The Guardian – Julia Carrie Wong
Company claims as many as 40% of US teens are on the chat app – but after a series of scares, online safety groups urge caution
Kik, like the past, is a foreign country.
The mobile chat app of choice for 40% of US teenagers (according to the company) contains an entire version of the internet inside its virtual borders, but like those pesky high-frequency ringtones, Kik is largely inscrutable to people born before the turn of the millennium.
News that a 13-year-old girl, Nicole Madison Lovell, chatted with an 18-year-old man on Kik the night before he kidnapped and murdered her, however, has added urgency to the parental quest of understanding what kids are getting up to on their phones these days.
What is Kik, and why are kids so into it?
At first glance, Kik is just another free messaging app for smartphones. You log in, you pick a user name, and you send texts, selfies, and emojis to your friends.
But that’s just the first level of the Kik experience, which is clearly designed with a teenage user in mind (“For Kik, youth are the primary focus,” founder and CEO Ted Livingston wrote in 2014).
The app has a built-in web browser and all sorts of internal native apps, which means that once you arrive in Kik, there’s very little reason to leave. You can play mobile games, make memes, watch videos, listen to music, and check out the funniest content on Reddit.
Does it encourage flirting?
Crucially, you can find and chat with total strangers on Kik. Two of the top five internal apps are Flirt!, which gives you a list of users in your age range to, well, flirt with, and Match & Chat, a Tinder-for-Kik that lets you swipe left or right on users and chat with the people who swipe right on you too.
While the ability to match people up with strangers for a conversation is nothing new (remember AOL chatrooms?), what’s concerning to many parents and internet safety experts is that Kik is anonymous. You don’t need to link your account to a phone number, and you don’t need to use your real name.
On Kik, you can be whoever you want.
That freedom seems to foster a certain breed of cyber-libertinism. Within a day of downloading Kik, two Guardian reporters were sent unsolicited photographs of butts and breasts. A third received a message asking if she would “like to show your cute feet”.
Is it dangerous?
Anonymity is an important touchstone of free speech on the internet, and teens are an important target demographic for internet startups. That combination of youth and anonymity has proved exceedingly valuable to Kik, which has beenvalued at $1bn, but also dangerous to some of its young users.
Local news reports are chock-full of tales of predators using the app to prey on children, either by contacting potential victims before meeting and raping them or by extracting child abuse material from them.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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