Another Stab at Social Media: Why We Shouldn't Ignore the Wizz Ban

Findings reveal that those aged 11-13 years are the most common victims of online exploitation. As social media expands its reach, it risks mutating into something more complex and uncontrollable. Young people’s trust in the internet is an increasing cause for concern given its vast and threatening capacity to misinform, exploit, and abuse their confidence.

Wisening Up About Wizz

The Wizz scandal is only the latest evidence of this expanding wave of dangerous online content, opening up a debate surrounding the safety of young people online. The app was recently removed from popular stores due to accusations regarding user safety -— though it has since been reintroduced following improvements.

The trouble with Wizz is that it works like any popular dating website, allowing users to swipe to find a ‘match.’ Its claim that it wants to help you find ‘new people’ remains ambiguous and open to interpretation. Searching for fellow Ice Spice fans? Looking for someone to play video games with? No problem! Sign up to Wizz and you can find people your age with just a finger swipe.

But the truth is so much more than innocent conversations over gaming. Wizz serves as an unfortunate example of just how sour social media can be, especially when it creates an unsafe environment from the get-go.

Sextorting Children

Is it true that Wizz essentially set itself up for a plethora of problems, including abuses such as sextortion?

According to the Metropolitan Police, sextortion is defined as ‘threatening to publish sexual information, photos or videos about someone.’ Sextortion can happen to anyone, anytime. Victims often don’t even need to send compromising images to perpetrators — all that is needed is a picture of the victim’s face. Wizz profiles enable hundreds of people to instantly access an unsuspecting individual’s photograph.

One teenage Reddit user claimed he had been a victim of a sextortion attempt. A person he thought he would be exchanging ‘nudes’ with threatened to send the image to all of his Instagram followers, leaving him ‘extremely scared.’ Another unsuspecting teen became a victim when they were sent doctored (manipulated) images of themselves. This teen gave the perpetrator prepaid e-cards of a value of up to $600 to avoid the images being distributed.

Sextortion is a common problem amongst Wizz users. According to NBC News, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children found over 100 sextortion allegations originating from Wizz. While this doesn’t seem like many, Wizz’s volume of sextortions is beaten only by highly popularised websites that have a wider age scope, such as Instagram. The ratio of allegations to users leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth and a good reason to keep one’s photos safe in a private album.

The problem is that apps like Wizz enable the targeting of possibly one of the most naïve demographics of internet users — children. Social media reveals that the present generation of young people lives with anxieties their older counterparts never had to confront. While the classic ‘back in the day, things were better’ argument is completely exhausted, it’s certainly interesting to consider how much more danger young people face thanks to social media platforms like Wizz.

Forced Under the Spotlight

Wizz has since developed a reputation for being like a woman walking past a construction site in the 1950s. As sextortion became pervasive, young people were exposed to experiences that they never should have had. True, almost any app with a chat function has this problem. The old saying ‘If there’s a will, there’s a way,’ still applies. E-dating issues concerning children have appeared on virtually all platforms accessible by minors. Wizz, however, is laughably renowned for being a place where underage users receive a constant onslaught of menacing messages. To understand this better, I interviewed several teenagers who had experience with the app.

One told me that while using it, they had been ‘bombarded’ with other users desperate to exchange sexual images with them. When they declined, they were met with hate and harassment. Unsurprisingly, they described it as a ‘really overwhelming and overall horrible experience.’ An environment where young people are pressured to share sexual images of themselves has become almost synonymous with social media. Even my friends and I joke that if you install Wizz, you’re practically asking for the spotlight.

However, this is not something that should ever become normalised, nor something to become desensitised to. Why set out to create a safe space if you are unwilling to invest in protecting it? As humanity advances in line with technology, online platforms should be anticipating abuses and putting the work into protecting children and vulnerable adults. Wizz has been around since 2019, why did it take five years for the repercussions and dangers to become public knowledge? The response was slower than a 1990s dial-up (although hopefully not as useless).

Sexual conduct between young people is undoubtedly an issue in itself, but it’s also important to remember that where children can flirt with children online, adults can flirt with them too. Another 16-year-old I spoke with told me that they had received messages from people who were ‘definitely over 18,’ which suggested that the safety precautions that claimed to separate people by age were not working. This is regrettably another common issue across many social media platforms. Companies frequently assure consumers that their app has features to ‘protect’ young users, despite those features being flimsy at best — Roblox’s word filter is a prime example.

AI and Us

Whether we like it or not, AI technology is here to stay. Calls for AI regulations are therefore crucial in preventing further harm to children. But in the meantime, staying vigilant is our best chance of staying safe online. Generative AI has already been used to misinform US voters. This expansion of generative AI’s reach on social media has devastating implications for young people.

Deepfakes have been around for a while but thanks to breakthroughs in generative AI, they have increased in notoriety. A deepfake allows a person’s face to be seamlessly superimposed on an image or video. Alarmingly, 96 per cent of all deepfakes are pornographic. There is every reason to believe, then, that malicious individuals will want to capitalise on the free, fresh faces available in the digital grocery shop that is social media. And the best part? There are no specific laws guarding against the creation and use of deepfakes.

One glaring downside of social media is that it promotes the death of anonymity. Children are encouraged to show off their faces to potential millions. Has nobody stopped to consider how detrimental that could be? Too many young people use social media having no idea of who is on the other side of their screen. It could be someone their age, or someone much older. The case of Wizz demonstrates just how easy it is for older adults to use the app. Meanwhile, that person on the other side of the screen is quickly becoming some teen’s best friend.

The Future of Social Media

When done right, social media can be a force for good. Hell, social media targeted at children can be fantastic when done safely. For instance, Childline has a ‘message board’ service dedicated to helping young people discuss various issues with anonymity. The service is overseen by Childline staff and has unambiguous rules with genuine consequences.

Inappropriate pathways into adult life are appearing at a worryingly increasing rate. Wizz gave adult individuals access to vulnerable young people, and wider society didn’t seem to have a huge problem with that. Apps tend to come and go, but I’m sure most people agree something must be done to regulate usage and protect children. The question is — what?

Wizz returned to the app store about a month after being removed, claiming to have improved user safety. Admittedly, the changes seem to have worked. I interviewed someone who had used the app both before and after the update and was told that there was ‘less’ of the infamous sexual conduct. However, this doesn’t change the fact that the app was once notorious for having flimsy safety controls that bred vastly inappropriate behaviour and abuse.

The world of social media often demands that we sacrifice anonymity in the name of fame or profit. Kids can now become just like their favourite celebrities and influencers, playing at being adults. But encouraging young people to grow up so fast can be damaging, confusing, exhausting, and irreversible. No wonder so many teenagers report having mental health problems. Whatever happened to enjoying Candy Crush? There must be safeguards that protect childhood.