Social Media News from Facebook’s F8 Conference
The F8 Developers Conference is Facebook’s annual event to showcase what they are working on in their numerous social media and messaging platforms. Tuesday’s announcements featured Facebook’s new features to connect people for romance and new friendships. Instagram is looking to stop bullying before it happens.
Facebook Dating
The dating feature for Facebook has been tested in several countries including Mexico, Thailand, and Canada. It will be rolled out soon to more countries and finally released in the United States “by the end of this year.” The latest update to Facebook Dating allows you to build a secret crush list. This list of eight people will be saved and compared to the lists of your friends who also use Facebook Dating. If any of your crushes add you to their crush list you will both be notified so you can make a connection.
I guess, if you’re going to try to make romantic connections on social media it is better to start with people you’re already friends with. Facebook says it will help you with connections based on your groups, likes, and comments on their app. Their goal is to help connect you to people with whom you share interested, thus, increasing the chance of you having a match. They actually said they are not trying to make connections for a one time hook up but to actually help you find someone you’d be interested in having a real relationship with.
Facebook is also testing features that will recommend new friends based on your interests, location, work, and even what college you went to. Again, being tested in just a few countries, the Meet New Friends feature will allow users to opt-in and then customize their profile to tell the system what interests to prioritize while connecting them with new friends. You can even list what activities you’d like to do with new friends and then be prompted to send a private message to someone and make plans to do that activity.
What Parents Should Know
Fewer of our kids use Facebook now but there are those that still spend time on there. Dating and Friend Finding features can be problematic for parents who are concerned about their kids making unwanted connections on social media. My advice is to not allow your child on social media until around the age of 16 (based on their maturity) and even then keep open conversation with them about the kind of people they make friends with online. My rule will be to only allow my friends to communicate online with people they already know really well in real life.
Instagram Fights Bullying
While Facebook is trying to connect you with more people, Instagram is working to protect you from the people you’re already connected to. Developers have announced a tool that will nudge users to think twice before posting a negative comment on an Instagram photo. They can choose to ignore the advice and post it anyway, but Instagram is hoping that causing them to give pause will curb some of the negativity that Instagram is becoming known for. There are also tools in development that will allow users to block comments from certain users without blocking their accounts altogether.
Just in case blocking comments isn’t enough of a break from the negativity, another Instagram feature will let you take a break by going into “away mode.” This is a way to sign off of Instagram for a while, no longer get messages, comments, and notifications or be prompted to post, but still not have to delete your account. Also, in an attempt to make Instagram “less pressurized” they are testing the ability to hide like counts.
What Parents Should Know
We have all heard stories of young people deleting or archiving photos because they didn’t get enough likes. We’ve read the horrible news stories about kids who harmed themselves, or worse, as a result of being bullied on Instagram or Snapchat. These efforts by Instagram to curb some of the negativity are a great idea. In my opinion, however, there is no better line of defense that parents. Our job is to create that safe space for our kids to come to when they have a question or concern about social media. We should be the ones determining how old they should be before they sign up for that Instagram profile. We should be who they come to when some stranger reaches out to them on Snapchat. That can’t happen if we aren’t aware or if we are too timid about the time they spend on social media. If we will take our role seriously we can raise kids who are healthy and whole.
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