The Social Network Effects of Parent Monitoring on Communication Apps
In a recent article, “Snapchat will let parents see whom their kids are chatting with,” by Ben Goggin of NBC News, one of the newer implementations by Snapchat–a social media and communication app that allows users to both post and send media in the form of pictures, videos, and messages that disappear after 24 hours–is introduced: the parent monitoring function. The concept of social networks and triadic closures are applicable to this new feature.
Snapchat has appropriately named this the Family Center, and it simulates “the way that parents engage with their teens in the real world, where parents usually know who their teens are friends with and when they are hanging out – but don’t eavesdrop on their private conversations” (Snap Inc., 2022). While parents cannot actually view the conversations and media that are shared between users on Snapchat, parents can see who their children are in communication with. This function may seem like another method for parents to “violate” the privacy of their children, but it has serious implications as there have been multiple prior cases in which teenagers involved with drug transactions through the app have lost their lives due to fentanyl-lacing. Also, this function would only be in place with the consent of both parties (in this case, the child and parent).
A social network is a network of people, represented by nodes, that are connected with each other through relationships, which are represented by edges. As further discussed in class, within these social networks, triadic closures are likely to form for reasons of “opportunity, incentive, and similarity” (Kleinberg, 2022). This means that when one person has a relationship beyond being acquaintances with two other people, those two other people are likely to develop a relationship as well; whether that relationship can be classified as weak or strong depends, but the concept states that a relationship will form. Regardless, it is interesting to think about what this relationship will be like. Will my mom become friends with a friend from school? Will she become best friends with them? Or, will the connection be weak and they will remain as mere individuals who know of each other?
This only seems like the start of something that will be widely implemented by social media and communication apps as Sam Chapman, the father who suffered the loss of his child due to the aforementioned scenario, is working with the Organization for Social Media Safety to propagate “Sammy’s Law,” which is a bill that would require a surveillance aspect for parents. It raises the questions of how parent-child relationships will adapt and what effects on social networks within friend and parent clusters will occur due to this.
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