Protecting children online
| Banja Luka | Wednesday, 09/02/2022
9th February, International Safer Internet Day, represents an opportunity to remind the public about our obligation to protect children and young people on the Internet and to prevent negativity towards the young on social networks.
Therefore, the police officers will hold lectures in elementary schools all over the Republic of Srpska, in order to raise awareness of the children and adults on potential dangers on the Internet, ways to protect themselves and whom to address in case of any abuse.
During the previous year, the Ministry has recorded 10 criminal offences of Exploitation of Children for Pornography, 4 criminal offences of Introducing Pornography to Children and 1 criminal offence of Using a Computer Network for the Commission of the Criminal Offence of Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of a Child.
The digital age is characterized by the mass use of the Internet in which an individual, starting from a child, holds in his hands a device with huge possibilities that can be very useful because it provides general connectivity, abundant inflow of relevant data, data processing and similar.
However, it also has its downsides, because using social networks has its advantages and disadvantages. The most popular networks among children and young people include "Instagram", "Snapchat", "YouTube" and "Tik-Tok".
The social network "Tik-Tok" is particularly popular among children and young people, it is designed to create and share short video content, and according to the business policy of the Tik-Tok platform, users of this social network cannot be persons under 13 years of age. Practice has shown that this platform has become a suitable ground for setting challenges among users (most often children) that are rather bizarre. The bizarre challenge on Tik-Tok called "blackout" is not the first challenge of this type that appeared on one of the social networks and resulted in the loss of a human life. In the past period, we have witnessed similar challenges such as "Blue Whale", "Broken Skulls" and similar ones. A worrying fact is the widespread use of this application by children and young people. This is confirmed by the tragic events that occurred in the region.
In order to avoid the downsides, to control the content that the child consumes from this and other platforms, we recommend a combination of these two segments - parental supervision and technical protection options:
- Children and young people use social networks better than their parents. In order for the parent to monitor his child’s activities on the social network, it is suggested that the parent downloads the applications used by his child, to get familiar with its operation and its content so that he is able to discuss with his child about the application content. In that way, the parent gets closer with the child and learns more information about the application.
- The Tik-Tok platform provides the parents the possibility to use the option Limited Work Mode to control their children and the family Safe Mode to pair their account with the child’s and fully manage the settings. This is an excellent tool to monitor your child’s activities on the Web.
- When a 13 or a 15 year old child registers to TikTok, in accordance with the default settings, his account is private and only his friend can comment the videos, whereas other users cannot duet with his video. Only users older than 18 can have live video and use DMs, as well as buy, send and receive virtual presents.
On the website of the Department for High-Tech Crime of the RS MoI https://mup.vladars.net/index.php?vijest=vtk you may find a number of preventive advice regarding the protection against all forms of high-tech crime.
