(by 6 people)
Here are some tips for parents who want to better understand MySpace. I hope that you will use these to become better-informed about how networking sites work and how to avoid their dangers, and will communicate with your child about his or her MySpace usage.
MySpace is a website where people can create profiles that include pictures, descriptions, links to/from friends' MySpace pages, and comments from other people. MySpace itself is not evil, and can be a very effective way for people to stay in touch, bands to publicize upcoming concerts, people to get moral support, etc.
The problems occur because not everyone is using MySpace for upstanding purposes. It's very easy for predators to find and contact unsuspecting youth, and for kids to cyber-bully one another. Many parents know that their kids use MySpace, but they think it's ok because the kids don't put in personal information. In most cases, however, one can easily surmise where that child lives, what activities she is involved in, and how old she is by answers to her survey questions or the friends on her contact list. So, not including personal information is not guaranteed to completely protect a child from predators.
How to find someone on MySpace:
Check it out for yourself - ask your child to show you his or her profile. If your child's not available at the moment and you're curious, here's how you might find it:
- Go to http://www.myspace.com/
- Sign up for a free account (takes two minutes!)
- Click on "Search" in the light blue band at the top
- Enter your search criteria
- If you don't see who you're looking for, look for friends or other kids at the same school.
Then, when you're at their profile:
- Click on "View all of ___'s friends." You may have to do this many times to find who you're looking for.
- Look in the comments the person's received—the person you're looking for may have written one.
Here are is a small sampling of some of the disturbing things I've personally seen or heard of with local kids on MySpace:
- Most jr. high kids state their age as 16 or 17, since MySpace doesn't allow public pages for kids under 16.
- Some kids are making fake pages about other kids. Not only are these pages slanderous, but in many cases other kids believe that's the child's real page, at least for awhile.
- Someone copied a girl's face from her MySpace picture and pasted it onto a pornographic picture.
- In order to look "cool," some kids create online personas that include cursing and sexual innuendo that doesn't represent who they really are. (or maybe it does??)
- Kids will delete profiles to satisfy parents, and then create another profile they never tell the parent about.
Other networking sites:
MySpace isn't the only networking site around. Other networking sites include (but are not limited to): Xanga, Friendster, Blogger, Facebook, Alldumb.com, Rotten.com, FaceParty and Livejournal.com. Often, the kids from one school will tend to concentrate on one or two sites.
Safety Tips:
- Set page to "Private"
- Don't include personal info (that includes last name, town, school, sports teams, where you hang out, etc.)
- Don't include photos
- Only let people be friends if you already know them
- Avoid "in-person" meetings with people you don't already know
- Check comments regularly, and delete inappropriate ones instead of responding to them.
- Don't post something that could embarrass you later.
- Be skeptical
- Report inappropriate behavior
What should a parent do?
- Ask to see your child's profile
- Read the profile, with links to friends and photos, with your child at your side
- If you're skeptical, read it on your own and explore deeper
- Monitor the profile on a regular basis…and look for new ones!
- Keep the kids' computer in a public place (i.e., NOT in their bedroom!)
- Always (try to) stay a step ahead of your kid
- And praise them when they do the right thing!
More MySpace info you might want to see...
- MySpace Tips for Parents
- by Parry Aftab. Includes a link to remove your child's MySpace page.
"For teens, MySpace is a popular online hangout because the site makes it easy for them to express themselves and keep in touch with their friends. As a parent, please consider the following guidelines to help your children make safe decisions about using online communities." - BlogSafety.com
- Safe Blogging Tips for Teens: A handful of basic tips to keep you safe.
Advice for Teens: Blogging is great - just be smart about what you share
Advice and Resources for Parents: Kids will express themselves online - what are they doing, how can they keep it safe? - TMI! How much information is too much information?
- (Dateline NBC)
"This is a page Dateline staffers created to illustrate what a MySpace profile could look like and the kinds of personal information users post. Put your mouse over each highlight to see why this information might be potentially dangerous." - MySpace invader
- A police detective shows teens and their parents that they're not as safe on MySpace as they think
"He says his name is Matt- it's not. He says he's new to town- he's not. And he says he's 19- not even close. But that's how he portrays himself to the kids "befriending" him online on the social networking site, MySpace.com." - What you don't know can hurt kids
- Parents must understand online tools to protect their children
"Many safety guides for children using the Net read as if they were written by Robert Fulghum. Everything I ever needed to know to stay safe in the virtual world, I learned in the real world. Don't go scary places by yourself. If someone is making you uncomfortable, just leave, and tell your parents. Don't look at pornographic pictures, and you won't have to worry about them. But most important - don't talk to strangers, and never give them personal information. Unfortunately, it's not that simple." - Kids, blogs and too much information: Children reveal more online than parents know
- "...teenagers are among the most active Internet bloggers, and many are posting pictures, names, addresses, schools, even phone numbers, almost always without their parent's knowledge."
- Wise parents peek in kids' myspace
- "When he speaks to schools, DeWarns sometimes asks students how many of them would post a billboard on the highway featuring photos of themselves, a list of their friends and, in some cases, their phone numbers. And almost none of them say they would,'' he says. "So I ask them, why would you not do that when you are putting it on the Internet and getting thousands of more hits?''
- How to Defeat a MySpace Addiction (Wikipedia)
- "Admit you have a problem. This may be hard, but accepting that MySpace has taken over your life is an important step into overcoming your addiction. If you simply can't resist the urge to check your home page, then it's clear that MySpace is controlling you and not the other way around."
- Parents beware: MySpace no place for young, naive liars
- (LA Times)
"Thomas' picture appeared: a slightly goofy tough-guy pose. A snatch of heavy metal -- his theme song -- started playing. Then his "profile" popped up: his eye color, his height, his heritage ("Europe and that crap, aka white boy"). And his age: 26.
Thomas is not 26. He is a slight, freckle-faced 11-year-old in California. Technically, he has no business being on MySpace, since the Web site tells kids younger than 14 to scram.
And so it would appear sites such as MySpace, which is huge among middle-schoolers, are helping to spawn a generation of uninhibited liars." - Talkin' 'bout MySpace Generation (Money magazine)
- Kids' online profiles can hurt job prospects decades down the road
"But here's one few people--parents or kids--have considered: that users may be unwittingly creating a kind of shadow résumé that will hurt their employment opportunities for decades to come." - Internet Safety: What parents need to know (MSNBC)
- Keeping children safe online means teaching them to be smart, responsible users of the Internet. Click on an age group to see tips from WiredSafety.org's Parry Aftab.
"Follow the golden rule of cyberspace: Don't do anything online that you wouldn't do in real life!" - School suspends 20 over MySpace posting
- Calif. middle-school student faces expulsion over alleged threat on Web site
COSTA MESA, Calif. - A middle school student faces expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against a classmate on the popular MySpace.com Web site, and 20 of his classmates were suspended for viewing the posting, school officials said. - Internet Safety: Internet 101: Blog and Diary Web sites
- Questions about myspace.com and what to do if you have a problem
Why Be Concerned about MySpace and Other Such Sites? - Cheat Sheet: Teen Lingo decoded
- "Can't understand the acronyms and expressions on teen Web pages? Below are some commonly used online terms. Bear in mind that teen chat language evolves... so today's expressions may not be cool tomorrow."
- Dateline NBC
- Page with more links about MySpace.
- A Sinister Web Entraps Victims of Cyberstalkers
- "I speak about it all the time," Ms. Frank said, adding that the rise of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, where young people often naïvely divulge too much information to a world of potential stalkers, has made the situation worse. "Even teens are becoming the victims of cyber ID theft and cyberstalking," she said.
- Testing the Bounds of MySpace
- A writer learns a lot from an experiment with the popular social networking site -- especially about her 13-year-old daughter.
"I've covered murders, grisly accidents, airplanes falling out of the sky and, occasionally, dirty politics.
But in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on MySpace.com." - Runaway girl found at motel; man arrested
- "A 21-year-old man accused of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old Burbank girl he met through MySpace.com was arrested last week after she ran away to meet him."
- 'MySpace' teen back from Middle East
- "A 16-year-old honor student from Michigan tricked her parents into getting her a passport and then flew off to the Mideast to be with a West Bank man she met on MySpace.com, authorities say.
U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded her to turn around and go home before she reached the West Bank. She returned home Friday.
Katherine R. Lester is a straight-A student and student council member, her father said. "She's a good girl. Never had a problem with her," Terry Lester said." - Parental Guidance: How safe are the top social-networking sites for teens? We take them for a test run.
- by Julia Angwin. Wall St. Journal, 7/24/06.
This is the best article I've seen to date - worth paying the small WSJ cost to get it!
"After a week in the world of social networking, I came to some conclusions. Really young kids (say, under 13) probably shouldn't be on any of these sites except possibly Imbee. Slightly older kids might do best on Xanga, where opportunities for strangers to connect are limited but the site doesn't have the strict feeling of Imbee. And Facebook is the best option for high-school and college students -- because ultimately the Internet is safest when used for networking with people you already know, or might know, in real life." - College students warned about Internet postings
- Incoming college students are hearing the usual warnings this summer about the dangers of everything from alcohol to credit card debt. But many are also getting lectured on a new topic -- the risks of Internet postings, particularly on popular social networking sites such as Facebook.
- For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé
- "Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy."
- The Perils of 'Digital Double Vision'
- Technology Lets Us Observe Our Own Lives, But Shouldn't We Just Live Them Instead?
One of modern parenting's crises is discovering teenagers' MySpace pages and finding one's kids presenting themselves as drunks, sexual adventurers, anarchists or worse. In most cases, these portraits are selective and exaggerated - second selves for kids to experiment with. But many kids don't seem to know or care that their pages are accessible and might be taken at face value. The flipside of a horrified parent finding their kid's MySpace page? It's that kid discovering that someone from the outside world - someone else's parent, a job interviewer, a reporter - has found it and reached conclusions based on it.
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