Facebook to profit, but teens pay cost

Facebook has just made it a bit easier for members of Generation TMI to mess up their lives.

Mark Zuckerberg & Co. 
announced Tuesday that teens are now allowed to post public updates and photos to their Facebook profiles. This is due to two undeniable truths: It's better for business, and Facebook doesn't give a hoot about your kids, their future or their 
safety.

Teens are major consumers, with their disposable income and susceptibility to marketing and fads. Advertisers want greater access to them, and Facebook was reeling from recent research showing the current generation is starting to view the service as unhip. But make no mistake: 94 percent of teens on social media have a Facebook account, according to the Pew Research Center. And an estimated 5.6 million children under 13 have lied about their date of birth to get around the site's age requirement and sign up.

Though cyberbullying is a huge issue, Facebook's newly relaxed privacy rules are more likely to impact things like college acceptance and employment. University admissions offices now admit to checking social media profiles of prospective students. Like it or not, employers have a huge interest in the social media footprint of 
employees, too.

The American Academy of 
Pediatrics now warns that parents should talk to their kids about social media just as they should talk to their kids about drugs. That's not as hyperbolic as it sounds. The part of our brains that anticipates the consequences of our behavior isn't fully developed for women until age 25 and men until age 30. The notion of teens going down a rabbit hole of bad social media should be treated with the same vigilance as drug addiction.

We need to teach kids in elementary school that when they post something on the Internet, they are adding to a body of research that will become their memoir. Every status update, tweet and comment by a friend is a sentence in your yet-to-be-written biography. Evidence suggests this is literally true. Decades from now, biographers won't be sifting through attic boxes for handwritten letters and interviewing elders, they'll have programs that automatically crawl through social media archives and Internet 
archives.

Social media is akin to the greatest generation gap since rock 'n' roll. The only difference is, it's got actual potential for harm, and Facebook just amplified the risk.

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