As the world moves further into the digital age, social media is taking on a larger role in the lives of teens today. People use everything from Twitter to Facebook to connect with friends and family and share important events or even how they feel that day.

As stated by DMR (formerly Digital Marketing Ramblings) there are 100 million Snapchat users, 316 million active Twitter accounts, 300 million users of Instagram and 1.49 billion active Facebook accounts. These numbers came from a poll in the beginning of 2015 but more people make accounts everyday. Although people see social media as a way to connect with friends and family, it is also the number one resource of child predators around the world.

According to Covenant Eyes, the FBI Executive Assistant Director, Shawn Henry, estimated that at any given time, there are over 750,000 child predators online in 2011. Social media offers personal information and has become an everyday tool to not only sex offenders, but pedophiles and sex offenders.

This topic of discussion is ignored a lot of the time, not only by young adults, but by their parents as well. Coby Persin made a video about the real dangers of social media and posted it to YouTube, Aug. 10, 2015. In his video, he went undercover just to prove how easy it was for anyone to take advantage of the information posted.

In his video, Persin went undercover and posed as a 15 year old on Facebook. With the permission of their parents, he began messaging a 12 year old, 13 year old and 14 year old girl. Through this experiment, he was able to maintain his cover and receive personal information from the girls such as their address.

Most parents do not want to believe that something like this will happen to their kids. They want to think they have taught their children the reality of stranger danger. That is exactly what the parents in the video were thinking but their children were still victims of an online predator.

The Kids Health website shares that social media had both positive and negative attributes. It can be used to help keep friends and families connected while giving teens the opportunity to get involved in volunteer work or a nonprofit. Through sites like Twitter and Instagram, people are also given the opportunity to express themselves in a creative way through photography and music.

The inverse of this is that social media can be a center for cyber-bullying and questionable activities. More and more parents are being forced to talk about the subject with their children as the number of child predators and sex offenders grow every year. A lot of the time it is a difficult topic to talk about because parents do not want to pry too much into their children’s lives and break their trust.

The National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) advises parents to give their children three basic steps to protecting themselves over social media. First, never give out optional information. Most sites only demand a name and an email. One should never feel obligated to give out their phone number or home address.

Many social media sites also have the third level of privacy option. This is the choice where only one’s approved friends can view their profile. The NCPC feels this is the most important step in keeping one’s profile and information safe from strangers. The last tip they give is only accepting friend requests from people they know. This may be a good way to defend one’s self from those who use social media to commit crimes.

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