News for the Week of June 1, 2008
A top story this week shows how easily journalists, parents, employers and school administrators - anyone - can find people in any social-networking site...
Finding bog snorkelers in MySpace
Well, this isn't just about finding bog snorkelers (for the great unwashed, I'll get to what it is in a moment). It's about how easily journalists and other users of search engines (maybe parents too) can find people in any social-networking site. The article in Journalism.co.uk shows how easily reporters can search social sites for case studies and background info and how easily that can turn up the most specific details about people's lives. Within 10 minutes the writer - who'd set out to "find private information" about someone under 16, including where s/he could be found - "was able to find the mobile number of a 15-year-old girl in South London, the address where a 17-year-old waitress is employed in Kent," etc. The article shows how to do advance searches, for example for "pro-ana" sites (supporting anorexia) or bog snorkelers, preferably in a general search engine such as Google, not in the social site itself: "If you are doing research on the fury caused by pro-anorexia sites on the web then you will find only a handful of 'pro-ana' ... references using Bebo's search tool. But more than 170 Bebo pages can be found in Google using this search string: site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo 'pro-ana'." For "bog snorkeling," 120 results in MySpace were turned up with this string: site:myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction "bog snorkelling". As for what bog snorkeling is, it's a competitive sport - sometimes combined with running and mountain biking in a new kind of triathlon - see this page in Wikipedia for more.
Court rules on student's blog post
Here's further proof that online behavior can lead to offline consequences: A federal appeals court ruled that a high school in Connecticut did not violate a student's free-speech rights by disciplining her because of a blog commented posted from her home. The reason, reports the Hartford Courant, that "her blog post 'created a foreseeable risk of substantial disruption' at the school." The student was barred from serving as a class officer and speaking at graduation. The Courant added that the court "stopped short of declaring how far schools can go in regulating offensive Internet speech made off campus." Here's my original post about the Avery Doninger case.
In other news...
- Teen rape suspects plead guilty. Four suspects ages 17 and 18 "pleaded guilty to raping a Seattle-area girl who later identified two of her attackers on her MySpace page," United Press International reports. The 16-year-old victim of the assault, which occurred last fall, met offline with the four after communicating with them online and was assaulted "on a darkened road." UPI adds that "the girl later described what had happened on her MySpace page," after which police "obtained a search warrant to capture email messages about the incident exchanged among the suspects."
- 1 in 5 Oz youth cyberbullied. Twenty-two percent of Australian youth have been harassed or bullied online, according to Australia's annually Youth Poll. Even so, "the internet plays a critical role in the lives of 15-to-20-year-olds, with 64% having a social network site, The Age cites the survey as finding. The 22% cyberbullying figure compares to about 33% in the US (for more US data, see "Cyberbullying: Clarity needed"). Not unlike in the US, probably, "body image was a major concern to 54 percent of the [Australian] youths surveyed, 46 percent of whom knew someone who had committed suicide or tried to do so."
- 'Hate 2.0.' The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, recently testified before Congress that there has been a "stark rise in the number of hate and terror sites and Web postings," a New York Times blog reports. Its annual report says the Center has identified about 8,000 such sites in the past year, up 30% over last year, the blog adds. Contributing to the problem is the rise of the social Web on which people post hateful videos, comments, etc. The Center "attributes a third of the 30% spike to blogs and discussion groups that support terrorism. The rest is the material of age-old hatreds: 40% anti-Semitic, 20% anti-black, 15% anti-immigrant and the rest a hodge-podge of anti-religious, anti-government sentiment." To counteract all this, the Wiesenthal Center is asking Web users to participate in a sort of Web neighborhood watch program by emailing links to hate sites, videos, and groups to ireport@wiesental.com.
- Police on gaming community risks. I don't like the excessive reporting about "predators" online that go way beyond alerting parents to spreading the kind of fears that cause overreaction and shut down parent-child communication (the latter can put kids at greater risk because they go underground at a time when grownup street smarts are needed more than ever). But this is a predation story worth parents' awareness. "FBI officials said they are now investigating a number of cases in southern Ohio in which sexual predators have used online gaming systems to find victims," WAPT TV in Cincinnati reports. "What makes the new technology especially dangerous, agents said, is that players can talk to one another using headsets." Last year a 30-year-old woman was arrested by the FBI for using Xbox Live to exchange nude photos with a teenager in another state, and in 2006 I blogged about a 26-year-old man in California who was accused of grooming a boy in the same gaming community. To learn about one small group that's there for young gamers in Xbox Live, see "Support for young gamers." See also a 2005 item "A mom writes: Trash talk in online games."
