"As we all know, warnings have gone out countless times, in this world that we live in today, there are folks that visit places, social networking spaces such as MySpace, whose intentions are not good. And they come from far away," said Col. James Baker of the Vermont State Police in an interview with CBS News entitled "MySpace link to girl's disappearance?" (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/27/national/main4214510.shtml) This is among a countless archive of related articles dealing with MySpace, among other social networking sites, which put children and adults alike at risk for danger.
I do not want to indicate in this post that all social networking sites are dangerous and all those involved are going to be harmed, but there is the fact that by being a member of a site, such as MySpace, being at risk of an online predator is inevitable despite privacy settings. For example, MySpace has a default setting that those on MySpace, ages 14 and 15, will automatically have their profiles set to private. On the other hand, a large amount of the children registering for MySpace are under the age of 14 (the age you must be to have a profile) so they simply sign in with a different year of birth, leaving themselves vulnerable to open profiles if they are not familiar with privacy settings. My younger sister, Jodi, is 12 years old and is a prime example of this. She cleverly decided to join the crowd of 7th graders and create a MySpace profile. Luckily she was smart enough to put all false information in her profile, but this included her date of birth, thus enabling her to create the profile in the first place.
Another article (http://www.kcrg.com/news/local/15540222.html) explains the case of a 23-years-old predator who met a 14-year old girl on MySpace where he lured her into meeting him and proceeded to sexually molest her. Cases like this are unfortunately endless and it's hard to wonder if we can really just blame MySpace. The website does not intend for these incidents to happen, as it just acts as a site for CMC. It's hard to not place blame for cases involving children on not only the predator but also the parents of the child. Countless tools are available to parents such as WebWatcher and AceSpy to monitor the websites children visit and the things they do while online. But these tools can only do so much though. We cannot rid the internet of some of the twisted people who entertain themselves on it, but we can work to enrich parents and children of the dangers that seemingly harmless websites can have. Lets hope that in time, our space online will really be our space, and not the space available to millions of other people who use the internet as well.
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2 comments:
I totally agree with this. The internet is not always our friend, even though we always depend on it. There are so many dangerous people out there in the world. Sure, there are agencies that track down predators by pretending to be a teenage girl, and then they arrest them, but that is not even close to how many others could be out there. But you know there are so many innocent kids out there who fall into the ten stages of online relationships because once they decide to meet face to face, that is when the physical harm is done.
So yes, even though Myspace helps you to stay connected to your friends, it can be a death trap, and younger kids just don't know. They think they do though, and that's the scary part.
Social networks like Myspace are a great way to stay connected with friends. However if people arent carfule especially teens myspace is easy access to a lot of information about someone. Predators will find ways to minipulate social networking and abuse social networking systems. It is people like this who take the fun out of myspace. Younger kids think harm cant be done that it is innocent communication but they really dont know. There are many predators out there and I think younger people need to be more educated on these situations and things to prevent them.
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