A favorite website of many high school and college students is MySpace.com. The popular social networking website allows its 60 million users to post a profile and photographs, search for people with similar interests and possibly make friends both in the local area and around the world.
For some of us in our late teens and early twenties, MySpace.com has become a common way to find friends at the University of Wisconsin and keep in touch with our friends from high school and back home. As of Monday, 5,851 students at UW have profiles on MySpace.com. At a university so large, finding friends and developing social networks from scratch can be daunting. Searching for new relationships on MySpace.com is one valuable way to alleviate the fear of meeting new people on a campus of 41,169 students.
MySpace.com can be an innocent way for meeting new people, but it can also be a tool for those with more sinister intentions. March 3, authorities in Connecticut announced the arrest of two men who used the website to meet and prey on young teenage girls. One man had sexual contact with an 11-year-old, and the other with a 14-year-old. In another incident, an elementary school teacher in Tennessee was arrested for using MySpace.com in order to contact a 13-year-old student with whom she was convicted of having sex last August.
MySpace.com does give safety guidelines to both its users and parents of users who are under 18. Some of these guidelines include reminding users not to lie about their age (MySpace.com requires that users are at least 14 years old), informing users that the profiles are for the public to see and suggesting that users not put anything embarrassing about themselves in their profiles. The website also does not allow hate speech and will delete any profile that displays it.
Chris DeWolfe, the chief executive of MySpace.com, has announced after these arrests that his company will soon add an enhanced security plan to protect its users. Authorities in Connecticut and Tennessee do not blame the social networking website and place the blame squarely on the pedophiles. These arrests, however, do shed light on the fact that users of websites such as MySpace.com may be vulnerable to those with less than admirable intentions.
MySpace.com warns users, especially children, not to post photographs and text that may embarrass them or allow people whom the user does not know to find them. Despite these warnings, though, MySpace.com allows a user to reveal a tremendous amount of information about oneself. For example, searching through profiles about students at UW, I was able to find out exactly what classes other students are taking, where their hometowns are and from what high school they graduated. In some cases users wrote in their profiles the dorm in which they live and even where they work. With this vast amount of information (along with a picture), it would not be terribly difficult for someone to find a MySpace.com user leaving class or work and strike up a conversation about their exact likes and dislikes.
Of course, most people on sites such as MySpace.com are not pedophiles, rapists or serial killers. MySpace.com can be a useful tool to meet others across campus with similar interests. This website can help others find friends in Madison or the world with similar interests, hobbies, and values. As with any public website, however, the user must be careful about what he or she puts in a profile. Not every user is out to get someone, but the website's users must be cautious about how much they reveal. Too much personal information may leave someone vulnerable.
There is always a risk with chatting with people whom one does not know, just as there are risks of taking Lakeshore Path alone at night. Telling profiles are risky and can be even dangerous. Users of sites such as MySpace.com should try to find a balance between revealing what would attract a would-be friend with what would make someone a possible victim.
Jeff Carnes ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in linguistics.
