Introduction

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When Facebook was launched in 2004, it was only accessible to Harvard students. As its popularity grew, it expanded slightly to a few other Ivy League schools. As it became even more popular, it became accessible to universities and businesses all over the country. In 2005, high school and international students began using Facebook. Today, Facebook has more than 900 million users. It seems like we are always updating our status or “poking” people or accepting new friend requests. It makes sense that the next logical step could be to include middle school students in this phenomenon. The current site’s terms of service disallows people under thirteen from creating a profile, in order to protect the privacy of young children. 

However, according to a Consumer’s Report survey (2011), there are 7.5 million children under 13 who have a Facebook profile, violating the website’s terms of service. To make the website even more accessible to the thirteen and under demographic, Facebook recently announced their plans to: “allow children younger than 13 years old to use the social-networking site under parental supervision” (Troianovski and Raice, 2012). Facebook will provide functionality that will enforce “parental supervision,” by requiring parents to link their profiles to the profiles of their children so that they can supervise their child’s friend requests, messages and news feeds.
Opening the website up to this new demographic raises many questions. What will be the benefits of including pre-adolescents? What will be the benefits to Facebook? What will be the benefits for the children? What ethical issues and social issues will accompany this decision? For example, is ten years old just too young to be connected socially? Will the decision by Facebook and the new Facebook functionality be in compliance with current federal laws that require children to be over the age of thirteen on social media sites?