“Likes and Side Effects” Podcast: The Disturbing Internet

The first beheading is a key moment in every teenager's life. A link lands in your Facebook inbox, you click on it and a video starts: a man kneeling, another with a machete. “Are they actors?” you think, but your head is already falling off. Distraught, you then have to go to dinner, endure your parents' questions about how school was, and pretend that your life hasn't been changed forever.

Beheading videos are just a fraction of what children should be protected from online. The digital world enables cyberbullying, disinformation and radicalization. Then there are groomers who abuse apps specifically designed for children to connect with them. Children can be exposed to pornographic content online at an early age or be blackmailed if they are manipulated into sending nude pictures of themselves.

Collien Fernandes warns of all these dangers in her new podcast “Likes and Side Effects”. In the first episode, Leonie Lutz, founder of the “Digital Accompany Children” platform, explains how young people can be protected.

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Because - parents can hardly escape this truth - at some point the child will ask when they will finally have their first smartphone and when they will be allowed to use social media. Lutz believes that not 16, as decided in Australia, but 14 is the right age to introduce children to social media with supervision.

Ultimately, social media is also an important meeting place, for example for queers or other marginalized young people. And smartphones are not just evil, they are a useful tool.

The podcast is also useful, at least for parents who are too lazy to google. All the information is nicely compiled here. The fact that Collien Fernandes herself was a victim of digital violence makes her warning all the more urgent.