// Langwitches Blog

Working in an elementary school, one might think that issues with social networking places, such as MySpace, are still far off. Well, after a long day at work today, I can tell you that elementary school age children are alive and well and VERY active on MySpace. Maybe not the 5-9 year old crowd, but the tween crowd is wanting to be part of the “cool” and “in” places they hear their older siblings, cousins, neighbors and team mates talk about.

MySpace makes it very clear, when you sign up that the minimum age is 14 years of age. This does not deter most of the children, since they will just make up an age and pretend to be older in order to create their free MySpace account.

Users must be at least 14 to join. According to the MySpace’s Terms & Conditions, if a user is under 18 and misrepresenting their age, the account may be deleted.
If you have sighted a user under 14 years of age on MySpace.com, please contact us with the URL or friend ID number and we will remove it.

I believe it is each parents’ personal responsibility to monitor and guide their student in their online life (just as it is in their offline life!) until they are mature enough and ready to fly on their own. Unfortunately many parents might not know how to keep their student safe on social network places. Some parents are well aware and gave permission to their child to create an account. I can imagine that some of the reasons might be:

• that they are not aware that MySpace has an age restriction (14 and older)
• that they do not comprehend the implications an online presence might have on their child’s future in terms of school and college admission, scholarships, employment and careers.
• that they cannot envision HOW public their child’ MySpace really is and how many people have access to their child’s information
• that they are not aware that ANYTHING their child posts online could, might, can and will eventually be used against them by predators, ex-friends, prospective employers, etc.

I regularly monitor my own childrens’ MySpace page. My 17 and 15 year old have added me as their friend on their private profiles, while my 13 year old does NOT have an account. While I do not read their messages, I do scan over the general tone on the page. I have also been asked several times by parents of friends and students of mine to check their blog or web page out to see if I could spot a safety issue.

Here are the things I scan the page for:

1. No first and last name
2. Don’t give away your geographical location (city)
3. Don’t give away school name
4. Possible double or direct meaning of screen name
5. Overall tone of page
1. Cuss words
2. Sexual
3. Racist
4. Hate words
5. Threats
6. Bullying
7. Violence
8. Offensive
9. threatening
6. Photos
1. sexual
2. provocative
3. age inappropriate
4. identifiable school uniform or school shirts
5. doing something illegal (or pretending)
6. photo resolution (the higher the resolution, the easier and with better results it can be manipulated/photoshoped)
7. bullying (negative comments)
7. Interest and Personality Details
1. How detailed? Could feed all the information to someone who is “grooming” the child.
8. Posting of sports team and competitions
9. Posting of cell phone numbers or AIM screen names
10. Posting of friends’ personal information
11. Friends List
1. Do you know them personally? All of them?
2. Do you have bands added? (Loss of “private profile” control)
3. Do your friends keep your personal information safe?

PLEASE leave a comment if you have additional advice on what to look out for on MySpace.

[tag] Internet_safety, mySpace [/tag]

« links for 2007-05-23
links for 2007-05-24 »
 Email This Post  Print This Post