My daughter recently came back from school a little confused because her best friend had said to her, “You are black.” We had not yet had a conversation with her on skin colour — after all, she is only five years old. But surely things are changing faster than we thought. We had a talk and managed to assure her that colour doesn’t matter. But this is just the beginning. Peer pressure will only build from here on. And she will want to conform with her friends. If it’s not about looks, it could be about games like the Blue Whale Challenge, which is said to have claimed the lives of a teenager and a young man within a week in Kerala, prompting the chief minister to write to the Centre demanding a ban on the game. He could have added one more to the ban list: Sarahah.
The latest social media rage has caught on like fire in India. It’s among the most popular downloads on Apple iOS and Google Playstore and already has more than 7 million Indians signed up. Developed by a Saudi individual, Sarahah — meaning honesty in Arabic — it helps the user get anonymous and supposedly ‘honest’ messages. It’s a way of getting constructive feedback, is the claim.
But this can easily become a tool for cyber-bullying. Children now manage to get unhindered access to the internet, so what’s to stop them from being on Sarahah. The app could start as a fun way to rate each other and give positive feedback, but can soon turn into a mean game. A parent has already complained that the last message her daughter got on the app, before she deleted it, asked her to kill herself. The app’s USP might be its anonymity feature, which could also be the most dangerous.
This is another reason the Government needs focus more on cyber crime and pass stringent rules to safeguard internet users, including children.
Senior Deputy Editor