Dad shares messages sent to his 7-year-old daughter on Music.ly
Music.ly is an app that let’s users create and share 15 second clips of themselves lip syncing to popular songs. Like many other social media apps, users can post content, follow others, comment on posts, and message each other.
It’s a popular app among kids because they are the perfect audience for it really; who else wants to spend their time lip syncing and sending to friends? The platform’s user guidelines state that it’s for those 13 and up. And like any other social media platform, it can be dangerous for kids to use unsupervised — a lesson one parent learned this month when his daughter was sent a series of very disturbing messages through the app.
“Today we went through something that I feel needs to be shared,” Brad Summer wrote after he shared screenshots of someone attempting to get his 7-year-old daughter to send them pictures. The exchange will make you absolutely sick.
Images via Brad Summer
As you can see, whoever is sending these messages knows immediately that Brad’s daughter is seven years old. And they waste no time trying to elicit pictures from her.
When she says no, the user immediately tries to press her further.
Thankfully, this is when the child shows her parents, and her father steps in.
“I am actually not in law enforcement,” Summer explains to Scary Mommy. “I stated what I could to scare the person away. This is with the local police and they have tracked the IP and submitted a subpoena to this app.”
“I know many will blame us parents for this happening” Summer says in his Facebook post. “But we never thought like predators and I guess we were naive in thinking that our daughter was safe on what we thought to be a kid friendly app. We have learned the hard way. I ask that you not judge us (many still will) but let our experience teach us all.”
He explains that his daughter does not have a phone of her own, but uses their phone when they are around. She used this app to connect with her cousins and make goofy duets of songs together. “We have accepted friends of theirs and our daughter believed this was another one. I never thought of someone pretending to be 9 to gain access to my child. We live and learn and I continue to do so everyday as a parent.”
It’s a testament to their parenting that their child felt safe coming to them immediately to tell them what she’d experienced. That’s what we should all strive for — open communication with our kids so that they know if something like this ever happens to them they can come to us without fear.
Summer’s advice to other parents? To communicate to your kids that you will always be there for them. “The only way to be safe is to let Mom or Dad be their superheroes. We can get the bad guys for them, but they need to be our sidekicks and tell us when those people ask bad things.”
“Please, tell your kids to let you know if anyone ever asks something like this, let them know it’s okay to tell you. It has helped us in this situation.”