MySpace and Attorneys General Announce Join Effort to Promote Industry-Wide Safety Principles

On January 14^th, MySpace and Attorneys General from 49 states and the District of Columbia released a joint statement that can be found at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080114/20080114005546.html?.v=1.

The “Principles of Safe Social Networking” were partitioned into four categories:

1. Site Design and Functionality
• Reviewing every image and video uploaded to MySpace
• Reviewing the content of MySpace discussion groups
• Making the profiles of 14- and 15-year-old users automatically private
• Deleting registered sex offenders from MySpace
• Defaulting 16- and 17-year-old users’ profiles to private
• Improve technology to enforce the minimum age of 14
2. Education and Tools for Parents, Educators and Children
• Online safety public service announcements
• Free parental software (underdevelopment) so parents can prevent their children from having access to any social networking site
• Increase communication when consumers report inappropriate material or activities on MySpace
3. Law Enforcement Cooperation
• 24-hour hotline
4. Online Safety Task Force
• Develop online safety tools to authenticate identity and verify age
• Explore new technology to “help make users more safe and secure”

My Thoughts:

At first glance, this sounds like law enforcement and MySpace are sure working hard to keep our children safe out there in cyberspace. However, no “technological tool” solution is going to keep children safe. Net Generation children, pre-teens, and adolescents are far too technologically savvy to be thwarted by technology if they truly want to social network. OK, so you are going to try to develop technology to keep young children (under 14) off MySpace. How is that going to happen? When you create a MySpace profile you are asked to state your age. No verification is required. How do they plan to verify if you are truly 16, 18 or even 99 as many underage kids indicate? Interestingly, in my studies of MySpacers, when asked their age in an anonymous online survey, and allowed to type it into a box rather than check their age from a list, 15% of the participants VOLUNTARILY told me that they were under 14. The youngest was 9!

Reviewing all photos, videos, and discussion group conversations is quite admirable and an unfathomable task. With more than 200,000,000 profiles, most with multiple photos and videos being uploaded daily, it would take years to check each one. Now, consider their plan to monitor MySpace groups. Below is a list of MySpace groups as of January 17, 2008:

By my rough calculation, there are 4,086,000 groups! How they plan to monitor group conversations is a mystery to me. Perhaps they will use software that identifies key nasty words. Oh, yeh, the kids will simply create new words to replace the old ones or use starts between letters, or something even more clever to hide these conversational no-nos.

Educating parents is an excellent idea and public service announcements are a nice start. But MySpace needs to do much more than that to alert parents to the ways they can keep tabs on their children. In fact, MySpace already has a complete section with colorful, informative tabs of all types of MySpace safety information. Didn’t you know that? Where is it you ask? Well, scroll all the way down to the bottom of any MySpace page – where you typically find links to matters that are more legal than informative – and hidden between their privacy statement link and how to contact MySpace is a link to “Safety Tips.” I think that MySpace might be better served by figuring out ways to get these sources into the hands of parents without making them search all over the place. For example, why not develop software to determine who is a parent and who is not by simply identifying profiles that answer the question about whether or not they have children in the affirmative? Having done that, Tom can send each parent a message alerting them to the available safety tips. How about posting messages about safety resources on the 49,323 groups dealing with “Family and Home”? Or, in a completely self-serving comment, Tom could buy a copy of my book for every MySpace parent!

The final two principles, Law Enforcement Cooperation and Online Safety Task Force are typically vague and without any real solutions to aid child safety.

Finally, you may have noticed that I ignored the goal of “Deleting registered sex offenders from MySpace.” Creating a MySpace page does not require anyone to use their real name nor does it ask if the person is a sex offender. What is to stop a registered sex offender from creating a profile without indicating that they are a danger to the safety of children? That one is really ludicrous. My first entry on this blog discusses just how unnecessary it is for MySpace and parents to work themselves into a frenzy about so-called sexual predators roaming cyberspace. Sure there are some people on MySpace who have ulterior motives and send kids messages containing foul language or pornographic pictures. However, my data as well as the data collected by the Research Center for Crimes Against Children (supported by the Department of Justice), show that when MySpacers do receive these sexually-tinged communications nearly all react appropriately by blocking the person, ignoring the message or telling an adult. Further, according to the research, most of these “sexual predators” are actually kids themselves simply fooling around.

One final thought: Giving parents software to prevent their children from going on any social network is a ridiculous idea and terrible parenting. With 80% of all 11- to 17-year-olds on MySpace, many kids experience the majority of their social lives online. With working parents, where nobody is home when school is over, many teens must go directly home after school. Instead of hanging out with friends at after-school activities or at the mall, they congregate on MySpace. Pulling the plug is tantamount to making your child a social outcast by limiting a major part of his/her social life.

My research has shown that parenting style is critical in determining online safety. The best solution is to teach parents how to use “Authoritative Parenting” to establish rules and set limits for their children while allowing the children to have input in the discussion. My extensive research, which you can read on my website, shows convincingly that having an authoritative parenting style is by far the best solution to keeping your children safe and healthy while letting them enjoy an online social life. Good parenting is the answer, not technological tools.