Do you have social media savvy kiddos? I’m thanful that mine are too young to be in the social media world quite yet but as a blogger I’m always one of the first to jump on new social media bandwagons.
There’s a new one that was recently started by Twitter, called Periscope.
I’m not gonna lie…it’s tons of fun. We’ve been periscoping a lot, and on a recent business trip Becky from Your Modern Family and I took to Dallas (to see Holly from Kids Activities Blog), we did a lot of Periscoping (@paula_rollo).
It was while we were there that we realized how dangerous this can be, especially for the younger generation.
So what is periscope? It’s an app you can get on your phone. You use it like a live video feed that you stream to the world. Freaked out yet? Yeah, me too. Like I said, this is crazy amounts of fun. Especially if you are an adult, and using it cautiously. But let’s think about what can happen with kids for a minute…
Periscope shows your general location. You can even search for strangers in your area who are live on periscope at that moment. Then you start watching their live video. It alerts the “live” person when some one logs on to watch them, and people who are watching are even able to post comments for the video broadcaster to read/respond to.
I bet you see where I’m going with this. Young kids periscoping and creepy predators watching. Maybe even asking them to do things on camera. Knowing at least a general idea of where they are located and possibly able to glean more information from whatever they are videoing.
It gets a bit deeper than this though, because the videos are deleted after 24 hours max. You can even set them to be deleted after the live broadcast. This means more attentive monitoring is needed from moms and dads than EVER before.
I’m not totally against Periscope. I use it myself and I enjoy watching them. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t innocently stumbled across some creepy stuff (hello random person lying down in the dark periscoping…), and that doesn’t mean that I haven’t had some real creepers join some of my periscopes. We did a blogging Q&A for my other site’s periscope account (@biz2blogger) and we had a guy asking some pretty awful questions and trying to trick us into saying inappropriate things.
I’m not saying it should never be used, but I am anxiously waiting for them to enforce some safety protocols. Either way, parents need to be aware of how Periscope works, if their kids are using it and how you can monitor them there. This one is quite a bit more than “the new instagram or kik” because it’s totally public.
Do you Periscope? Do your kids?
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