According to one study, 95% of teenagers had smartphones in 2018, up from 23% in 2012. Social media and apps are terms and industries that didn’t exist a few decades ago. Memes joke about how social networks in the ‘90s were kids riding bikes from one house to the next, and teenagers had never heard of an app.
The number of apps kids use are seemingly endless.
Children today have never lived in a world without the possibility of a device with apps in the palm of their hand.
Communicating and consuming media through social and other apps is and always has been normal for device natives, those who don’t remember life without the smartphone.
Different social media platforms and apps have different rules for what kind of content is allowed to be posted by its users.
Those rules may or may not be in line with what you want your children to be shown, including Twitter and Reddit that don’t prohibit nudity. Other platforms may have stricter rules when it comes to pornographic images, but some images can still slip through the cracks.
If you are a parent and, for example, have a teenage boy who follows a particular sports team and wants to see what the coach is saying after a big game on Twitter, you may be OK with that but are concerned that one accidental click or post shared by someone else could reveal to your child an image that you prefer was not shown to him. This creates a choice: Do you allow your child to use social media and other apps, risking what they could see accidentally, or do you prohibit them entirely, blocking them on all devices?
There’s a third option with Canopy.
When Canopy protects a device your child uses, you can block the actual app from being downloaded onto their device and give them permission to use the platform on the device’s web browser. For example, you can block Twitter in the app management tool and allow them to still access the website twitter.com, which is filtered by Canopy’s SafeSmart Filter. That way, your basketball playing teenage son can still follow his favorite coaches and stats without being exposed to pornographic images you’d prefer he doesn’t see. You can do this with all social media platforms and apps that can be accessed from a web browser.
Technology is amazing.
Parents love the peace of mind they get when they know their child won’t see explicit content on the devices Canopy protects, and kids love the freedom. Discover all the good of the online world without the bad, and try Canopy today!
