Letters

With reference to a recent article about children using social media by GulfWeekly’s Education Matters columnist Chris Fenton.  

How many likes do you need on a social media post to feel like you are really loved? Ask this to a young person and the answer can be astonishing. Many will reply, they need hundreds to find their self-worth.

You can’t stop young people using social media - it’s become too ingrained in society. But can you help them use social media in a way where their self-worth isn’t affected? Where their career prospects aren’t damaged? Where they don’t use it to abuse others?

Yes, we need to let young people know of the dangers, but we also need to encourage the positive side of social media. If we world-weary adults try and convince the kids that social media is evil, we are going to be totally ignored.

Young people need to be empowered to use social media in the right way. They should understand the privacy settings of the platforms - giving them the power to choose who sees their content. That’s a simple, obvious thing to teach.

And then there’s social media bullying. Young people aren’t always aware that they are the ones doing the bullying. There’s the criminal element. When students hear examples of young people losing their job because of something they posted when they were just 13, it makes them really think.

That’s the negative side but if you focus just on this then you come across as a grumpy parent stuck in 1999. So how can you use social media positively?

Plenty of young people do amazing things on social media. There are the teenagers vlogging (video blogging) about their illness or disability on YouTube. There are the young people using Facebook to raise money for charity. There are the youngsters finding their political voices on Twitter.

Creative teenagers are sharing their artwork or animations on Instagram and young writers are turning their thoughts into blogs.

So let’s tell young people there is a better way to use social media. Let’s not try and beat them up but raise them up. Let’s show them that social media can be a power for good and not a place to hurt. Not a way to gain self-worth but a method of expressing their skills and passions. Not a place where career prospects have to be destroyed but a communication tool to help them find a job.

Let’s reclaim social media for what it should be for our young people and not what it’s become.

Mark Saxby, by email

Editor’s note: Mark is a social media consultant at Status Social which delivers Positive Social sessions to young people in schools. More details at https://www.statussocial.co.uk/services/positive-social/