Category Archives: Media

Pinterest Safety Updates for Children

Pinterest, a photo-sharing app often thought of as the last safe social media platform for children by the general public, made waves last month for issues on the site regarding child safety.

An NBC article released in early March highlighting the dangers of children being on the app became the first of many on the topic. In the original NBC article, author Jesslyn Cook discussed the story of a 9-year-old girl who was using Pinterest primarily because her mother was worried about the type of content she’d be exposed to on other social media platforms like TikTok.

Unfortunately for both the mother and daughter this was not the case and shortly after creating the account, the girl’s mother found that certain accounts were saving her daughter’s posts onto boards titled things like “sexy little girls,” and “guilty pleasures.” Along with these boards, the 9-year-old was also getting bombarded with direct messages from followers, commenting inappropriately on her body.

While Pinterest has always had certain safety measures in place, like only allowing teen users to receive direct messages from users they follow and requiring users to be at least 13-years-old. Since the NBC article was published they have begun to implement even more safety requirements. The company has stated that they have increased the number of human content moderators and are developing new features that allow users to report accounts for certain offenses.

Although this is a step in the right direction, the gesture did not appease senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal who wrote a letter to Pinterest after the NBC article was released. According to a follow-up article written by NBC, in the letter the senators wrote: “It should not have taken national media coverage of such graphic misuse targeting young children to prompt action … This report is particularly disappointing given that Pinterest has branded itself the ‘last positive corner of the internet.’”

As of April, the app has made some drastic changes regarding their policies on child and teen safety. Accounts for users under 16 are completely private meaning that they aren’t discoverable by other people, and their accounts won’t show up when searched. Pinterest has also disabled the messaging feature for teen accounts since the article, but are currently working on updating the feature so they can “allow for safe connections with people [the] teen knows.”

Along with banning certain features, Pinterest has since swept its entire platform to deactivate any accounts they believe to be dangerous. While a good idea in theory, this has caused a lot of innocent accounts to be disabled for no reason — an issue content creator Dove Clarke was forced to deal with. After having her 10-year-old account deleted for seemingly no reason she took to Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to post her complaints.

In a tearful video on TikTok, Clarke states: “Your stuff is not safe on Pinterest. I use Pinterest religiously for my job, I used Pinterest to find myself and now it’s all gone.”

Although Clarke was able to get her account back, this whole ordeal has tarnished Pinterest’s safe image and has made people weary of the app in general. Some Chabot students have also weighed in on the subject, with second-year Isaiah Moore stating: “I don’t use Pinterest but, that’s not really surprising. Unfortunately, stuff like that happens all the time on the internet.”

Another Chabot student, Cynthia Hernandez, had this to say: “I haven’t used Pinterest since middle school but, it’s terrible that that’s how certain people would use it. It’s just supposed to be an app for sharing pictures.”

Sims 4 Update: Playable Babies & Bay Area World

On Mar. 14 Electronics Arts (EA) released a patch update for the Sims 4 which introduced infants, making them the youngest playable life stage in any Sims game so far. Along with this patch, EA also released a new expansion pack featuring a world modeled after the Bay Area, CA.

This new update was highly anticipated by fans of the Sims franchise as it introduced a concept that hadn’t been seen in any of the Sims games over the past twenty years: playable babies. Up until now, babies in the Sims games were no more than objects that players could interact with and even then these interactions were limited. Not only were they limited in interactions but, before this update, baby sims could only come in three skin tones and were confined to their cribs.

In games like the Sims 2 and 3, players were able to satisfy their baby-fever with toddlers; however, for the Sims 4, toddlers weren’t added to the game until 2017 – nearly three years after its release. Before this, newborn Sims would immediately age into children, skipping a vital life stage and taking away the opportunity for them to bond with other Sims in that aspect.

The “Growing Together” expansion pack combats this issue by adding the concept of milestones to the game, allowing Sims to remember and be influenced by the good and bad moments that have happened to them throughout their lives. Sims can now reminisce about their first time riding a back or losing a tooth, a feature that is similar to the “memories” in the Sims 2 which helped provide a basic form of storytelling for the players.

San Sequoia, the new world that came with the “Growing Together” expansion pack for the Sims 4, is just one of many in-game worlds based on places in real life. Worlds like Del Sol Valley from their “Get Famous” pack and Sulani from the “Island Living” expansion pack are based on Los Angeles and Hawaii, respectively. Regarding San Sequoia the developers drew inspiration from Silicon Valley specifically, adding in NPCs with jobs as app developers and start-up employees.

This new world mirrors the Bay Area in terms of diversity, as well, by adding the games first canonically transgender and non-binary Sims, Celeste Michaelson and Jay Robles. The NPCs can talk about their gender-identity with players through certain social interactions if they have a high enough relationship level.

While a lot of members of the Sims 4 community were initially excited about the new pack, a month after its release, it received mixed reviews – with a lot of those being on whether or not the content in the pack should’ve been released for free.

Youtuber Catkin commented that this was the first pack they felt that nearly everything included should’ve been included in the base game, stating: “The milestones, relationships and quirks are all quite important and would have been a huge quality of life update.”

Among these complaints, there was also the argument that this pack was only focused on familial interaction and didn’t offer anything for players that are not interested in that playstyle. Reddit user Nicky Q says that the pack is useless to them since they don’t play with families. They say: “I play Sims to live my best childfree life with a bunch of pets. I’m happy for everyone else, but if I ever end up buying this pack it would just be for the build items.”