Issues in Social Media for Children

Running head: ISSUES IN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CHILDREN
ISSUES IN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CHILDREN
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1ISSUES IN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CHILDREN
Introduction:
Information systems are extremely important are and are being used widely in most of the
organizations in today’s world. They help in automating processes and making business
operations much faster and efficient. They are also being used in social media. These platforms
are being used and accessed by the consumers including the children. Children below the age of
14 use social media like Facebook, twitter, instagram and that in turn have adverse effects on
their way of thinking and the society (Winpenny, Marteau and Nolte 2013).
Ethical issues of information systems and its impacts on the children:
Children below the age of 14 use social sites like Facebook are victimized in a number of
ways. Firstly, they do not have the consent of their parents to open a Facebook profile and they
end up being stalked by other Facebook users (Boyd 2014). They often upload their pictures on
Facebook or other sites and those pictures are illegally downloaded and misused even without
the knowledge of the children (Laurini 2014). Children are considered vulnerable and
incompetent when it come sot usage of social media since the hackers often steal the personal
data that the children upload on the social sites and misuse such data. Hackers can even breach
the security of the home premises of the child by hacking the home network (Dijck 2013). This
way they can monitor and stalk the child a well as the other activities that happen in the
household premises, which in turn can traumatize the children upon discovery. Some of the
ethical principles that the users of information systems should be aware of are: To be respectful
towards others, treating everyone equally, keeping promise that has been made, respecting others
Respect the property of others and being honest and truthful. Some of the basic human rights that

2ISSUES IN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CHILDREN
the children are also entitled to are recognizing the dignity of the children, which even they have
a right to have a right to have. Even they have right to liberty to live in their own way and
deserve security for anything they post on social media. It is their freedom to choose the way
they want to live and their privacy is their right. They should have freedom of thought, religion
as well as conscience. They should also have right to express their opinions (Quinn 2015). The
hackers also misuse the privacy of the information shared by the children from these mobile
devices like their smartphones or computers. Kantianism states that our ethics are defined by us
and we judge something as good or bad based on whether everyone around us are doing it. For
example if everyone started breaking promises it would by no means start meaning that breaking
promises is an ethically correct practice.
Social issues of information systems and its impacts on children:
Many children often feel like expressing their views and seek guidance about a particular
topic which they post on social media but hackers and other users often take advantage of that
and misuse the information that are provided by the children (ACM SIGCAS 2018). For
instance, recently some of the children form the junior team of NFL posted about the racism they
face in the process of team selection for the school championships (Strasburger et al. 2013).
Children often tend to be mentally traumatized or victimized by the different comments and
reactions of negative feelings and defamation that are posted on their social networking profiles.
This again is a drawback of the information system in the backend. There should be better
algorithms that the software developers should come up with that should be able to filter the
comments posted by random users on Facebook before making them actually live to the users
(Rainer et al. 2013).