MySpace Problems
But What About The Parents?
By Daniel Muniz

The enormous popularity of MySpace has ostensibly come with its fair share of problems, especially among its teenage members. For years, the public exerted increasing pressure for the social networking site to clean up its act. Due to the huge base of users, there have been quite a number of pedophiles, voyeurs, and perverts who routinely scour MySpace profiles looking for minors and mischief.

After a stint of bad publicity the company performed its own research only to discover that around 29,000 registered sex offenders had become members. But that figure doesn’t even come close to reflect the actual number of anonymous sex offenders as well as the predators that haven’t been convicted of any crimes but are still prowling for opportunities.

As a result, numerous public official officials from various states have sought reform. Accordingly, MySpace’s owner News Corp has gone to great pains to hammer out an agreement with 49 state attorney generals in an effort to demonstrate that they are serious about enhancing the safety of their members under age 16.

Consequently, security features have been tremendously upgraded. The highest security levels are now the default setting for minors, such has having their profiles automatically set to private in which the user would have to specifically grant permission to select people to view their account.

But even in the midst of the new safety enhancements and the recent agreements with Attorney General Offices across the country, MySpace still had a very serious internal flaw. A bug in the software allowed anyone to bypass the privacy setting. Pedophiles very quickly shared this exploit with other perverts. Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for people to filch a lot of these photographs and distribute them across the net.

And what is most disturbing was the extraordinary length of time that this flaw existed. It just took way too long for MySpace to identify the problem and then do something about it.

Again, they received a heavy a lot criticism.

However, which issue is really at stake?

There are plenty of young adult women of legal age who enjoy posting images of themselves on MySpace while only wearing a bra and panties (or sometimes less than that) along with publishing explicit journals detailing sex and drug and alcohol use. Underage teenage girls want to be able to do the same thing too!

Why is there so much pressure by critics to force MySpace to be more secure? Is it because they want the company to better protect minors who like to post pictures of themselves in their underwear?

If that is indeed the case, then the obvious question is where is the parent in all of this?

Anything posted on the Internet has the potential to be hacked and exploited or it can fall victim to carelessness. For example, Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, mayor of the small town of Arlington Oregon, posted pictures of herself while only wearing a black bra and panties and used the town’s fire truck as a backdrop. She only intended the pictures to be seen by her friends but for a while, the images were available to the public which then led to widespread distribution across cyberspace when the incident got national attention.

But regardless of whether or not an elected official should be seen only wearing sexy underwear while using municipal property as a prop, the point is that something that is supposed to be personal and very private can be made very public if it is on the Internet.

So if an underage girl likes to post lewd pictures of herself on the web or describe her erotic experiences and sexual fantasies, how much responsibility does a corporation have to protect her?

I am in no way defending the lowlife degenerates who prey on our children because they are scumbags, but I do question the lacking of parenting in our information age. In a previous generation, parents used to have the ultimate responsibility in safeguarding their children. But in today’s modern environment, there are too many parents who have no problem in allowing their children to publicly display their lewdness on the web.

And then there are others who don’t want to know what their kids are doing in cyberspace. Perhaps they think that as long as no one has been arrested, abducted, or mutilated, then everything must be fine.

Now there are some people have given up on parenting. They feel that if an adolescent really wants to have a MySpace account and place lewd pictures on it, then they are going to find a way to do it whether it is at school, at a friend’s house, or somewhere else. So in other words, it is useless to have rules or to monitor their children’s online usage.

What these people don’t understand is that restricting freedom and establishing boundaries is only one facet of parenting. The biggest influence in a child’s life is still the parent. A parent can use that influence as a vehicle to inform and explain to their offspring about the real world and all of its inherent dangers. In addition to discipline, part of that parental role also includes guidance and direction for real life issues.

Every child needs that kind of face time and reinforcement that only a parent can give. If not, then someone else will be more than happy to provide it, such as Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, or Paris Hilton.

A big corporation can only do so much to protect our children. It is time for more parents to step up to the plate and talk to their children about what is safe and appropriate on the Internet.

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