Sajini Chandrasekera

The modern web is far more than a communicating medium and now in modern society it has become a foreground for youngsters to spend time chatting friends or visiting social network sites. As we know teen years are full of curiosity and they will seek information which they lack, to dig from the Internet and most common will be articles and pictures on sex .These are the years of childhood in which an identity apart from the family is forged and that has always involved hiding aspects of life from one's parents. The Internet provides a forum for exploring to satisfy their desires.

Once a teen enter the world of Facebook they find it a play ground and even without to their knowledge they become victims of predators who are waiting to grab such innocent victims , and these predators are very well experience in their own game .Teen is a age where they seek attention mostly from opposite sex and once a Facebook profile is open you add all the friends you know and comment on their walls and with time strangers who have mutual friends and strangers who are total from nowhere would send request and all times all these profiles are very attractive with a very beautiful profile picture which is not even belong to the real owner of the profile. This is how teens add their numbers of friends and very well talented predator will know the difference of an armature and an experienced Facebook account holder. Once they know the difference then they lay out their trap very well. Teens are very inexperienced in life and they will trust anyone who show them love and caring and will share all their personal information about their mobile numbers to home address and once they are trapped either they make the teen fall in love with them or blackmail them through the net. The more you reveal about your life on Facebook, the more you educate strangers of dubious motives to who you are, your daily habits and where you can be found.

Online love is becoming very popular these days and these predators always give false information on their age, relationship status and all other personal information, but teens trust every word they say on chat and have no idea what's so ever that the boy of 16 they chat is a man of 50 who is married with kids or maybe a grandfather. Once the predator makes a firm ground with teen girl /boy then they take it to next level of asking to send nude pictures and a teen girl who is madly in love will go any extend to keep the online lover attracted to her . These nude pictures have a much more chance of circulating on the net as you can never trust man/woman who is behind the screen of your computer. Some online love predators get the girl on the webcam and ask her to take get naked and they make sure not to show themselves of they are in false age or gender. These nude webcam videos will be on the net the very next moment reveling the true identities of a innocent girl. This is not always between the opposite sex, maybe it's between the same sexes and the damage is still the same.

Add to this the phenomenon of Sexting making its way from high schoolers down into elementary school children and this makes Facebook the perfect storm of vulnerable young people revealing way too much personal information about themselves in a way that sexual predators from a few years older to decades older can find and use against them. Sexting is becoming very popular among teenagers and they use it in Facebook chats and on their mobile phones. This is the newest version they use to take precaution from elders and the language they use are either symbols or initial letters of a word and I think as parents we must be fully aware on this and to some extend parents must be educate on this new texting methods.

These are just a few of the reasons that Facebook accounts need to be monitored by parents and guardians. Too much is at stake. Protect those you care about or without your knowledge the whole life of your child will be ruined and life time scars will remain with them throughout.

The greatest danger to teens on social media is not what they do online, but rather what others do and say about them....