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.