Online Safety & Facebook

Attached this week is a helpful document around Facebook, with great advice for parents around keeping your child safe on this platform. 

With 2.9 billion users, Facebook, owned by the recently rebranded Meta, is the world’s most popular social media platform. It encourages interaction with other people by (among other things) adding them as friends, reacting to or commenting on their content, sharing images and videos, posting status updates, joining groups and playing games. Facebook is free, and anyone over 13 can join – but with no age verification, younger children can easily create an account. It is likely your child is already familiar with the platform, even if they do not yet use it themselves.

In the guide, you will find tips on a number of potential risks such as cyberbullying, strangers, not following age limits and the addictive nature of Facebook.

Remember to use the Netsafe guidelines for parents, that we sent out a few weeks ago. This has valuable tools for working with your child. This digital world can be a really harmful space that adults need to make sure they monitor. It is always important to be KIND no matter the interface. This is something we all want as humans and it must be modelled by everyone if we want to see a change.