What Parents Should Know About The Latest Social App, Gas
By Movieguide® Contributor
A new social media app is captivating teens: Gas.
What is Gas, and what should parents know before letting their kids use it?
Gas is a new social media app where users can anonymously compliment friends, crushes, and others. There are polls users can fill out, answering questions about other people on Gas.
Examples of some of the polls: “I’d say yes if (blank) asked me out on a date” and “I think (blank) is the coolest kid in school.”
While some have pointed out that other anonymous apps have faced issues with cyberbullying, Gas’ founder Nikita Bier shared how the app will avoid those problems.
“The distinction with Gas is that we author all the content so that you’re answering polls that are generally uplifting and positive, and that’s kind of the aim of the product,” Bier said.
He continued, “We don’t allow messaging of any kind (and) we don’t have any advertising or tracking. We’ve really wanted to create a safe place for teens to share what they love about each other and I think we’ve really accomplished that with Gas.”
While Gas sounds like a positive, uplifting platform for teens to share compliments, there are downsides.
Titania Jordan, the chief parenting officer at Bark Technologies, a social media watchdog platform for parents, shared her concerns about Gas.
“While Gas isn’t nearly as dangerous as other apps we’ve reviewed lately, it has its share of issues,” she explained. “The app prompts you to add your contacts from your phone, and if you choose to, you can then see all kinds of people in randomly generated polls, which could get messy.”
She also said that the promotion of interacting with people who might like them or have crushes on them could make some teens get obsessive about checking the app. Jordan then pointed out that there are features users can pay money to access, which could also lead to financial problems.
Jordan did say that parents know best how to oversee their children’s app use, but recommended exercising caution, as they should with all social media platforms their kids use.
The importance of media discernment and parents’ involvement in what their children consume is more necessary than ever before with the prevalence of online sharing. Unfortunately, explicit content is no longer reserved for adult sites and R-rated movies but is prevalent in TV, some mainstream movies, and social media.
“Our families, and especially our youth, are being corrupted and destroyed by the messages being sold in the mass media of entertainment. Even our churches have been unable to give their members, especially their youths, sufficient help in avoiding the negative impact of our entertainment culture. In fact, many churches are clueless about the extent of the problem in their congregations. Other churches have opted for an anything goes attitude. As a result, the children have suffered, and the parents agonize over to how to deal with the problem. They don’t want their children to abandon biblical morality and go off as teenagers or college students into the toxic lifestyles promoted in the media,” Movieguide® Founder and Publisher Dr. Ted Baehr writes in The Screen-Wise Family.
“As one friend noted when, after exploring media-wisdom with me, he came to faith in Jesus Christ, that ‘God gave me back my mind,’” Baehr continued. “God wants us to think clearly, and so He tells us in His word to develop discernment, get wisdom and acquire knowledge. These parenting articles will help you to do just that by giving you the media awareness and biblical discernment skills to overcome the powerful influences and artificial peer pressure of the mass media of entertainment.”
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