Are they seeing too much, too young?

GIOVANNA Plowman is better-known as ‘tampon girl’. She is the New York teenager who had 250,000 Facebook followers earlier this year after she uploaded a video of herself removing a used tampon and sucking on it.

The 15-year-old did this in response to a dare. Giovanna, who wears low-cut tops in her videos, then took issue online with ‘imposters’ who had claimed to be her. ‘Tampon girl’ was her “achievement”, nobody else’s, she posted, and detractors were just jealous, she said, because she “was now famous”. This is the kind of degrading, sexualised behaviour that is worrying parents and making them fearful of social media. But how vulnerable are teenagers to 24-hour social media?

‘Tampon girl’ went online in January and, by the end of the summer, we had the ‘Slane girl’ video, the ‘rugby threesome’ controversy and Miley Cyrus’ ‘twerking’ at the MTV Music Awards.