Why do teenagers trust strangers on the internet more than they trust their family? 

These days teenagers are renowned for posting pictures on their social media accounts that they wouldn't show to their own family. These pictures are seen by thousands of people across the world that they do not know – people that could do anything with the pictures we choose to share with them. The percentage of teenagers, aged 12 – 17, who go online is 93%. 57% of these have given out personal information to a stranger. 67% know how to hide their social media accounts from their parents.  Why do we do this? Why do we not trust the people that are right beside us our entire lives but DO trust strangers?  

Our parents care for us. They devote hours and hours of their lives to looking after us. Most often the pictures we do not show our family before putting online are the ones they would disapprove of. It is instinct for a parent to protect their children. Seeing a photo or a message that they believe is compromising the wellbeing of their child would certainly be unsettling. A lot of the time we don't show them things like this because we know that they will be angry at us. We are scared of how they will react. Many of the people online that see the things we post do not care about us. Why should they? They don't know us. All they know about us is what we have put on our profile and what we choose to share with them privately. They won't be mad at us for posting a picture or commenting on something that they believe is inappropriate. In many ways it is a lot easier to share information with people that don't know us than the people who know us better than anybody else. 

We care what people think. We care how many people like our posts, how many people view our videos, how many people comment on our photos. We care A LOT about what people think about us and this can easily influence what we post online. We want to look beautiful and have people comment nice things about us but often we don't think about who's saying them. Teenagers get so obsessed with the number of likes they're getting. We don't think at all about the people behind the likes – strangers. People on social media sites don't really feel real. If a 50 year old man came up to you in the real world and said, "I like you" it would be incredibly weird and creepy but the same man could get away with doing the same thing online. Sharing pictures with people and telling them things about your life doesn't feel like you're trusting a random stranger.  

 These statistics were found at http://www.toptenreviews.com/software/articles/30-statistics-about-teens-and-social-networking/  

By Kate H