Not so long ago, we lived the biggest conflict YouTube has had since it was founded in 2005, this is because, despite having hundreds of millions of users, it has managed to stay a relatively healthy social network.
The conflict began when some users detected unusual activity in certain videos, especially in videos of little girls, alleging that a pedophilia network operated secretly before everyone’s eyes.
The directors of the network faced the situation concluding that more severe revisions would be made to the children’s accounts to make sure there were no security problems.
This opened the discussion about children’s safety in social networks.
This was not the first time that children are involved in security issues on the internet.
The audiences are getting younger
Today’s biggest social media users are people who were born without the Internet, but who little by little learned to live on it; millennials still reign.
However, behind them, the new generation that no longer has to hang up the phones to be able to connect to the internet is coming.
But despite being better at managing the network, they are also younger and need more protection.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK, has been responsible for finding ways to keep children safe on social networks.
This instance released a statement in which they invite technology companies to implement “good practices” in regard to the protection of minor’s data.
One of the techniques in which they put more emphasis is to avoid “nudge” techniques that may be inviting minors to share their data where it is not necessarily safe.
How does it affect the big ones?
The main way to prevent data from being extracted is to remove the likes of the accounts of the minors.
What does this mean? The accounts of minors who sign up will be deprived of likes; this is because the information is collected as soon as somebody likes a post.
This might represent a problem for Facebook for it is the network that most bases its activity on the likes of users.
Another company that could be most affected is Snapchat, since one of its main policies of use, is to share snaps every day (despite not being mandatory, the application invites you to share every time you log in).
However, not only Snapchat invites you to publish.
We also have the participation of third-party apps that, on previous occasions, have stolen sensitive information.
Similar to the sanctions of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), those networks or apps that do not comply with the regulations to keep minors out of risk of being scammed will have to pay 4% of their global profit.
Another way to name it
Instagram, on its own, has another way of approaching likes.
Trying to refocus attention on photos rather than interactions, the photograph network has decided to launch a version of its app in which the likes will remain hidden.
The first version will be released in Canada, where people will not be able to see how many likes the photo of one of their contacts has, however, they will be able to see the likes on their own posts.
With this, Instagram is also looking to take reputation away from false accounts that are used to give relevance to certain posts.
False accounts, likes and paid likes are becoming more common in the world of digital transactions, so we are looking to return to the world of genuine interactions to make marketing efforts more productive.
Sources
www.independent.co.uk
www.petapixel.com