Facebook, Twitter ‘encourage kids to spread gossip and insults’

LONDON - A leading headmaster in the UK has slammed social networking websites Facebook and Twitter for undermining kids’ moral development by rewarding the use of ‘inneuendo, half-truth and insult’.

John Newton, head of fee-paying Taunton School, Somerset, said that such websites pose a serious threat as they blur the lines between gossip and fact before schoolchildren learn to appreciate the difference.

He said that on-line chat rooms and information sharing sites could help young people learn from peers around the world, but also suggested that pupils needed firm guidance from adults with “authority, balance and a firm grasp of facts and context” to avoid being led astray.

“A little knowledge is dangerous thing,” the Telegraph quoted him as saying.

“By unleashing a monster which encourages young people to learn from each other armed by their inevitably limited perspective, while not engendering in them a discernment for the true and the noble, we will raise a generation who do not love learning but simply see the screen as a source of opinion or nuggets of information, poorly digested, that will suit their point of view without testing their veracity,” he added. (ANI)