“[S]ocial media apps are appendages for tweens and teens,” writes Hayley Krischer in a recent article for the New York Times. “It’s one way they earn social currency.”
Ms. Krischer has put together a useful summary of several of these apps, some of which you may not yet have stumbled across.
Here are some of the highlights:
Yellow
Yellow, which has been called “Tinder for teens” (swipe right if you want to become friends with someone; swipe left if you don’t), opens with a geo-locator. There is a 13-year-old age minimum, which there’s no way of verifying.
[...]
It’s not hard to wreak havoc with a false profile using a real schoolmate’s name.
In an email, Marc-Antoine Durand, the head of community and safety at Yellow, wrote that the company is addressing parents’ concerns by prioritizing emails that are sent through the settings feature of the app. Yellow also has a team of “human moderators” who look at potentially fake content and impostor accounts. ...
Anonymous Apps
Anonymous apps have been developed for people interested in a faceless and nameless documentation of their lives (as opposed to a selfie), drawing in children who learned from earlier generations about the consequences of an offensive online footprint. (For example, Harvard University withdrew admission offers to 10 incoming freshmen in June because of obscene Facebook posts.)
There are a number of anonymous apps on the market ... all of them promising the same feature: Spill intimate feelings about yourself or, on the flip side, spread rumors and attack friends, without any trace of who said what.
Ephemeral Apps
Many adults have heard of Snapchat and Instagram Stories, but what about Live.ly, a rising live-streaming app with a large teenage audience? All three [Snapchat, Instagram Stories, and Live.ly] work like a disappearing magic act. You send photos, texts and videos, and poof.
Chances are, your teenager is using Snapchat: 75 percent of teens use the app, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey in April. ...
[...]
Instagram Impostor Accounts
In early May, Dawn Dunscombe, who lives in a small New Jersey suburb, learned that an Instagram account with the handle “I Have A Crush.1” was devised to impersonate her 10-year-old daughter.
Ms. Dunscombe’s daughter does not have an Instagram account. Yet the fake account was filled with posts, including claims that her daughter had a crush on a boy in her class. It wasn’t the outed crush that upset Ms. Dunscombe ... it was that the fake account was created in her daughter’s name so easily and with the purpose of damaging her young daughter’s reputation
Full story here. (You’ll find a list of useful tools to help you track what you kids are up to at the end of the article.)
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