Who Has Entered The Chat?
I remember hearing that door open, someone entering, and being excited to find who I was going to be able to talk to. The jitters would start, drop to my stomach, and give me butterflies. Was it a friend, a crush, or someone I had never met before? I couldn’t wait so I ran to the door only to hear it shut again and there wasn’t anyone around. Darn, I missed them. I went back to what I was doing and waited to hear the creaking sound of the door open again.
Early 2000s was a major shift in online interaction among adolescents. The AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was my go-to to talk with friends and strangers alike. It was the cool thing to do - it was the way to interact with anyone from around the world. Facebook hadn’t been invented yet. Email was the main form of online communication but mainly for business purposes. Even cell phones and the option to create messages weren’t a thing. AIM was the popular way to connect with others quickly. We had it made! I could go to my messenger, see who was online, private message the person, or I could go to the chat rooms, and chat with anyone from anywhere. The chat rooms were categorized by all kinds of topics to find those like-minded or appropriate age groups. I remember using abbreviations before abbreviations such as Age/Sex/Location, which would look like 13/F/IL, and would allow others to quickly have an idea of who you were and where you were from. AIM was the reason we have all the crazy abbreviations today - it started from AOL.
My first camp boyfriend would use all capital letters when I would tell him I was leaving the chat and say, “I LOVE YOU!!!”, “DON’T GO!”, and so forth. I liked it but it also felt weird at the same time. He broke up with me through messenger after only two weeks of dating. I was devastated. I had no idea how much it could hurt. My teenager brain had difficulty processing it all because my brain wasn’t fully developed.
When I would go to different chat rooms, I thought I was so cool and living on the edge. I could talk to anyone and be anything. I recall a random person asking me on the chat, “Does the carpet match the drapes?” At this time, I was so naive and had no idea what this person was talking about. Fortunately, I had someone from the chat room private message me, and tell me what the person was asking. Now looking back, this was my first taste of cyber sexual harassment and possibly online child sexual harrassment. At the time, I had no idea the dark holes someone could go down on AIM chat rooms. It was the new exciting thing so it couldn’t be that bad.
This was before our society knew what cyberbullying was or before any laws were in place to protect people from all kinds of online harassment. Enter chat: MySpace. What a fantastic online creation. I could customize my profile, change my song, Tom was my first friend, choose my top 8, and feel like the coolest person in the world. If you didn’t have MySpace - were you even cool? From here, social media gradually exploded, Facebook launched in 2004, Youtube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, Instagram and Pinterest in 2010, Snapchat in 2011, Vine in 2013, and TikTok in 2016. Then TikTok became the hub for social media during COVID-19 to keep everyone occupied from boredom. Unfortunately, like anything, too much of something isn’t always good. Due to the explosion of social media over the past 20+ years, we saw a rise in sexual exploitation, cyberbullying, harassment, and just about anything in between. What the creators thought was going to be a great place to connect, share information, grow businesses, and meet new people became a place for dating violence, sexual harassment and exploitation, cyberbullying, blackmail, and drug dealing.
One of the most important things parents of adolescents can do is monitor their kids' social media. Through extensive research, it has been found that adolescents are sharing pictures without thinking of consequences, private messages of a boyfriend or girlfriend harassing their partner for sexual favors, using verbally abusive or threatening language, getting involved with a drug dealer through social media platforms, or sharing something online that is considered cyberbullying. The access to technology has caused our youth to have less consequences because things can be done in private without doing anything in public.
Let’s jump ahead to 2025, due to the increase of fentanyl overdoses among adolescents over the past few years, parents needed answers to why their kids who aren’t involved with drugs would all of sudden die from a drug overdose. The culprit? Snapchat. Snapchat is a social media platform that allows its users to send pictures and videos, and after the recipient views, the picture or video will immediately disappear. This feature can be extremely alarming because there isn’t a history to easily go back and view what has been sent or received. Secondly, the ever popular emojis and keywords are linking kids directly to drug dealers on Snapchat and other platforms. Snapchat is now in a lawsuit against the parents who have lost a child to an overdose which they got through Snapchat.
What can you do? The most important thing is being involved in your child’s life by having open communication, and providing healthy boundaries. Unfortunately, adolescents have difficulty communicating when feeling shame, embarrassment, or fear of repercussions. It is important to let them know their safety and protection come first and it isn’t their fault if one of these many situations arise. Mistakes happen. So, who has entered the chat?
Written by Summer Luber, MT-BC
Substance Use Prevention Educator and Clinical SUD Intern at Mutual Ground
Resources for Social Media Safety:
Resources for Teen Dating & Violence:
Emojis and Keywords:
