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Shocking Report Reveals the Most Dangerous Apps for Kids
By Movieguide® Contributor
Parental control company Bark just released their 2024 rankings of the apps and social media platforms that are most dangerous for kids.
“In 2024, we analyzed almost 8 billion data points across children’s connected tech and accounts, devices, text, email, YouTube, over 30 apps and social media platforms,” Bark’s tech and parenting expert Titania Jordan told KXAN.
Jordan added, “The first takeaway that was honestly heartbreaking is that for every issue that we report on year over year, they basically all got worse year over year, which means more children experience cyberbullying, were exposed to graphic, violent sexual content, struggling with suicidal ideation AND disordered eating and body image related issues.”
Bark’s statistics are based on “the number of Bark users who were sent alerts when their child engaged with or encountered a particular subject matter,” per their report.
The report stated that 77% of teens engaged with “bullying” content, while 78% of teens interacted with content about drugs and alcohol.
Bark also warned parents about the level of sexual content their kids might be engaging with. 77% of teens interacted with sexual content, ranging from web searches for explicit content, to receiving nude photos. 7% of teens engaged in conversations of a sexual nature with someone who was older than them.
When asked what apps parents should be most concerned about, Jordan listed Snapchat (“Children can buy drugs as easily as you could have a pizza delivered to your house on Snapchat”) and X, formerly Twitter.
“We did see year over year that X, formerly Twitter, has increased in the amount of alerts for this sort of problematic content. And so a lot of people don’t think kids are spending time there, but they are,” she explained. “Twitter is reducing its workforce in terms of their content moderation team, there’s less people to help make the platform safer, and some of their policies around being more accepting of mature adult content.”
Instagram also made the list, but Jordan was quick to commend the app for the work they are doing to increase safety regulations for young people.
Related: Americans Use These Tools to Limit Their Screen Time
“I will applaud Instagram’s effort over the past year to roll out seemingly meaningful parental controls with their teen accounts,” she explained. “They’re putting forth, I’d say, a strong effort, but parents need to know that they exist and how to turn them on. Nothing is foolproof.”
Instagram recently announced the rollout of “teen accounts,” which would mean users younger than 16 would need to secure a parent’s permission to create an account on the platform.
“They’re an automatic set of protections for teens that try to proactively address the top concerns that we’ve heard from parents about teens online,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri told GOOD MORNING AMERICA. “Things like who can contact them, what content they see and how much time they spend on their device … all without requiring any involvement from the parent.”
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