The great unknown-unknowns of sharing our kids on social mediaBy Bethany Mandel
August 5, 2023
I haven’t seen my friend Sarah for over a decade; we taught in Cambodia together in the early 2000s, which feels like a lifetime ago.
Which, in a way, it was, because both of us have married and had children since then.
Social media however has kept us close, which is why we both shared a laugh when she finally met my children this summer.
“So this is what they look like,” she exclaimed, “I’ve never seen their faces!”
Even though I’m a social media over-sharer, I have never posted photos of my children’s faces on the Internet; not even on a private Instagram or Facebook account.
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Then there were known unknowns: How might my kids feel about my social media posts one day? Would they grow up to be over-sharers like me, or far more private, like their dad?
There were, also, unknown unknowns. When my daughter was born almost 10 years ago, there was no such thing as AI.
But at the speed at which technology was moving, who knew what digital nefariousness might lay ahead?
Today, we are arriving at those answers.
In late April, a Quebec man was sentenced to at least three years in prison for creating “deep-fake” pornography by superimposing the faces of kids taken from social media onto the images of children being sexually exploited.
During the sentencing, provincial court judge Benoit Gagnon said, “The use of deepfake technology in criminal hands is chilling. The type of software allows crimes to be committed that could involve virtually every child in our communities.”
Perhaps no one has a more far-sighted window into the unknown unknowns of social media than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And how he handles social media and his own children is instructive: He doesn’t show their faces.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2023/08/05/the-unknown-unknowns-of-sharing-our-kids-on-social-media/
