Myspace and Creepies!

My Mom received an email regarding a seminar being done for parents on the dangers of the internet and social networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook, Vampirefreaks (LAWWWL!), and other sites alike. She didn't attend this seminar because she felt that she knew a little more about these sites than the average parent, so she could judge for herself without being fed things from the seminar speakers.
I support her decision, not just because I agree that she could make her own judgements about the sites that my siblings and I go onto, but because I agree that in a lot of these seminars, false facts are thrown around. Lies and assumptions are told, and some parents eventually go home and ban their children from using the internet at all since that's obviously how the pedophiles get to them, unprovoked.

I am all for internet safety awareness. I think kids need to be aware that not everyone and everything on the internet is safe and they should use common safety knowledge to know that the 32 year old guy in Ohio doesn't just want to "be your friend". Obviously with that comes with the knowledge that not everyone on the internet is who they say they are. I support a parent's decision to not allow their kids into public chat rooms where everyone has access to everyone else, but the whole social networking problem has simple answers, and none of them include banning kids from going on the sites.

As a member of Vampirefreaks.com, I've heard all the jokes before; we're obviously a bunch of satanic vampire-wannabes with no lives, who want nothing more than to feed on your little kid's blood. We must not go to school, or have a job, or any friends, for that matter. We're all social rejects and we listen to emo music and self-mutilate because nobody understands us.
Hah. Trust me, I've heard it all--and they couldn't be farther from the truth. Sure, you'll get the occasional "hardcore" kid who thinks they look pretty good in black and white war paint and thinks Slipknot is the heaviest band next to Metallica, but if you look past that, you'll see some very bright individuals who want nothing more out of the site than the kids who sit on Myspace all day want out of Myspace.
You've probably seen in various newspapers that people have killed their parents or other people and just happened to have an account on Vampirefreaks, automatically causing people to tag the site as a bad influence and a bad place.

This is exactly what's wrong with the media: their power to influence vulnerable and gullible people into believing that social networking sites are the reason that kids go missing and end up dead on the side of the road. The truth in this accusation is so flawed and frankly it's sad that people can be so easily influenced by one mention of a site in a newspaper article titled "MURDER" or "FOUND DEAD". We all are so curious to see who was dead and why that the rest of the details of the article become more interesting than before.

I'll use Myspace as a prime example, since it's so popular to blame these days:
When it comes to just how easily accessed kids are on these sites, a common misconception is that the sites do nothing to protect people. Myspace automatically makes people under 18's profiles private unless you manually switch it back to public. Along with that, there are options such as having to know the person's last name or email to make a friend request. There is even an option to make all comments, blogs and even messages by-approval, meaning the person has to approve them before they are posted. And let's not forget that you cannot access someone without being their friend. The most you can do (if their profile is public) is see their profile and pictures. No comments can be sent, and if the person sets their messages to private, no messages can be sent either.

So who do parents have to blame when their kid gets abducted by someone they 'met from Myspace'? Do they really have the justifications to blame the site? Why? Because the site can actually keep track of the millions of users that create profiles? Psh, they wish they could, I'm sure! But it's just impossible. There is no possible way that they could make sure no creepy person couldn't access their site.
Has anyone actually seen the safety precautions/privacy options I mentioned in the previous paragraph and still thought that their kid couldn't possibly have let the creepster access their profile? If your child's profile and messages are set to private, the only way he/she is going to be in contact with a potentially dangerous person is by ACCEPTING their friend request. Why is it suddenly Myspace's fault if your kids enjoys having 5000 friends that they don't know? I have no room to talk in the friend debate, because I have 3000 friends, myself. But I enjoy having 3000 friends--it's never lonely. I also have the common sense to say 'no' if a person I didn't know requested that we met up alone or something. In the end, parents cannot honestly say that their kids are not at fault when it comes to letting these pedophiles and creepy people into their internet lives.

I'm certainly not suggesting that kids deserve to get kidnapped or molested by internet pedophiles because they were stupid, I just believe that parents should really do their research before suing these networking sites or even blaming them. Parents are so quick to blame everyone else but themselves or their children, and that goes for a lot of other issues too.
When will we get back to the old days of realizing that we can't run away from problems forever? The internet is a public place and will forever house dangerous people. Banning kids from the internet will not take the danger factors of life away.