Your children may spend a lot of time on social media websites such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
These popular sites are great for communication, however sometimes children may share too much personal information, discuss inappropriate behaviour or unintentionally place themselves at risk by what they share online.
We have collated some useful guides for parents below which help parents find more about the safety features available on many popular social networks.
Safety Tools
There are a number of safety tools such as Reporting, Blocking and Privacy Settings. We recommend that parents look through the safety guides from Facebook
Twitter has a range of safety features. For more information visit https://help.x.com
Block: Use the block function to stop a user from following you, tagging you in photos or accessing your tweets. Any @replies or mentions from a Blocked user will not appear in your mentions tab (although these Tweets may still appear in search)
Reporting: Click on the in-Tweet reporting button or fill out the online forms on Twitter’s support pages (support.twitter.com/forms) to send a message to Twitter’s user support and safety team.
Mute: Hide a user’s tweets from your timeline without blocking them. A red mute icon will appear on their profille, visible only to the user, until they are unmuted.
Protect your tweets: When you sign up for Twitter, you have the option to keep your Tweets public (the default account setting) or to protect your Tweets. To protect your Tweets go to your Security and Privacy Settings.
Photo tagging: in your privacy settings you can control who can tag you in photos.
Sensitive content: Twitter ask users to mark their Tweets as sensitive if they contain media that might be considered sensitive content such as nudity, violence, or medical procedures. For the viewer, the default setting is that if a Tweet is marked as containing media that might be sensitive, they will be required to click through a warning message before that media is displayed to them.
It can help to learn more about location functions and think carefully before sharing location information. You can delete all location data history in your ‘security and privacy settings’.
Age Requirement
To be eligible to sign up for X, you must be at least 13 years old.
However, the site does not ask for age upon registration.
Twitter suggest you contact privacy@x.com if your child is under 13 and using the site.
Privacy Settings: You can adjust your privacy settings to make your account private. This means that anyone who wants to see your photos or videos, followers, or following lists will have to send you a follow request for you to approve or ignore.
Location settings: Users choose when they share location on each post, this can also be edited at a later date
Tips for Parents: Instagram have created a page with some FAQs that parents may have about the site
Age Requirement
To be eligible to sign up for Instagram, you must be at least 13 years old.
Snapchat have community guidelines that outline what type of content is acceptable and unacceptable to snap. It explains that is not OK to snap the following:
Pornography
Nudity or sexual content involving minors
Invasions of privacy
Threats
Harassment
Impersonation
Age Requirement
To be eligible to sign up for Snapchat, you must be at least 13 years old.
To be eligible to sign up for TikTok, you must be at least 13 years old.
Safety Tools
Privacy settings: Normally if you know someone’s phone number, it can be easy to find out if they are on WhatsApp or not. To control who can find your profile picture and your status, or when you were last online, there are privacy settings that can be adjusted so either ‘everyone’ on WhatsApp can see your profile picture, just ‘your contacts’ which are the contacts in your phone book, or nobody.
Blocking: You can block specific contacts from interacting with you on WhatsApp. If you block someone, they can no longer send you a message, however you will need to delete someone as a contact in your phone book if you want them not to see your profile on WhatsApp. As each phone is different, you can learn how you can block people on WhatsApp on different phone networks.
Reporting: You can report content to WhatsApp, although they state it is better to go to law enforcement if you believe your safety, or someone else’s safety is at risk. It is important to screenshot the offending text/picture/video and to provide as much information as possible to WhatsApp as they won’t be able to see the message otherwise.
Spam: Should you receive a message from an unknown number, you will be immediately asked if you know this contact or if you would like to report it as spam.
There is information on staying safe on WhatsApp on its FAQ page.
Age Requirement
To be eligible to sign up for WhatsApp, you must be at least 13 years old.
Heath Park is part of The Central Learning Partnership Trust: a company limited by Guarantee.
Registered in England and Wales. Company number: 07827368. Registered Office: Central Learning Partnership Trust, Prestwood Road, Wolverhampton, WV11 1RD.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Read MoreCookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
