An age old debate – Facebook for under-13s?

Last weekend, comments made by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg were taken to mean that he wants to get younger children using the social networking site. When asked about the issue at the e-G8 Internet forum in Paris on Wednesday, he claimed his comments were completely taken out of context stating: “We’re not trying to work on the ability for people under the age of 13 to sign up.” The complexity of protecting children online meant the question was not a priority for the company.

And just like that, the media was whipped into a frenzy of debate over children under the age of 13 having access to Facebook. The site actively polices profiles to ensure under-13s are unable to register. However, it would be naïve to assume the site’s 600 million users are all over the age of 13. A report published last month claimed one in five British children aged between nine and 12 has a Facebook page, while more than seven million under-13s use the site worldwide.

I have to admit, I am not particularly flabbergasted by these findings. As it stands, the Facebook terms of service dictate that members be at least 13 years old to set up an account which implies that youngsters with Facebook accounts might just be telling porkpies about their real age. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why. I remember evenings after school, aged about 14, concealing the MSN messenger page from the watchful eye of my mother. ‘Everyone’ was on messenger, so of course, I wanted to be a part of it as well.

And time hasn’t so dramatically altered this need to ‘belong’ amongst young teens. It was very much the same with mobile phones. The first Christmas of secondary school in London was when I challenged my parents for a mobile phone. “But everyone has one” was my ultimate argument. My parents eventually conceded as I was starting to become more responsible for myself –travelling home from school independently, girly sleepovers on Saturdays etc – and it allowed them peace of mind, for the most part, that I was immediately contactable. Having a mobile phone when you started secondary school became almost a rite of passage for my peer group.

I don’t view the great Facebook age debate as very different to the question of giving your child the responsibility of a mobile phone. Just as mobiles became an integral part of my generation when I was at secondary school, so the internet is integral to the next. Users of Facebook run their social lives through it, which I see as an extension of my twelve year old self sending multiple texts to my friends in order to plan our cinema outing.

I appreciate this is an incredibly simplistic take on the use of Facebook, and the biggest factor in the equation is the question of privacy. Facebook allows the user to present themselves to the world in a way they wish to be seen. While a user can say anything they like about themselves, it also means that others can say anything they like about them. Cyber-bullying has become a big issue, however, isn’t the risk of bullying just as prevalent in the real world as it is online? We cannot ultimately prevent the taunts and jeers of the playground, just as much as we can’t prevent them online. Social competition is rife from the latter years of primary school, and all the more so in secondary school. Facebook doesn’t exacerbate this social stereotyping problem, it merely adds another tool to the equation, joining clothes, possessions, interests and outward presentation in dictating how we are perceived by our peers.

Facebook has created a platform for targeted branding and advertising, which can often influence our behavioural decisions. I still find it disconcerting when the site “knows” I am fan of Ugg Boots so consistently targets me with promotional advertorial lining the right-hand side of my screen. I can understand parental discomfort towards this environment as children are particularly susceptible, but I am not suggesting we let five year olds build their own page and be hounded by inappropriate promotions irrelevant to youngsters of their age. I am suggesting that the start of secondary school is not an entirely unreasonable time for children to join their friends online. If you trust your children not to give out their mobile phone number to strangers, it implies you trust them to behave in a similar manner online.

The internet is ripe with content inappropriate for children, but so is television, print and radio –it’s not solely Facebook’s fault. Online interaction will become an integral part of children’s lives, so treating the creation of an online profile in the same way parents would treat the presentation of their child’s first mobile phone, would seem a sensible solution.