Cut the (dis) cord: Experts on app leading depressed teens to 'run away' from home

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On November 5 mid-day reported how a 13-year-old boy from Badlapur, along with a few other kids, had planned to run away from home, and meet in Goa to "start a new life". According to their plans, the boy had asked members of his group on an app to come to Goa. They planned to pose as orphans and get a certificate from a Goa orphanage. They eventually wanted to go abroad and invest in bitcoins and earn money. The police traced the kids eventually to a Goa hotel, and got them back to Mumbai.

But it's not Instagram or Facebook that the children have used to coordinate with each other. They used Discord, a concept devised by Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games. It is a VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers". Discord is also one of the apps which hides the identity of the user allowing them to interact through open as well closed groups.

The app, which helped these children connect and chat, doesn't offer parental controls, so there's no way for parents to restrict content or password-protect the privacy settings within the app. Sanjay Shintre, Superintendent of Police (Maharashtra Cyber) said, "There are many apps which don't have parental controls. If we take Discord for example, it's basically a gaming app, but it's been used for different purposes by kids. Now the responsibility of parents is to keep a tab on how much time their kid is spending on the phone apart from their online classes."

Discord is just a tip of the iceberg; there are hundreds of other apps, and websites where one can play games, which are violent and sometimes lead to perversity. Socially disconnected children can turn to such apps. Hvovi Bhagwagar, psychologist and psychotherapist, says that loneliness and extra exposure to the Internet, mobile phones could lead to disaster. "A WHO report suggest, that parents' involvement in their children's lives has gone down in the last two decades in India. This is the root cause of the problems that teenagers are facing these days."

Unmesh Joshi, founder of Responsible Netizens, an NGO, said, "A parent should constantly observe his child, his behavioural changes, screen time and immediately seek help from professionals in case he sees any distinguishing changes."