Secret Facebook accounts

[lindipops]

DS's friend offered to set him up a secret facebook account and happily
DS told him that our computer connection is so slow it wouldn't stay secret for long as I am liable to pop inand out the room.

Apparently a lot of the kids and we are talking age 11 to 12, who have a Facebook account with a parent on as a friend have set up a secret Facebook account that their families have no clue about. One has held his for 2 years, so plainly he had his in junior school.

The other thing is a lot of them are going into hard core sites - I was told about one involving 2 women sh*tting on each other etc etc and stuff is being downloaded onto mobile phones and passed on.

It was something that had not occurred to me - the setting up of secret Facebook accounts - silly me. So keep an eye for this!

If parents can't be arsed to monitor what their children are doing on an Internet-connected computer then this kind of stuff will continue to happen. It's sad, depressing and potentially very dangerous but there you go.

Facebook is actually pretty much safe.
If i were you, I would tell them they can have facebook on the condition that they keep strict security settings and only add people they know as friends.
If you deny them access to facebook, THIS happens. They rebel. And with these 'secret' accounts they might accept friend requests from strangers (because they know their parents won't find out) and that's when the paedophiles start rolling in.

My DS is 12 and has had his own facebook page for a few months now. I only let him set it up on the understanding that he added me as a friend, let me set up the page so i can check the privacy settings and i know his password so i can access this any time I choose. Sounds a bit 'big brother' but I have only accessed his messages twice when a bullying incident came to light so i could monitor this.

Lindipins - thanks for the info about this; something I have considered a possibility but with no real idea whether it goes on or not.

The parents of some of my DD10s friends offered to let her set up a FB on their computer and use it when she visits - if it's not bad enough that DC try to get round the boundaries, other parents actually help them!