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Monday, November 19, 2007

Social Networking Tragedy

Social Networks are the latest rage these days among young and old. They started out as ways for students to stay in touch and make new friends, and are now used by anyone who is someone. MySpace and Facebook are the leaders at the moment, but there are many more. The basic idea is that you can create a page for yourself that includes who you are, a picture of yourself, your hobbies, favorite music, etc. You can then invite friends to join your social network. If they agree they appear on your page as your friends, and you are added to their list of friends. In this way you create a social network of friends - 1st degree (those you know directly) and 2nd degree (friends of friends). Within this network you can chat, share music, send updates, send virtual drinks, and do all kinds of other stuff. The sky is basically the limit since these sites provide developer kits enabling the users themselves to create new applications.

While this sounds like a lot of fun, I recently read of the tragic death of Megan Meier. Megan, 13 years old, was befriended by a 16 year old boy on MySpace. With her mother's approval, Megan added Josh to her list of friends on the social networking site and a long distance MySpace friendship developed. However, "Josh" was in reality the peeved parents of a girl who lived down the street from Megan. As this article describes, Megan ultimately commited suicide after "Josh" began slandering her on MySpace.

When I logged onto Facebook the first time I was both fascinated and appalled by the whole idea. Yes, it's a great way to meet new people and it's great way to share pictures, updates, etc with my family and friends. However, I was amazed by the amount of information people were willing to put on the internet about themselves. I immediately thought of how kids could bully each other using this medium, and of course everyone's fears of pedophiles. The same rules that apply for instant messaging which I mentioned in a previous post are true here. Kids shouldn't interact with people they don't know.

There are laws against impersonating a doctor, lawyer, policeman, etc in real life. There definitely should be laws against an adult impersonating anyone for the purpose of misleading or harming a child whether it be in real life or cyberlife. In my worst dreams I never imagined a parent would use a social networking site as a weapon against another child.

At a minimum, it seems to me that we need a way to identify real people on these sites vs. impersonators.

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