Teaching Russian Children to be Safe When Using Social Networks

This paper is devoted to a new sphere of the Russian humanitarian knowledge and practice of ensuring the media security of children on social networks, which can be considered as the prior channel of mass media, especially for this demographic category of teens. The researchers consider that media security is the state of protection of the essential interests of the individual against threats coming from mass media systems. There exists the law on the protection of children from information harmful to their health and development in Russia, but most of its requirements do not apply to social networks because their legal status as the mass media in Russia remains undetermined. While the level of cybercrime in social networks is extremely high, Russian schools ignore this problem. At the end the researchers gives basic recommendations to teachers on how they can help pupils be safe in the social networks.