Monday, May 14, 2007
“A Place For…” Friends Predators Moral Panics
filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira
Because sex perverts just aren’t clever enough to create a social networking profile under an assumed name, right? Again MySpace is being accused of not doing enough to protect “the children,” with seven US attorneys general, in North Carolina, Connecticut, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania, seeking to force Mr. Murdoch’s Neighborhood to release the names of the alleged thousands of registered sex offenders on the site.
Context, please? SNS researcher danah boyd, David Finkelhor (Director of Crimes Against Children Research Center), Amanda Lenhart (PEW), and Michele Ybarra (President of Internet Solutions for Kids) give up their own data in this talk last week, Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization.
Turns out, even when the quantitative studies don’t support the notion that sharing personal information on social networking sites leads to “online victimization,” that doesn’t keep the numbers from being positioned as reason to increase online surveillance. Meanwhile, other threats to young people’s sexual well-being? That don’t improve from having law enforcement hang out on MySpace all day? Well.
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