It is the responsibility of parents

to ensure their children are safe. It is not the responsibility of "social media".

Now let me say here that I do think social media is a problem, a very real problem, where children and young people are concerned. There is far too much time spent on it and much of what is there is harmful. That said the idea that the owners of social media should be held responsible for the harm done is rather like saying those who sell tobacco or alcohol are directly responsible for the harm done.

Tobacco and alcohol are legal and so is social media.Yes, there are age limits and penalties for supply to those underage but we are dealing with the actual physical exchange here. A shop or bar can refuse to supply those goods to anyone not in possession of a "proof of age" document. 

"Social media" is not like that. One of the big problems is that transactions on it are conducted at arm's length. There is simply no way of knowing who you are really dealing with at the other end. How on earth are you going to stop an adult obtaining a social media account and simply handing it over to a child - complete with password? 

Looking back I see how easy it would have been to do this for the Whirlwind - and do it without her father's knowledge. We were fortunate in that she simply did not want any such thing. She always used the same personal email account her father used. Even that was not often used. "I haven't got anything to hide," she would say.

I don't know how much longer that would have lasted but she appeared to be genuinely lacking in interest. The computer at home was there for homework, for finding out how to cook something, or because she had a problem in the garden. Once in a while something else would capture her attention and she would look it up but social media was not the way she wanted to operate.  "I can talk to my friends at school."

That school does have a very strict social media policy and it seems to work. It may also work because it has the very strong support of the parents. The head of the senior school once told me, "It has not been easy but it has been very worthwhile." 

Perhaps that is the problem. It is not easy to enforce such things. Does that simply mean that others should take on what should be our responsibility? 

Prohibition of something like tobacco or alcohol is a powerful way of making the demand for it even stronger. I still see younger teens smoking while in school uniform. They are clearly not of an age to have bought the cigarettes legally. My good friend M... knows that the teenagers he still keeps an eye on have sources of not just illegal drugs but alcohol as well. The same will be true of trying to ban social media or restrict it to only approved sites.

We could try the route of everyone having to prove their identity and their age to use social media but I doubt it would work. There are too many very clever people out there, often those we are trying to protect, who would find a way around it.

The best protection has to be careful parenting. Careful parenting is time consuming and asking for a degree of responsibility for one's own young. I suspect that the time and the willingness to do that is lacking.