Internet Safety

We recently ran into an issue with social media; perhaps you have, too.

Being tagged or shown content that is against your morals and values on various social media sites has become inevitable, and it is disturbing. We trust that none of you have been subjected to inappropriate posts on our page; we try to be diligent so that doesn’t happen, and want to apologize if anything slipped by us.

There are steps you can take to protect yourself and those who follow you on social media. We’ve had to learn the hard way how to protect our accounts, and we’d like to share what steps we’ve taken in an effort to protect you, the people who follow our page.

We recently did not want our name attached to one Facebook post where we had been tagged. So the very first step was to “untag” our name from that list. Here’s how: 

Secondly, we wanted to report and remove content from view to protect our community. We evaluate content based on what we would or would not want kids to see posted online. Once something is online, even if you work to delete it, it can always be found and resurfaced. Facebook does have ways that you can report content:

On the upper right-hand corner of the post, click the ellipsis icon and choose “Report Post”
                                        

We anticipate malicious content and people who are driven by evil to spread messages that go against our core values. So we try to continuously delete and block pages that appear to be spam or solicitous. 

If we are tagged in content like this again, we’re concerned about keeping it from ever being seen or attached to us. Here are the settings you can alter to make sure no one can tag you in any posts, to only enable your friends list to tag you in posts, or to have an approval step to be tagged in posts.

Important tips to remember if this happens to you:

1. Do not click any links in a suspicious post. If it is from someone you don’t know or from a friend but it looks different from what they usually post, if it looks like “click-bait”, if several people are tagged in one post, or if the link is shortened; chances are you should not click the attached link.
2. Change your settings, sdashown above, to not let strangers tag you in posts or comments.
3. To lower the chances of being hacked, strengthen your security settings with two- factor authentication, strong passwords, and not staying signed in on public devices.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has launched a service to help victims of online child sexual abuse called Take It Down. They are working to “remove nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit photos and videos depicting a child from the surfaces of participating electronic service providers”. Here is the link for their new PSA.

One more tip: keep your kids safe by only allow internet-connected devices to be used in the common areas of your home. This gives the adults the ability to monitor which sites the kids are accessing, and who is accessing the kids. 

May you and your loved ones stay safe!

Sincerely, 
Sues Hess, Executive Director
and the Reclaiming Hope Team