Taking into account the available technological solutions and applications offered by ICT service providers, as well as the growing scale of psychological problems of children using smartphones and online social media, the following question arises that is relevant today: How to effectively organize parental control of what a child does in the aforementioned social media?

Children and adolescents represent the youngest generations using online social media. The youth currently attending schools and studying in universities are mainly the so-called Generation Z, who grew up with smartphones equipped with Internet access, including online social media. Today, the children and young people of Generation Z are thus at the greatest risk of being negatively influenced by online social media, including various types of misinformation, fake news, misleading unreliable offers of advertised products and services, influencers and youtubers promoting themselves, etc., which are increasingly appearing in them. In addition, there are many untrustworthy offers of products and services in social media, offers presented by influencers and youtubers, offers presented as part of advertising campaigns conducted in these media, offers promoted through spots, animations and advertising videos, in which generative artificial intelligence technology is increasingly used. It is increasingly common for advertising companies to create AI-generated influencer avatars based on intelligent chatbots for their online advertising campaigns. AI-generated fictional influencer personas look, speak and behave like real people in videos posted on social media. Internet users watching these digital influencers often don't realize that they are watching not real people but digitally generated non-sisterly real characters. In addition, in recent years there has been a growing scale of hate speech most often generated by peers from class, school. The developing hejt was the reason for the increasing scale of child and adolescent suicides in some countries in recent years. In addition, many people, especially young girls, have psychological problems due to a sense of low self-worth and self-esteem which is related to spending a lot of time on online social media and watching influencers promoting certain sublime standards, what is in a certain subculture of youth recognized and promoted as informal canons of beauty, attitudes, possession of certain material goods, etc. In addition, such psychological problems were exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was associated with locdowns imposed in some countries on selected sectors of the economy, bans on being in certain types of public places, periodically introduced national quarantines and education conducted remotely in the form of e-learning. In some countries, the scale of such bans and restrictions, which were intended to slow down the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) coronavirus, was exceptionally large. This was the case, for example, in the country where I operate. Unfortunately, the mortality rate of citizens during the Covid-19 pandemic in Poland, despite the large-scale introduction of the aforementioned anti-pandemic bans and restrictions, was exceptionally high. Besides, the mentioned anti-pandemic bans and restrictions were introduced without adequate public consultation, on the basis of special legal regulations in the form of laws and ordinances, with the bases of prior research and analysis of the potential negative effects of such controversial measures. At present, in 2024, it is known that in the country in which I operate the negative effects of the aforementioned introduced on a record large scale so-called anti-pandemic measures, including bans, lockdown-type restrictions, periods of national quarantine were much more in comparison with the expected but not realized positive effects. In view of the above, taking into account the available technological solutions and applications offered by ICT service providers, as well as the growing scale of psychological problems of children using smartphones and online social media, it is necessary to improve the computerized systems and applications running on smartphones that enable effectively conducted parental control of what a child does on the aforementioned social media. On the other hand, citizens should influence politicians, and politicians should influence the technology companies that run online social media, so that these companies also take much greater care of the safety of children and young people using these media. The aforementioned technology companies should not treat children and young people merely as potential customers for product and service offers presented during advertising campaigns conducted on social media. The technology companies running these media should not create algorithms that promote posts, posts, comments, banners, animations, videos, etc. that contain negative and socially harmful content. That this is how this kind of media works was proven during the Senate committee hearings of former managers who previously worked at Meta, for example, and developed certain solutions within Facebook and Instagram. TokTok has also grown rapidly in recent years, which also features many examples of disinformation, factoids, posts, memes, entries, banners, videos, etc., containing unreliable and factually incorrect content, as well as many advertisements presenting various product and service offers aimed mainly at children and young people.

I have described the key issues of the determinants of the development of social media with attention to the issue of cyber security and the technologies used Industry 4.0 in my article below:

The postpandemic reality and the security of information technologies ICT, Big Data, Industry 4.0, social media portals and the Internet

Article The postpandemic reality and the security of information tec...

I described the key issues of opportunities and threats to the development of artificial intelligence technologies in my article below:

OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS AND THE NEED FOR NORMATIVE REGULATION OF THIS DEVELOPMENT

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In view of the above, I address the following question to the esteemed community of scientists and researchers:

Considering the available technological solutions and applications offered by ICT service providers and the growing scale of psychological problems of children using smartphones and online social media, the following question arises that is relevant now: How to effectively organize parental control of what a child does in the mentioned social media?

How do you effectively organize parental control of what a child does on online social media, what he reads, what he writes about, what he browses, etc.?

And what is your opinion about it?

What is your opinion on this issue?

Please answer,

I invite everyone to join the discussion,

Thank you very much,

Thank you,

Best wishes,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

The above text is entirely my own work written by me on the basis of my research.

In writing this text I did not use other sources or automatic text generation systems.

Copyright by Dariusz Prokopowicz