Red Flags to Consider in Social Media Accounts
You may not know it, but odds are your child occasionally receives unsolicited messages on social media or messaging apps from people they don’t know or have never met in person. Smartphones, tablets, and other devices can be like a digital doorway into kids’ lives, accessible to anyone, anytime.
What often begins with a seemingly harmless “hey” from an unknown person, can cascade into an unexpected series of events that can harm your child.
Thousands of Canadian kids and families tell us about it every year.
Social media can be a positive experience, but it comes with risks. Thankfully, there are steps you and your child can take to spot red flags online and stay safe.
What’s the harm?
Many youth use social media platforms to connect with their friends. People with bad intentions also go to these digital spaces to target and exploit kids. These people, we call them “offenders,” use many tactics to target youth. One is to create a fake social media account, so they can connect directly with youth.
These fake accounts often look and feel like a “normal” account. The account may have a profile photo, a detailed bio, and generally look like a teen’s account — a detail that helps offenders trick kids into trusting them. In some cases, these accounts are used to sextort youth, a term that means blackmailing someone by threatening to expose their intimate images they have been tricked into sharing.
This happens more than you think.
Cybertip.ca, Canada’s tipline for reporting online child sexual abuse and exploitation, received an average of six reports of sextortion per day in the last year.1 According to our reports, youth are being sextorted on mainstream platforms you’ve likely heard about, like Instagram and Snapchat.
What can parents do?
It’s important for parents to talk to their kids about the dangers of connecting or chatting with people online, especially if it’s someone they don’t know or have never met in person. Parents can help guide their kids on what to look out for when dealing with a suspicious account.
Red flags to watch out for
Here are three tips to help you figure out if an account is suspicious:
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The account is new
Recently created accounts should be scrutinized more closely than one that has been around for a long time. Those looking to take advantage of youth often create and control multiple accounts at once to help them target as many kids as possible.
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The account has little to no followers
Does the suspicious account follow many accounts yet has little to no followers? If you spot this, it’s definitely a red flag. Genuine accounts tend to have a more equal balance between how many people they follow, and how many people follow them.
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The photos on their profile don’t look “right”
Check the photos the account has shared. If it doesn’t have any photos, this is another red flag. If the account has photos of people, consider whether the person depicted is actually the one behind the account.
A simple trick you can use to see if the images were taken from somewhere else on the internet is to use a reverse image search tool. These tools can often find the origin of a photo, so you can see if it has been posted to another platform or account.
It's important to know that these aren’t the only ways to spot a red flag account, all the sleuthing in the world can’t guarantee you’ll always get it right.
The key takeaway is for youth to always take a moment to consider whether an interaction online with someone they’ve never met is authentic and safe. Encourage your youth to talk to you if something doesn’t feel quite right.
If your child has been victimized online, we can help: Cybertip.ca.