WHO HAS THE POWER?: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS TO PARENTAL CONTROLS ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Abstract

One recent trend in social media platform practices as well as in proposed policy and regulation for online data rights is a turn towards parental controls. While concerns over children’s safety online and complaints about problematic settings are not necessarily new (Horne, 2021; Horne, 2023), there may be an emerging trend in some countries to try to address growing concerns about the impact of social media platforms by setting regulation on parental controls. To that end, more research is currently needed to study parental controls and age-specific settings for teens and children, as these are comparatively newer developments and a topic and platform feature in flux. This paper contributes to this needed research area by focusing on specific definitions and understandings of privacy. The purpose of this study is two-fold. Many social media platforms offer both age-specific privacy settings to children under certain age, as well as parental controls to manage the account of their children. As a result, this study will examine which parental controls are available and how they are offered across some of the most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and YouTube. The dataset for this study will consist of each social media platform’s: 1. default settings of teen and children’s accounts and 2. parental control options. The analysis will broadly consider how each platform defines parental controls via privacy options.