This is how young people communicate on social networks to overcome parental control

The majority of adolescents make use of a code language difficult to decipher for adults

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp and many more have a minimum age for their use. A limitation that varies between 13 and 16 years, depending on the terms of each of its platforms.

However, the reality is very different, since it is very common to find children under 16 and even 13 years old with profiles in these social networks. A parallel world that adolescents navigate to perfection and where parents struggle to protect the privacy and privacy of their children.

A battle to avoid and another to safeguard that the real world has moved to virtual with the digitalization of recent years. Younger people avoid making parents and friends coincide in the same place.

This is one of the reasons why teenagers forget Facebook and bet on Instagram. «Although, lately they coincide in Instagram with the rise of this», point out the experts of Panda Security.

Potential community manager

This coexistence, young people have seen it as a way of control and espionage, so the tricks of adolescents are ingenious "to express freely among equals, without their parents find out what they really do", point safety experts .

In this sense, many teenagers have more than one Instagram account. In general, they have one public and one private. "There is a curious paradox, since the account that they call public is usually very careful privacy permits, so that only their people can see their photos. In this way, they make their parents stay calm by watching the images and videos they expect to see, "warns Hervé Lambert, Global Consumer Operations Manager of Panda Security.

The public is a profile dedicated to parents and family circle, while the private "is more intimate and personal," they explain. In this account, however, they forget privacy permits and hundreds of open profiles can be seen, "because a lot of teenagers feel the need to add friends in their networks to feel more social acceptance."

However, that premature community manager job leads some teenagers to opt for a single account, but with a trick: they publish in their profile the photos that their parents "expect to see", while using the section of ephemeral photos and videos to make public his last exploits, pranks or courtships.

Encrypted biographies

If for the twitterers, the biographies of their profiles in the microblogging network were a space open to ingenuity, the space reserved for the description of the user on Instagram is a cryptographic challenge at the level of ancient Egypt.

Teenagers make use of the wide range of emoticons available on iOS and Android seemingly meaningless, but has a reason. "They can have different meanings, from who their friends are, to what urban tribe they belong, if they have a partner or who is the boy or girl they like," the Panda Security experts point out.

So, although this guy has the maximum privacy of Instagram, you can get a lot of information about your friends if you search for those emoticons in Google or in the search field of the social network.

"If, for example, a kid's gang uses the emoticon of a turtle and a bear to identify himself, all his friends will also put him in his bío. If you also have another emoticon, for example a dog, that is your pseudonym in the gang and if you have another, for example, a cat, most likely it is your boyfriend or girl or girl who likes », They stand out.

Parallel networks

The love letters passed to better history with the little notes, these in turn disappeared with the SMS. WhatsApp finished off these and now it appears around the corner new apps to call attention to the crush of the turn, what is known as impossible or platonic love.

The first step was with Ask.fm, although all the lights are taken by ThisCrush. This new social network is the ideal universe for cyberbullies, since many minors use it to insult and even harass others without being identified.

Its operation is very simple. Under the emoticons that define his biography on Instagram appears a small link to ThisCrush, there the teenagers receive answers, insults and the odd compliment to a question they have shared, especially in the stories. And you have not seen that question? Perhaps because that ephemeral story has been vetoed to the intimate and adult circle of the child.

The responses of the community can be overwhelming, especially because the profile of ThisCrush is not private. That is, anyone with this link can enter to comment on what they want anonymously.