4 Digital Trends Parents Should Watch Out for in 2023

1. Social Media Child Sex Abuse Material

The statistics are devastating but also head-scratching. TikTok, Snapchat, Google, Dropbox, and Microsoft collectively flagged nearly 1 million pieces of child pornography circulating on their servers in late 2020.1

Think that’s bad? It’s peanuts compared to Facebook’s 5.4 million.

These aren’t unique pieces of content. The worst of the web tends to get shared over and over again. How, in 2020, was this possible?

Part of the answer is that companies like Facebook and TikTok aren’t doing their jobs. If a billion dollars is pocket money to your company, you’ve got to be investing a lot more in keeping young users safe.

But there’s something else parents absolutely need to understand.

Kids that fall victim to cyber sex predators are almost always duped into the “friendship” under false pretenses in full light of day on their favorite social media (or gaming) platforms. One DM leads to another leads to another — until the sleazeball gets what he wants: a sex pic or video that gets passed around the web a million times.

What you can do: 

• Keep your children off social media until they’re 13. Outlawing TikTok may be a challenge, but don’t waver. Need some help? Here’s some advice on enforcing your kids’ screen time limits with a gentle hand.
• Warn kids about talking to anyone they don’t know. Online sex predators get away with their crimes because children don’t know any better. Make sure yours do.
• Make tech-free zones and times of the day. This will stop your kids from retreating to their rooms and chatting at all hours of the night.

2. Meta’s Metaverse

Think back to December 2021, when Meta launched its VR social media platform, Horizon Worlds.

Not picturing it? Imagine normal Facebook but with an added feature where you could be virtually confronted by the raving troll who told you just yesterday that the moon was a huge server built by Google to enslave Earth.

Before they launched it, Meta needed to test their new product. In one of those test sessions, some goon in an Oculus (a beta tester presumably) groped another beta tester.3 Facebook’s response? She should have activated the “Safety Zone” tool, which would have placed an invisible “anti-pervert” force field around her avatar.

As a parent, I can’t imagine the ramifications of a virtual Facebook city populated, at least in part, by real predators hiding behind avatars. Do I let my kids take a stroll there? Do I take a stroll there?

What you can do:

• Don’t jump on the metaverse bandwagon. This truly is the brave new world. Meta’s safety tools are evolving (not to mention the fact that we don’t fully know how VR experiences impact kids’ brains yet).4 Wait for those tools to get better. Our kids aren’t guinea pigs.
• Arrange private sessions for your kids. Just like with Minecraft or Roblox, Meta’s Horizon Worlds lets you set up a closed network of real friends that sleazebags can’t see or ooze onto. It’s as easy as clicking “Launch Closed Session,” says Meta.5 If your kids do give Horizon Worlds a test drive, make sure you activate that feature.

3. Murky Actors

We’ve written extensively about the dangers the dark web poses for our children. Typically, the conversation revolves around bad actors and their bad deeds: a hacker busting into a hospital database and stealing thousands of health records, for example, or a sicko paying for infant pornography.

What often gets left out of the discussion is all the infrastructure that’s enabling these criminals to peddle their illegal wares. You need a lot of it — a platform and host like WordPress, a domain, and an internet service provider, bare minimum. If any one of those channels gets bottlenecked, down goes your soapbox.

Here’s where our kids come into the equation.

Legally, service providers aren’t liable for the user content that ends up on their platforms.7 (This is a huge conversation, but that’s the gist.) More worrisome for parents: They don’t particularly care who owns it as long as they’re paying rent. How many of those users are exploiting children? Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children logged 29 million reports of possible online child sexual abuse.8

This doesn’t have to be the case. Just ask the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, which got ousted from the internet in 2017.9 If you ask me, it’s about time the companies in charge show a little muscle against the human cockroaches lurking in the web’s unlit cracks.

Until then, parents, beware.

What you can do:

• Stay on top of the conversation surrounding accountability for internet platforms and service providers. We need free speech online if we want the internet as we know it to keep running. However, the laws governing it are long past due for an overhaul that would protect our kids better.
• Petition your local lawmakers. Make them take the issue seriously. They need all the help they can get to understand the issue.

4. Online Threats

When our kids get harassed online, the culprit is usually a bully, right? Not necessarily, according to a massive (41,000 people across 24 countries) new study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the Global Cybersecurity Forum.11

Cyberbullying is still a massive problem. Twenty percent of all the threats BCG recorded were Insta bullies. But this year, ads and popups topped the list of children’s internet gripes (47 percent), followed by exposure to inappropriate content (36 percent), hacking and phishing (17 percent), and unwanted flirting (17 percent).

That’s the nitty-gritty. But BCG’s study also paints a broader picture of a web that’s evolved from a community of sharers into a wildly unpredictable house of mirrors with dangers — large and small — lurking around every corner. As parents, the motley, uncontrollable nature of these threats can feel a little like a relentless army of zombies out to destroy our children. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

If there’s any light at the end of this tunnel, it’s a pretty big one. Eighty-three percent of the children BCG interviewed said they would go to their parents for help if they felt threatened.

Good job, little ones! (If only more of you actually did. According to the folks with the pads and pens, only 39 percent of parents said their kids actually followed through.)

What you can do:

• Talk to your kids about the web’s serious dangers and do it early. We call this the “predators and scammers” talk around here. It’s right up there next to the birds and bees talk — except you’ll probably want to have it as soon as they’re old enough to wield a device.
• Monitor their screen time. Parental control software can be a big help here. For Android users, try Google Family Link. If you’re looking for ways to keep an eye on your children’s Apple devices, don’t miss my guide to child-proofing your kids’ iPads.
• Teach digital hygiene basics. Along with talking to them about the web’s shady characters is showing your kids how to protect themselves from them. Here’s a digital safety guide for kids that should come in handy.

Final Thoughts

Kids have been pulling reckless stunts forever. The difference between whatever dumb games we used to play in the past and what’s happening now is that today’s trends tear like wildfire over the internet. The allure of fame and a global audience is the lighter fluid.

And that’s just TikTok challenges. The metaverse is coming, too, and the only thing we can count on for sure is an invasion of privacy.

Sometimes it seems like our kids are more savvy about the internet than we parents are. (That’s because they are. They grew up on it.) But that doesn’t mean they can deal with everything they experience online. They’re kids after all.

If there’s anything that gives me hope, it’s that 83 percent of kids in the BCG’s far-ranging study said they trusted their parents enough to talk to them if they felt threatened online. Let’s take that as a positive sign that if we do take the time to listen — and to talk, instruct, and  act — we can lead our kids into adulthood (virtually) unscathed.