I read an article in the Austin American Statesman today about the parent of a 14 year old girl suing myspace.com because the girl met a 19 year old guy through the site, arranged a meeting with him, and was sexually molested. How many more stories are needed to make parents understand that myspace.com is a FREE site, anyone can set up a profile, contact just about anyone else through their profile, and ultimimately it's not the responsibility of myspace.com to monitor communication between members?
Maybe things have really changed since I was in high school back in the stone ages before the internet. I had real friends, not fake myspace friends I had never met. We communicated in person or on the phone. I went out with people I actually knew, not people who contacted me blindly through a message board of some kind, which is the only analogy I can think of to compare the stone age of my high school years to now.
I have a myspace.com profile which I use mostly as an extra address book. I spend maybe 5 minutes a day on myspace checking my email, denying friend requests from random people I've never met, and sometimes reading bulletins. If I had children I would set up a profile so I could monitor their myspace profile and see what kinds of people they were accepting as friends.
If you are a parent and you don't know what I'm talking about, you are negligent in your parental responsibilities. If your child is using chat rooms and/or social networking sites as their main source of social interaction it is your responsibility to talk to them, find out why they are on the computer all the time instead of participating in real activities, and why they think they need to talk to people they've never met on a computer. If they can't make real friends maybe they need some kind of afterschool activity that involves other kids their age so in the future they will be capable of interviewing for a job, getting along with co-workers, their spouse, their children, and every other person they encounter when they leave your care.
That's right; I said your care. Parental responsibility encompasses many things and if you are relying on myspace or any other social networking site to care for your your child maybe they should be charging you so your child can access the site. Until then, don't expect myspace to be your free babysitter or your lottery because you failed to teach your child to use good judgement or meet the person whose car she's getting into after school.
It seems like every DatelineNBC I've seen recently has been about internet predators so I have to conclude other people have seen the same thing.
The common theme: if your child is on the internet YOU need to monitor their activities and make sure they understand why it's not a good idea to invite pervy69 over to hang out. Something bad is going to happen. If he's talking about sex and sending pics of his dick your child is probably going to be molested. If you haven't taken the computer out of their bedroom and made sure they only use it when you're around, you haven't accepted your parental responsibility to keep your child safe.
It's not up to myspace, it's up to you.
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Austin American Statesman
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Wednesday, June 21, 2006
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2 comments:
Well said. Sadly, so many people seem to think neither personal responsibility nor parental responsibility are important. If something goes wrong, they figure they can just sue some company that was vaguely involved somehow. I'm not convinced that people aren't just being greedy, either.
"Hey, look, an excuse to sue somebody, maybe I'll be able to quit my job."
Well, my ethical friend, you know from visiting my site that I holler about all of this quite a bit. I opened my yap last fall and just haven't stopped. I am glad you left a link to your post at my place, and am also happy you are not receiving nasty notes. We hate those. UGH.
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