Skip to footer

Grom Social – a social network for people under 16, made by a 13-year-old

When 13-year-old Zach Marks's parents kicked him off of Facebook, he didn't get mad, he made his own social network. Now, the 16 and under GromSocial.com has 70,000 members in 199 different countries and a staff of 16. 

|
Mary Knox Merrill / The Christian Science Monitor
GromSocial.com is a place for kids under 16 to interact safely. Here, the family of bullying-victim Trey Long, who committed suicide because of the taunts, work on a computer at their home in Chatsworth, Ga., in 2010.
  • By Anne Collier Guest Blogger

No pressure or anything, but we’ll be watching GromSocial.com – a social network site for people under 16 – to see if it isn’t one of the best ways for kids to learn safe, constructive use of social media.

It was started by 13-year-old Zach Marks in Florida after his parents kicked him off of Facebook, Florida Today reports.

Even the county sheriff, Wayne Ivey, believes that there is no better source of safety messaging to kids than a peer, according to the paper.

GromSocial “has 70,000 members in 199 countries and a staff of 16,” and maybe it’ll support user safety through individual and corporate best practices.

It defines “grom” as “a promising young individual who is quick to learn,” which describes its founder. Zach started getting in trouble in school for talking too much and not paying attention, so his parents had him tested for an attention disorder, only to find out from the doc that he was just smart and bored.

This summer “the Marks family and accompanying web site staff are on a cross-country tour in a 35-foot RV, taking the company’s core messages of anti-bullying and cyber safety directly to kids” around the country. I just hope they’ve got accurate information and aren’t exaggerating the bullying problem.

Maybe, as self-appointed experts on cyberbullying, they read an important article about cyberbullying in the journal Psychology of Violence last fall which said: “Although there was a small but significant increase in youth online harassment from 6 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2010, the percentage of more serious harassment, either repeated harassment or incidents that caused victims distress, were experienced by only 5 percent of youth in 2010″ (the article was entitled “Online harassment in context: Trends from three youth Internet safety surveys”).

That’s hardly the “huge problem” Zach’s dad Darren Marks was cited by Florida Today as calling cyberbullying, and it’s important for anyone involved in Internet safety education to get that right because of what we’ve all learned from the social norms research about how perception affects behavior (see this for more on that).

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Grom Social – a social network for people under 16, made by a 13-year-old
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/2013/0718/Grom-Social-a-social-network-for-people-under-16-made-by-a-13-year-old
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe