The Dangers of Social Networking for Kids

I have been amazed at my church and work to see the cavalier attitude many parents have toward MySpace and Facebook. The same parents would not allow their children to have an independent e-mail account will often allow them to spend hours unmonitored on social networking sites. You may have heard the stories about predators stalking children on MySpace, but what about stories like this one of stupid adults messing with the mind of an impressionable youth.

"(She) stated in the months leading up Meier's daughter's suicide, she instigated and monitored a 'my space' account which was created for the sole purpose of communicating with Meier's daughter.

"(She) said she, with the help of temporary employee named ------ constructed a profile of 'good looking' male on 'my space' in order to 'find out what Megan (Meier's daughter) was saying on-line' about her daughter. (She) explained the communication between the fake male profile and Megan was aimed at gaining Megan's confidence and finding out what Megan felt about her daughter and other people....

"According to (her) 'somehow' other 'my space' users were able to access the fake male profile and Megan found out she had been duped. (She) stated she knew 'arguments' had broken out between Megan and others on 'my space.' (She) felt this incident contributed to Megan's suicide...

Parents need to be reminded again and again that the internet is NOT a safe place for children. It should not be considered a fenced-in backyard, but a city square or busy mall in which a stranger can easily target your child, whether from malice or stupidity, and do damage that can never be recovered from. This is not a MySpace problem. It is a problem of naive parents.

Do you care about the MTV/MySpace candidate forums?

I understand that the 'youth' vote is important (when exactly is the youth vote not the youth vote any longer) for candidates, so they're willing to do just about anything in order to get it. MTV clearly understands this and have thus implemented many different efforts to get candidates to debase themselves work with them. The newest effort is a series of one-on-one forums where a candidate will take questions via MySpace. Supposedly this is going to be unfiltered and thus the candidates will have to answer lots of questions that don't generally come up in a stump speech. Somehow, I imagine it sounding a lot like a stump speech on pot - call me cynical.

I watched the YouTube 'debate' and it ranged from irrelevant to outright silly (partially because it was democrats and partially because of the questions). I can only imagine that this forum will be much of the same.


So am I the only one that feels this way about these youth oriented events? Personally I like good ol' fashioned campaigning, but then maybe I'm outta' touch.

The social network battle-royal

The youth in my old youth group were crazy about MySpace, but I never got into it. I always thought it was unorganized and generally ugly. I wasn't about to spend a bunch of time building up friends or any of the other stuff that people do on MySpace. Well it appears that there is a potential fight coming between MySpace and FaceBook. From the opinion of this blogger FaceBook is about to walk all over MySpace. He makes a bunch of really good points, looking back to the fight between Prodigy and AOL. I'm not sure how much this affects any of us on this blog but it will be interesting to see if FaceBook becomes the next big social network - or if social networking will go out all together and something else will become the next big thing.