Young People, Social Media and the Law

This book critically confronts perceptions that social media has become a ‘wasteland’ for young people. Law has become preoccupied with privacy, intellectual property, defamation and criminal behaviour in and through social media. In the case of children and youth, this book argues, these preoccupations – whilst important – have disguised and distracted public debate away from a much broader, and more positive, consideration of the nature of social media. In particular, the legal tendency to consider social media as ‘dangerous’ for young people – to focus exclusively on the need to protect and control their online presence and privacy, whilst tending to suspect, or to criminalise, their use of it – has obscured the potential of social media to help young people to participate more fully as citizens in society. Drawing on sociological work on the construction of childhood, and engaging a wide range of national and international legal material, this book argues that social media may yet offer the possibility of an entirely different – and more progressive –conceptualisation of children and youth.

1. Moral panics, childhood, social media and the law 2. Recreating families in social media 3. Social media, young people and political accountability 4. Schools, young people and social media: surveillance and the role model void 5. Working in the online society: social media and young people in new workplace 6. Crime, Identity and Gender: how social media opens new worlds of hope and exploitation 7. ‘Don’t mention the porn’: social media and the rise of the sexual child 8. The New Wasteland: Law, Many Publics and the Loss of Interest

Brian Simpson is a Professor in the School of Law at the University of New England, Australia.