Parents unveil the dark side of myspace.com

Parents unveil the dark side of myspace.com
Posted 2/2/06
BAKERSFIELD - It's one of the fastest growing websites in the country generating more than 50 million members in just two years. But, there is a dark side to the teen crazed myspace.com website that most parents don’t know about.

It’s a combination diary, yearbook and social club in cyberspace. It’s also a hallway chat for high schools kids these days that are meeting on the internet.

Although, most parents don’t know about the website, most kids do.
....

But, it’s opening up a whole new world of friends wanting to chat and get to know him including adults.

http://www.kget.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=0B224592-1D0E-4979-8B69-689924A12B2A

With so many predators and whackos out there, how could any parent allow their kids to go online without seeing what they're up to?

or too ignorant of computers and the net in general.

I would recommend at the least a good key logger, share the drive if a kid has their own system so you can monitor it, and so on.

This could all be done with minimal intrusion if one tells their kids you are doing this and that you will have a program that will read the information and search for keywords (which you don't tell them what those keywords are).

And tell em they might as well get used to it, because when you work in the corp world on their computers they can and do monitor everything from emails to chats.

I can see the screen if I walk by the office.

I do not follow him around at school, nor when he is in town to monitor everyone and everything that he does.

Here in my family we still do that even though my brother and I are both adults. We don't have an office room or anything of course so we have always kept it in the family room. Plus, now days AOL and some other providers have parental guidance for the parents. One of my cousin's and his immediate family does like us and keeps the computer in the family living room where everyone is. Kids should be warned about making friends online and things like that.

sensibility of your points, but isn't that severe and telling?

Is having a Big Brother relationship with your child and justifying it as a "welcome to my world" any way to build a strong, trusting, and close relationship with him/her?

That response just seemed simplistic and totalitarian, as if that is the idea we want to instill in our own.

I can think of many other ways to deal with that situation, and none of them based on basic estrangement with my own offspring. What is that teaching other than thought as violence in the quest for power over another? Do children have to give up their freedoms for safety at home, as well?

Yes, a parent has rights and an obligation to do what is necessary to protect, teach, and secure their young, but the most caustic abridgments of the rights they are teaching their own should be saved as last-case measures, not an induced, and artificial norm that our own society is now foisting upon us all until we accept it as a way of life.

Give me liberty or give me death? Well, we are not going to teach that to our kids if we play Fascist dictator becuase intelligent overshight and discussion is not considered an option, first.

A keyword search as I suggested does not mean you read their private online conversations but is a practical way to non-intrusively insure things don't get out of hand by either the kid or an adult who is trying to get them to do something.

An example is a program I wrote in perl to analyze the works of authors and generate a list of words and how many times those appeared, how unique the vocabulary was between works (originality, growth of language) and so on. Without reading a conversation one could easily do an analysis (or have the computer do it rather) and red flag issues.

If we are to trust our kids they should trust as well - if you say you're not going to read everything they write hopefully they trust you enough to believe such. Show them the program, how it works, and tell them if an issue comes up you will engage them on it before reading anything (and it can select only a few sentences to show a parent).

Trust runs both ways.

I have monitored my teens web usage in the past because she has been involved in some serious trouble, and she accuses me of stalking her.

At 14, I found her going to adult dating websites and having sexual conversations with adult men (who knew her status). When I confronted her about it she deleted everything before I could go to the cops.

All of this was way before myspace, but I have checked that out too. Previous poster is right about kids putting out way too much information (and pictures that may haunt them later). Sex, drugs and alcohol are a big part of the conversation there, at least in the circles my daughter runs in.

As far as regulating access, you are fooling yourself if you think you can have much effect. They have access to computers at school, on their cellphones, and access to sights you wouldn't like right under your nose. It takes only a minute to flip to an innocent "cover page".

There is really no correlation with teen criminals and myspace. Its just that almost all teens have a space there. A majority of National Merit Scholars, or Key Club members would probably also have a page there.

I think parents are only now uncovering the tip of the iceberg of the potential trouble kids can get into on the internet. But monitoring an older child who is determined to go looking for trouble isn't very realistic. You can monitor or spy or whatever extent you want to go to, but short of getting rid of the computer, (which would put a dent in the problem, but not eliminate it), there isn't really much you can do.

In our case, she finally just "outgrew" most of the dangerous behavior she had been engaging in, probably somewhat prompted by some younger health care workers and mental health care workers talks that she attended. Its frustrating that she wouldn't listen when we said the same things, but she didnt. Fortunately she just discovered someone she decided was cool enough to heed their warnings, and I am eternally grateful for what they did.

I still check up on her, but I havent found anything that really alarms me in the past year or so. I tell her after the fact, and she stays pissed at me for considerable time afterward. But she will be going off to college next year, is almost 18, and is more mature about not doing stupid things now than she was (not cured, but improved), so I don't think its really that necessary anymore. My "spying" has hurt our relationship, but I felt I had to do it anyway. I think she will understand some day. I did it thinking that if I confronted her about it, it would stop, but it actually got worse for awhile, probably out of rebellion.

Kids can keep their email private and can also limit those that post on their "space".

There are nuts everywhere (not just cyberspace) and parents just have to keep pounding into their kids heads that some information needs to remain private.

I recently did a Megan's law search (sex offender index) for the street I lived on 7 years ago and found that a child molester had been living across the street and across a small creek from my house. And that wasn't the peeping tom that plagued the neighborhood for 6 months. It was a semi-decent neighborhood.

and see what they are doing. I have no problem 'crashing' a PC if I see something inappropriate. In years past, this sometimes meant a total reinstall of Windoze, meaning that they lost their games, buddy lists, favorites, etc...

Do it once or twice and kids learn to obey the rules. Also, one of my daughter's friends stupidly let a pedophile know her real name and address and my kid saw what her friends family went through getting this a-hole locked up.

Really wised her up about online 'anonymity', and why it is important. Of course the fed snoopers can find out who we are. Damned fascists.

On other message boards I'm on they always have the option to let other people see your Email address or just the administratior. I always do just the administratior so I don't get spam crap.

and those people have been posing on DU-I would say something ain't right.
So many high profile teen killers had their profile on that website-something is not right for sure.

Of course we're a bunch of crusty grad students and we needed an explanation

As adults we know to limit giving out personal information or anything that may be too identifying while on-line. But even being very careful, things do happen. I recall a guy on these boards losing a job based on posting here. In other communities I've frequented over the years I've seen wild stuff happen--people finding people and seeking them out inappropriately, and those seeking to harm others too.

Some of the kids on myspace put WAY too much out there and are practically baiting themselves. That bothers me. Not all the people that sign on to that site have innocent intentions. But even before myspace existed there were examples of pedophiles going into chat rooms and cyber communities looking for kids. One such case wasn't far from where I live--a teacher that got a kid to meet him somewhere.

It sucks. It's cool for kids to have a place they can think of as their own, but unfortunately the internet just makes it easier for sickos to do their thing. :puke:

There aren't any easy answers for this stuff, unfortunately.

:scared:

The minors sites are protected.

had accounts on www.myspace.com.
That guy who went into the gay bar and started shooting is just the latest example. Surely, something to think about.

:scared:

These kinds of coorelations rarely have any valid basis. One can always find a relationship between negative behavior and the latest boogeyman. At one time it was "all these kids that have been holding up grocery stores listen to rock and roll" and then it was sucicidal teens listened to heavy metal, and then it got more specific with lawsuits against individual bands. So many of these kids were involved with this that or the other thing. This doesn't necessarily mean anything.

And as myspace grows, it means less and less. A certain percentage of any population is going to have people who act in negative ways. Assuming the percentage remains constant, the larger the population, the larger the numbers of people in that population who will engage in those behaviors.

She is home as of about 8:30 tonight in Frogtown neighborhood St Paul. Mother still doesn't have the striaght story but all the news stations advised monitoring use of the site. Girl had at least 3 adults in her chat list.

I hope that her parents are able to get to the truth.

myspace

http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=33&idsub=134&id=2145

Pennsylvania teens' weblogs reveal Christian faith
Suspected teen killer, David Ludwig, and girlfriend, Kara Borden, kept weblogs about their lives in Christian community




Saturday, November 19, 2005
by Bene Diction




Kara Beth Borden is 14, owns two weblogs and was the focus of a national amber alert after her parents were each shot in the head and died Sunday morning in Lititz, Pennsylvania.

Police believed she was kidnapped by her 18-year-old boyfriend. The 14-year-old girl is no longer in custody and has been reunited with her family and a legal guardian was appointed until Pennsylvania investigators know if she was a victim or participant. David Ludwig waived extraidition from Indiana and is in cusody in Pennsylvania. He is being held without bail.

Her webpage is pink, and she talked online like most teens using acronyms and incomplete sentences, the shorthand of the net, throughout her postings.

....

MySpaces.com and Xanga.com are webblog platforms popular with teenagers. They are filled with the angst of adolescence: immediate, emotional and important, each seeking peer acceptance. There is little online to fortell of the deadly events.

....

Police are preserving their weblogs for evidence. One of David Ludwig's weblogs hosted by MySpace has not been taken down while the other at Xanga has been shut off. There are over 15 thousand comments with some people believing he has commented about his innocence.

Some of the comments are also posting that the 14-year-old girl has been at MySpace after she returned to Pennsylvania. Kara Beth Borden's blogs are also offline.

Resources (some resources may no longer be available)

David Ludwig's Xanga weblog
David Ludwig's MySpace weblog
David Ludwig's Picture Trail weblog
Kara Beth Borden's Xanga weblog
Kara Beth Borden's MySpace weblog

Parents need to talk to their kids about internet anonymity, but if kids want to run off with people they met online, there's not much that parents can do.

I've met some really good friends online, and I've also met some creeps. Live and learn.

about MySpace with an expert on child abuse. She said that while there's obviously a risk with adults posing as kids in order to lure them into something, it still doesn't compare to the dangers of real world abusers. For the most part, kids use MySpace to hang out with the friends they have already.

I'm 34 - I grew up in the hacker community on underground BBSs doing real bad shit.. and trust me, if a kid wants to communicate with someone without their parents knowing about it, they WILL do it. You are fooling yourself if you think 'watching' your kids is going to keep them from doing what they want on a computer. They can just go to a library computer, or use a friends laptop in starbucks or whatever. You are just making it more tantalizing. If you remember being a kid (esp. a teenager) then many of you KNOW getting around your parents rules was a way of life. If most people never did what their parents told them not to they would literally never grow up.

You energy is much better spent communicating and informing kids so they have the tools to navigate through these alleys and streets with the ability to recognize danger. You can show them stories of what can happen if you are not careful on the net. You should also explain that if they do things the right way, they might meet some cool interesting people as well.