Preferred Platform

There is no recommended platform.

Not Ideal: Snapchat, Tiktok, Instagram

Snapchat

Snapchat’s feature of disappearing messages makes it a platform ill suited to safe use with minors. Snapchat may be used to create an announcement account that does not accept friend requests, but only publishes stories. This can be used as a way to document an event—posting all the images submitted—and saving the video to share elsewhere. There is no reason to do this, however, unless the involved youth are on Snapchat and want to be able to use this feature.

TikTok

TikTok has content which is inappropriate for youth which is not easy to avoid. Further there are concerns that TikTok continues not to follow federal laws pertaining to children’s privacy online. Therefore we do not recommend using Tik Tok in ways that pressure families to allow their youth to join, as that should be a decision made by a family.

However, TikTok is a useful way to publish video content that can be re-shared on a variety of platforms. Adult and program accounts should turn off direct messages (dm’s). Posts can be public so they can be shared with commenting turned off to avoid potential inappropriate interaction with strangers, as commentary on TikTok is often ugly/hurtful in tone.

Instagram

Instagram has copied Snapchat’s disappearing message function. Even more problematic than Snapchat, this feature cannot be disabled or avoided by not being friends with someone. Encouraging adults to be on instagram with teens runs the risk of either youth sending troubling messages to adults who do not react in time to screenshot the message—or predatory adults grooming youth through inappropriate messages which the youth are unable to screenshot in time and may hesitate to talk to a safe adult about for fear of not being believed. Covenants should include an agreement not to use such one on one messages and an understanding adults may not see Instagram messages. Adults using instagram should consider not using the messaging function and consider turning off notifications of messages so that they will not see messages sent from youth.

For youth using Instagram, there are some built in parental controls and there are third party apps (such as Bark) which parents can use to filter content on their youth’s Instagram as well. Instagram has instituted policies to mitigate cyber-bullying on their platform (for example by eliminating “likes” counts, and employing filters to detect bullying).

Do Not Recommend

There are no platforms we recommend against yet.