We’ve all heard the rumors that teens aren’t on Facebook now that it’s declining, but fret not those little monsters are still going strong on all other forms of social media. And yes, they’re using it terribly, but not in the way that you’d think.
As a member of the first generation of social media (yes, I was 13 when Facebook first came out for college only – but it still counts!) the biggest warning was about privacy. Parents told their teens not to post personal information online, teachers warned their students against the dangers of online predators knowing too much information, and everyone was told not to post anything too personal because it would never go away. The moral of the story was be careful of what you put online, it could have negative ramifications for you.
But teens nowadays aren’t worried about what they post online will do to them. Most of what they post isn’t about them anyways, its about other people. Teens are terrible to each other online. Actually, almost everything they do online is terrible.
The explosion Yik Yak, that terrible anonymous posting app, has ruined schools and reputations of teens.
But teens these days don’t even need the anonymous apps they have been provided with, one dumped his girlfriend publicly via Instagram. Yes, that is correct, a teenage boy cropped his girlfriend out of a photo and captioned it #transformationtuesday as a way to inform her they were now broken up.
As if that isn’t bad enough, there is a new trend in teen Tumblrs of “lifting” things. “Lifting” is the new term for stealing. Teens are stealing things from stores and then POSTING PICTURES OF THEM ON THE INTERNET. Oh but these social media savvy youths all have clever ways of not implicating themselves – most of the Tumblrs are captioned at the top saying “this is fake” or “I’m just pretending, I wanted to be one of the cool kids”. Smooth Tumblr thieves, smooth.
The moral of the story is that as a whole we should be very worried about the way teens are using the internet. Actually, we should be very worried about these teens in general, the kids are the future after all.
For even more teenage indiscretions (internet or otherwise), as always, Buzzfeed has got you covered here.
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