Young South Africans are spending more time online than ever before, while the web offers great opportunities for education, creativity and social interaction, there is also the risk of increased exposure to harmful content, cyberbullying, age-inappropriate advertising, and data misuse when Digital Wellbeing is not considered. There is also growing concern both internationally and in South Africa over the link between social media use and rising rates of teen depression and anxiety. Because the benefits and potential threats of the online world don’t exist separately from one another, it can be difficult for teens and their parents to navigate an ever-changing digital landscape. It’s all about finding a good middle ground between promoting healthy online use and taking a proactive approach against the risks, says Carey van Vlaanderen, CEO of ESET Southern Africa.According to the World Health Organisation, depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents. In the United States, results from a Centres for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that around one in three high school girls have seriously considered attempting suicide and more than half of teen girls, 57%, reported feeling ‘persistently sad or hopeless’. In South Africa, 73% of children and youth felt they needed mental health support in 2022, of which just 38% actively sought help, according to the latest UNICEF South Africa U-Report poll.Organisations such as the Centre for Human Technology, as well as noted psychologists and researchers, like Jonathan Haidt argue that social media is a major cause of the mental health crisis among young people, and that rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and self-harm started climbing sharply around 2012, shortly after daily social-media use became pervasive among teens through smartphones and apps

child, internet, social media, smart phonegetty. A little over a week ago Snapchat integrated ChatGPT into its service. While currently only available for its ~2 million paid users, we can be confident the goal is to roll the service out to all of its 750M users over time. Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s CEO, was quoted saying “The big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we’re going to talk to AI every day, and this is something we’re well positioned to do as a messaging service.”. While the service has been intentionally built to prevent common tasks such as writing academic essays for kids, which has gotten ChatGPT banned in some schools, it hasn’t yet figured out how to prevent the service from aiding child predators. In fact, it seems to be pushing the children into having a good time with their predators, among other things