In last week鈥檚 column, I referred to 颅gargantuan social media photo-sharing app Instagram as having a million followers.
An eagle-eyed professional editor pointed out to me that in fact, Instagram has a billion weekly followers, not a measly million.
A billion is one thousand million (1聽颅followed by 9 zeroes) 鈥� a lot of 颅people with as many different agendas, motivations and intentions as you could imagine. Our kids are exposed to all that every time they enter the Instagram world.
And notwithstanding a 颅longstanding and carefully curated 颅reputation for being a safe place on the Internet for users, many of whom are very young, Instagram sometimes doesn鈥檛 seem very kind at all.
To some, it鈥檚 getting worse.
Even 鈥淎-list鈥� celebrities, some of whom headline the app, describe painful, sustained, sometimes terrifying abuse on the platform, abuse they say Instagram has been unable to fully curtail.
Even everyday 鈥渓ifestyle users,鈥� long the bread-and-butter base for Instagram, have begun questioning their place on it as a result of rampant personal harassment.
A uniquely fertile breeding ground for 颅targeted persecution, Instagram is much larger than another major public social-media network, Twitter, which has 335 million monthly active users, and has unrolled sophisticated anti-harassment measures amid a sustained wave of bad press. And Trump.
To make matters worse for adults keeping an eye on adolescent 颅鈥淚nstagrammers,鈥� the app鈥檚 privacy settings are less 颅comprehensive than Facebook鈥檚, the other social network with more than a billion users.
On Instagram, a user鈥檚 profile and all postings and content are either public to the world or private (limited to approved 颅followers). But the platform is also a 颅powerful discovery engine and experts point out that it is relatively easy to search by hashtag or location and pull up thousands of people鈥檚 profiles and public images.
As a result, it鈥檚 simple for anyone so inclined to harass a user by encouraging 鈥渢rolls鈥� to mob a specific person by tagging them in an image or story.
Like Twitter, Instagram also enables the easy setup of endless anonymous accounts. All that is needed is an email address, and abusers can leverage this functionality to create armies of fake accounts to attack 颅people.
While Instagram does auto-filter certain words from comments, users say trolls 颅simply add an extra letter or symbol to escape the filters.
The Washington Post, for example, reported that Instagram had failed to curb illegal drug sales on the platform, noting at one point that illicit-drug-sale-related 颅content had flourished there.
Even social-media commentators tend to be awed by the extent and reach of 颅Instagram鈥檚 cultural influence, including the amount of filtered, edited images and the mental-health damage caused by the 颅presentation of unrealistic expectations of beauty to young folks.
In terms of influencing youthful buying habits, according to marketing researchers at Smartly.io, a staggering 50% of marketing teams spend half their marketing budgets on social-media ads and 29% of marketers spend the majority of their ad dollars on 颅Instagram.
For parents and others involved in the education and development of today鈥檚 颅generation of media-savvy kids, it鈥檚 a 颅cautionary tale.
If a child鈥檚 activity on the app takes a turn from connection and fun to perfectionism and anxiety, it鈥檚 time to take a break.
A consensus of parental advice is that if parents become more familiar with apps like Instagram to the extent that they can talk with their kids from a basis of knowledge, discussions about usage, content and safety will be easier and more productive.
Perhaps the first thing to talk about is whether a child鈥檚 account will be public or private.
If a child鈥檚 account is private, he or she can approve the people who follow them, and can remove followers at any time. Private accounts mean your teen鈥檚 content can鈥檛 be seen by anyone they haven鈥檛 approved.
If a user鈥檚 account is public, anyone can see the content posted on Stories, Feed or Live, and can follow and appropriate and misuse that content without needing 颅anyone鈥檚 approval.
Then there is the great risk of having too much personal information floating around social media.
As legendary self-described document security expert and convicted criminal fraudster Frank Abnagale (Catch Me If You Can) explains: 鈥淚t鈥檚 amazing how much information we share in social media, then we wonder why people steal our identity.鈥�
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
