Prohibit Children From Early Social Media Use — Afenyo-Markin | General News

The Deputy Majority Chief in Parliament, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, has urged the Home to draft and go a brand new regulation, by way of the efforts of personal members to ban youngsters below 16 from consuming and utilizing social media.

“In that regulation, offending dad and mom or guardians, by way of whose negligence and or acquiescence youngsters devour or use dangerous social media content material or turn out to be homeowners of social media accounts should face punitive fines,” he mentioned.

Presenting a press release in Parliament on the necessity for Ghana to scale up efforts to clamp down on early social media use by youngsters, Mr Afenyo-Markin urged Parliament, dad and mom and different stakeholders to scale up efforts and measures to guard youngsters, significantly these below 16 years, from early social media use and consumption.

He additionally known as on Parliament to direct the ministries of the Inside, Communications and Digitalisation and Gender, Kids and Social Safety to expedite work on creating a complete on-line little one safety coverage for adoption and implementation throughout the rapid future.

“Parliament should lead an modification to the Cyber Safety Act 2020 to impose an obligation on the Cyber Safety Authority to submit separate bi-annual reviews to the Home for consideration and subsequent motion on detailed measures it had taken to particularly safeguard youngsters from the dangerous results of social media use and consumption,” he mentioned.

Affect

Mr Afenyo-Markin, who can also be the New Patriotic Occasion (NPP) Member of Parliament for the Effutu Constituency within the Central Area, who made the assertion on the ground of the Home final Friday, additionally painted a disturbing image of how the ” harmful, hazardous use and consumption” of social media was placing the current and way forward for Ghanaian youngsters in grave peril.

“As a nation, we can’t throw our fingers within the air. We should confront the issue by taking proactive steps, together with formulating applicable insurance policies and creating responsive authorized frameworks to tame or defeat such evil minds,” he mentioned.

Mr Afenyo-Markin, who gave statistics to buttress his level, mentioned it had been estimated that over 4.5 billion individuals across the globe used social media as of October 2021.

In his view, social media websites might function invaluable platforms for each adults and kids to amass essential data, study new and important abilities, devour invaluable information content material, and even earn a dwelling by way of lawful social media advertising and content material creation.

Nevertheless, he mentioned the unlucky actuality was that, the Web was not all the time useful.

“Certainly, social media websites on the Web have turn out to be very harmful and damaging instruments and platforms utilized by perverts belonging to the evil fringes of society to focus on, victimise, radicalise, and destroy the current and way forward for harmless or curious or unsuspecting youngsters,” he mentioned.

He cited a research that recognized a few of the foremost unfavourable implications of using social media by schoolchildren as distraction of pupils’ consideration from their research, frequent use of Pidgin English in addition to pointless style consciousness.

The chief additionally quoted a UNICEF report launched in 2021 that exposed that globally, one in 5 ladies and one in 13 boys suffered sexual abuse or exploitation by way of digital media earlier than their 18th birthday.