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MySafeSpace?
04/07/2006
MySafeSpace?
Taking a look at the popular and problematic MySpace.com
By Julie Albert
Junior, Waterbury Arts Magnet School MySpace, it seems, has everything. The popular website includes music, movies, blogs, chats, relationships, and friends. On it you can do nearly anything. You can also be anyone you want to be. Actually, this is one of the concerns many parents have, as well as teenagers who are beginning to wise up. Anyone can easily invent a character simply to look more appealing to teens.
Prior to the creation of the current social networking website, the MySpace.com domain name was registered to an online storage and file sharing firm. The current MySpace service was founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson, who serves as the president, Chris DeWolfe, who serves as the CEO and a small team of programmers. Any current user is familiar with Anderson’s role with MySpace, as he’s the welcoming committee, and your first friend when you register a MySpace account. He often posts updates about the site on the home page.
MySpace was purchased in July 2005 by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and late last year launched its own record label in partnership with Interscope Records. According to reports, as of March 2006, MySpace is the world’s fifth most popular English-language website. MySpace has beat out competitors such as Friendster and LiveJournal to become the most popular English-language social networking website with higher traffic and reportedly over 68 million registered users, a quarter of which are teens. According to MySpace, 250,000 new members join the site every day.
MySpace has become synonymous with teenage culture.
Over the last year concerns about the site have hit the front page of every major newspaper. The site has even been banned from schools and public libraries. The concerns: unease over the type of content teens are posting and fear of the type of people they’re meeting.
OUR SPACE
MySpace is vaguely billed as a “place for friends”, but who exactly are to be considered friends? Can teens make and keep friends they have never met? Or should MySpace be better used as a tool to keep in touch with those you’ve already met? And why use MySpace to talk when there are so many other options?
In addition to connecting to new or old friends, MySpace is home to various independent musicians who use the popular site to promote their music. The musicians post their songs directly to their profile. These songs can also be uploaded onto other profiles, which give the musician the potential of more exposure. Because of the high popularity, mainstream musicians have entered this trend as well.
MySpace also allows teens to express themselves (though not always truthfully). They share their day with friends through blogging and leaving comments on others’ MySpace pages.
What exactly is so great about being able to talk to people through a website? For Michelle Edmiston, a senior from Pennsylvania, it’s because of the people there.
“I use it because I get to talk to people I don’t usually see,” she says, “and because it’s fun.”
MySpace is a fun way to communicate for many teens because you don’t have to be truthful, but it also allows you to keep in contact with someone you would otherwise not see or speak to as often. It also keeps long-distance friendships an open possibility.
MySpace, though has become a national obsession, much like television shows such as The OC or Wildfire. There are people who stay for hours on end on MySpace, searching through endless profiles just to find a long-lost buddy or who try to find new bands or friends. There are people who will honestly stay home just to be on MySpace or who stay up for unmentionable hours just waiting for someone to come on. And then there are people who are so desperate to get onto MySpace they have found a good supply of cheats to get around school blockades of the site, if only for a few minutes in homeroom, every single morning.
“It’s really kind of scary,” Edmiston admits. She luckily, is not one of the many who has been struck with MySpace-fever. Is she anti-MySpace?
“I spend time with my friends,” she says simply. “In real life, too, not in MySpace-land, shockingly enough.”
THE DANGER
MySpace certainly is not up there on the lists of most dangerous things a teen could do, however, teens are slowly becoming less careful about who can see their private information. Some people put on their full names, their towns and even their cell phone numbers, ultimately asking for trouble.
Many teens, often girls, meet strangers on the site and get very close over the Internet; too close, judging by some of the tragedies of late pertaining to young girls being lured off by much older men.
The misconception about the popular website is that it’s only used by teenagers. Many adults use the popular website for the same reasons as teens - networking, friends, relationships and music. The danger is that many sexual predators are also avid users of the site. Sexual predators, like anyone else in the world with an email address, can also make a MySpace profile and pretend to be someone they are not. It takes sad events such as young girls being lured off by “nice” people they met on Myspace and other unfortunate situations taking place that make some see the error of their ways.
A group of boys recently posed as a 15-year-old girl for an Internet prank. Their intentions were to make one of their friends feel better after a rough break up. They were going to talk with him on-line as the make-believe 15-year-old. However, they ended up helping California police arrest a 48-year-old man who tried to meet the fictitious teenager for sex, according to reports. The man arranged a meeting with the “girl” at a local park. The boys went to the park and when the man arrived, they called the police.
Bringing the MySpace issue closer to home is a case that occurred in early February of this year, where police in Middletown were investigating whether as many as seven teenage girls were sexually assaulted by men they met through MySpace.
On March 3, 2006 the FBI arrested two men in Connecticut in what prosecutors said were the first federal sexual assault charges involving MySpace.
Not only can sexual predators see the teens’ pages, but also their friends’. They can find out what they look like and even where they go to school.
In fact, some teens have begun to take precautionary measures such as not disclosing full names or location, or setting their profiles on private so that only people they know can find and talk to them. Some teens have sworn off MySpace altogether.
When asked if she has a MySpace account, junior Michelle Fabiano of Waterbury replies, “No. They scare me.”
She understands why many teens use MySpace to communicate, and agrees that it is a cool way of keeping in touch. However, there are risks she’d rather not take if she didn’t have to. “What (MySpace users) don’t realize is that anyone can see their page,” she says.
Edmiston agrees. “Don’t talk to people that you don’t already know,” she warns.
MISCONDUCT
The negative press goes beyond the sexual predators who use MySpace. Bullies who once used the playgrounds and classrooms to threaten their prey are now using blogs and home pages to spread rumors and lies faster than the conventional means of school.
Some teens are going even further. In December 2005, a student in Hermitage, Pennsylvania used MySpace to create a page bearing the name and likeness of his school principal. The intention of the page was not kind. For “birthday” he listed “too drunk to remember”. And for vital stats like eye and hair color he wrote simply “big” – a poke at the educator’s weight issues that he managed to include in most of the survey added to the MySpace profile.
After bragging in school about the page, 17-year-old senior Justin Layshock was found, confessed, apologized and was promptly suspended for his actions. His parents grounded him, and after his 10-day suspension, Layshock found himself transferred into an alternative education program for students incapable of functioning in a regular classroom.
Similar scenes are playing out throughout the country. Students are being suspended for posting mean comments about other classmates, and in one incident seven basketball players were suspended from school after mentioning on MySpace that they’d been drinking alcohol.
In many of these cases students are merely misbehaving. Under a 1969 Supreme Court decision, on campus student speech is afforded First Amendment protection at public schools, unless it “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”
But, are students going to far?
PROTECTION
Each profile contains two standard, what MySpace calls “blurbs”: “About Me” and “Who I’d Like to Meet.” Profiles also can contain sections about standard interests, such as music, television, books and movies. The personal information is where it can get tricky. Personal details can include marital status, physical appearance, location, birth date and the pictures section.
The question is how much information do you want to share? A lot of teenagers are sharing more information than they should. Many teens have lied about their age and have posted overly suggestive photos.
In a statement issued by MySpace they said, “MySpace is deeply committed to providing a safe and secure environment for all of our members. Consequently MySpace is engaged with a wide range of online safety stakeholders including parents, educators, law enforcement and safety groups, such as the Child Safety Network and WiredSafety.org, all of which are providing us with input on safety and security issues.”
According to MySpace they have dedicated a third of their staff, 120 people, to constantly monitor the site 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week. They are charged with reviewing every image hosted on site – more than 1.5 million every day.
“Since its inception, MySpace has developed a series of initiatives designed to protect our users against inappropriate conduct and content, including specific measures to protect our younger users,” a MySpace spokesperson said during a phone interview. “The accounts of users who violate our policies are closed.”
The site has raised caused huge concerns in Connecticut, and has even gained attention by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.
“While our discussions have been encouraging, I ask MySpace to take specific practical steps to address immediately the most critical concerns identified by my office,” Attorney General Blumenthal wrote in a letter following a meeting with MySpace executives.
“These measures are technologically feasible, as well as consistent with your stated terms of service and your own explicit goal of prohibiting nudity and other offensive or inappropriate material from your website.”
Attorney General Blumenthal closed the letter with “I am prepared to continue our constructive discussions … I welcome any other ideas you have for advancing our shared goal of making MySpace a safe site for all.”
MySpace agrees.
“Many of the concerns raised by Attorney General Blumenthal and others are endemic to the Internet in general,” MySpace spokesperson said. “With this in mind, MySpace will continue to take a leadership role in providing a safe community for both its adult and younger users and will continue to engage with the Internet’s most popular and heavily trafficked sites for which these issues are equally significant.”
WHAT NOW?
Really, what’s all the hype about? Could MySpace merely be the center of media scrutiny. Is it a hyped up fear? There have certainly been some very serious crimes and offenses that have happen through use of MySpace. When AOL hit the scene with chat rooms many critics said that teens were giving away too much information, but are teenagers smarter than many give them credit for being? Have they realized how to stay safe on the internet? This is a tech savvy generation of young people. Is it that novelty makes news and new technologies tend to pick up and draw new attention to old problems that never went away? There has always been an issue with Internet safety.
Is it necessary to go and immediately delete your MySpace page?
Absolutely not. I’m certainly not about to. It is necessary, however, to be smart about it. If you are going to have a MySpace page, you have to know what to include in your profile and what not to. Obviously, don’t include where you live, or your full name, or any of your phone numbers. That makes it far too easy for any of the (rare, but still existing) wackos out there. Think about it, the more information you put on, the easier it is for these wackos to search and find you.
Don’t accept random people. Talk to your friends, and their friends, and their friends, but don’t find people you have never met and ask them to be your friend simply because you like the way they look.
And finally, no matter how glamorous it may be to spruce yourself up a bit to make yourself more interesting, don’t do it. Lying about your age will only bring in older people who may or may not have good intentions. Lying about yourself will only make people want to know you for who you wish you were, not who you really are. And if you can’t be truthful on a Web page designed to make friends, how can you ever expect anyone to ever know who you are?
Maybe MySpace is just a trend, like so many others. Already other teens are turning to Facebook, which has many of the same capabilities of MySpace but is safer because it is next to impossible to invite someone you do not know. Will MySpace eventually fade away? Fabiano seems to think so.
“As more kids get older and realize what they are doing, hopefully they can help younger kids to learn how to protect themselves on it and hopefully it will die out.”
And if people do not learn how to be safe on MySpace, it will indeed die out, and quickly. One can only hope that teens start being safer online.
Youth Editor Quajay Donnell contributed to this report.
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