MySpace, Facebook a danger to our children?

Stan Beer
Sunday, 09 December 2007 06:58

Opinion and Analysis

However, it is not just the possibility of making contact with an unknown cyber undesirable that presents a danger to the more vulnerable and socially naive young people. Unfortunately, a more immediate and less controllable threat can come from known members of a peer group.

It's all very well for ads on US TV to warn young people of the dangers of posting images and information about themselves online. But how do you protect yourself against people you know posting images they have of you or nasty stories about you on their social networking page and distributing the material to their network of friends? What do you do when a jilted boyfriend or girlfriend starts a hate web page devoted to you?

The problem with Web posting and subsequent viral distribution is that often what's done cannot be undone. AOL may well rue the day when it published a huge slice of its search queries to a public Web page but not as much as the thousands of members whose identities had been compromised. By the time AOL realized its error and removed the page from the Web, the list of queries, which could be grouped together by AOL member number, had been copied and circulated around the Web via a number of forums.

Many adults find it upsetting to be the victim of flame attacks on the Web. However, for children in their teenage years, a key formative period of their lives when they are already subject to mixed  feelings, emotions and uncertainties, having their vulnerabilities laid bare and preyed upon in a public forum on the Web can be devastating, sometimes even deadly. For parents of such children, there is often a sense of powerlessness, because these are the years when their children tend to clam up and keep secrets from their elders.

While teenage children struggle with finding and establishing their identity online, pre-teens are already serving their apprenticeships on games oriented social networks like Club Penguin, Runescape and World of Warcraft. They're already starting to communicate with each other via email and IM systems and becoming online savvy. These are the next round of MySpace and Facebook users.

Returning to the opening question of this article, forbidding teenage children from doing anything that's legal without having a pretty damned good reason is simply asking for trouble. If our kids are in a community where most of their friends and peers communicate via one of the popular social networks, ordering them not to take part in such online activities is not realistic and, in many cases, will simply cause them to go behind our backs.

A far better approach is to accept the fact that our children are part of the Web 2.0 generation and therefore will want to take advantage of the full richness of communications experiences that social  networking sites provide. Our task therefore is to monitor their activities as best we can but, above all, help equip them to the best of our abilities with the necessary knowledge and education that they need to make their online experience a safe and enjoyable one. Sooner or later, we have to allow our children to ride the train alone but we should never turn them loose without a route map and time-table.