among the savviest people using of social media, and whether it comes to civic engagement, activism, or their thoughts on a new movie, they want to be heard,” Facebook said in an announcement. “While only a small fraction of teens using Facebook might choose to post publicly, this update now gives them the choice to share more broadly, just like on other social media services.”

But really, are teens among the savviest people using social media? They may be the most technically proficient, but we’re still talking about teenagers here. They’re not savvy — about much of anything. Aside from their youth and inexperience, their brains simply aren’t fully developed.

As Harvard researcher Frances Jensen told NPR recently, adolescent brains aren’t fully formed. They’re lacking a connecting part of the frontal lobe that controls decision-making.

“It’s the part of the brain that says: ‘Is this a good idea? What is the consequence of this action?’” Jensen explained.

One of the most important jobs of a parent — and one of the most difficult — is helping teenagers make good decisions — because at that age, they’re fully capable of making terrible decisions that can have life-long consequences.

Kids can make bad decisions about alcohol and drugs — and parents do everything they can to prevent that. Facebook can be just as harmful, with rampant bullying, sexual predators and the temptation to post stupid things that will come back to haunt them later.

Facebook’s new policies are really nothing new. The website has always been a wide-open virtual world of some of the best, and lots of the worst, of our modern society.

Parents don’t send their children out into the world alone, and just hope for the best.

We shouldn’t send them into virtual worlds unguarded, either.