Adults Who Amplify Children’s Mistakes Online | Editorial

By Kieron Murdoch | Opinion Contributor

A short video may have popped up in your Facebook feed on Sunday featuring three female  secondary school students in their uniform doing what appeared to be TikTok dance in the back of a classroom. The lyrics of the chosen song were explicit, and some of the moves might be considered crude. But it was a short video. A lapse in judgement.

Our focus today isn’t on the students however. It is on the people twice and three times their age who seem to relish the opportunity to take footage in which they see young people – in a moment of juvenile foolishness – perhaps not upholding the standards desired of them and share or post that footage for more and more people to see.

In one instance, a Facebook user posted the short TikTok video at 7:55 AM on Sunday, October 13th and by 7:55 AM today, Monday, October 14th, it had garnered over 82,000 views. That’s an average of around 3,416 views every hour or around 56 views per minute. Nearly 1 view every second. You can’t hope for that kind of reach even when you pay Mr. Zuckerberg for an ad.

In the time that it has taken you to reach this far in reading this, how many more views has it racked up? How many more people are able to recognise the juvenile participants? How much more anxiety has it brought them and their parents? How many more family friends at home and abroad inundating a mother’s inbox, “Is this so and so? Why did they do that?”

One wonders whether a person inclined to share and post things thusly ever stops to think of whether they are doing more harm than good. What must it be like to be a young person in this day and age where any misstep you make that is captured by someone else on video, or which you yourself filmed and posted, may become the subject of fierce online controversy.

One wonders whether a person inclined to share and post such things considers whether at the end of the day, the youth in question would prefer to be forgotten and to move on – something that is not aided by our seemingly incessant need to put everything of controversy online regardless of the impact it may have on the persons involved.

The natural response of many, however, is to say something like, “Well, they shouldn’t have put it online. It’s already out there.” True. But how far and wide it goes, and how burdensome the impact of its circulation becomes to the youth who may have first posted it, all before they have a chance to reconsider their decision, also depends on us.

Isn’t it somewhat ironic that while we ask youth to take responsibility for what they post, often the adults who rush to circulate it far and wide are quick to shirk any responsibility for the impact that their decision to press upload or share may have had?

The bottom line is: stop posting or amplifying children’s mistakes on social media. If you find them already posted, pretend that you’re a batsman, and practise the leave. See an example here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti5Bfcmup6I

As for parents, we’d urge them to remember to speak to their children about their use of social media. Help them to understand the impact and potential risk of posting swear words, sexual innuendo, threats of violence, mockery or humiliation of others, or hate language. Speak to them regularly. Don’t set rules at the beginning and then proceed as if youngsters can be relied upon to follow them.

Remind them that your primary aim is not to restrict their freedom, but to spare them from the unwanted consequences of making a poor decision in terms of what they post. Remind them that people online are as fickle and vicious as the Roman mob and that the social media space is not as forgiving or as friendly as they would like to imagine it to be.

Encourage them to record themselves less or not at all. Some platforms are entirely devoted to users recording themselves and posting the content. Ask them to think of all the times they may have ever said or done something they later felt embarrassed or regretful about, and to imagine if that action had been recorded, posted, shared, amplified, and discussed so much that random members of the public knew of them because of it.

Navigating such an environment is the challenge they are facing with all the wisdom of a juvenile. And as much as many parents spend their days urging youth to understand that what “what goes online stays online”, young people will make mistakes, as did every generation before them.

When they share something that they should not have, work with them to manage the fallout. They may already be anxious and otherwise negatively impacted by it. While there should be consequences, loudly chastising them may only put them in a worse mental space. They need to be able to rely on someone to guide them through it. Remind them to focus on moving on even when others do not.

About the writer:

Kieron Murdoch worked as a journalist and later as a radio presenter in Antigua and Barbuda for eight years, covering politics and governance especially. He is an opinion contributor at antigua.news. If you have an opinion on the issues raised in this editorial and you would like to submit a response by email to be considered for publication, please email [email protected].