MySpace To Be Made Safer For Users 251
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'When News Corp. bought the social-networking Web site MySpace.com last July, the media company got two surprises, one good and one bad,' the Wall Street Journal reports. The good news: Traffic nearly doubled in the last half of last year. The bad news: MySpace is being criticized for exposing children to risqué content and sexual predators. In response, 'News Corp. plans to appoint a "safety czar" to oversee the site, launch an education campaign that may include letters to schools and public-service announcements to encourage children not to reveal their contact information."
What do you mean exposing children to predators? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MySpace To Be Made Safer For Users (Score:3, Interesting)
The dangers are real (Score:5, Interesting)
A few months ago, a friend of a student at my school experienced a horrible ordeal. Her best friend was murdered and raped by an assaulter who had obtained her personal information from her "Facebook" [facebook.com] (another popular--mainly among college students--online community service).
Either way, I find it absurd how much people disclose on their profiles. I won't post any links, but people have their addresses, home phone numbers, and--the perfect appetizer for an attacker--half-dressed pictures. I don't know about you, but that smells like trouble to me.
Pure PR (Score:2, Interesting)
Parents, listen up! Do not let the safety czar be in charge deciding what's right for your kids. The only people who should be making those type of decisions are you, the parents. Think about it: the czar has hundreds of thousands of sites to monitor; you have one (per kid). It's a much easier job for you.
Daily Show Clip (Score:5, Interesting)
Misleading title (Score:3, Interesting)
What myspace needs(besides bandwidth) is a "safe mode" where it uses the default CSS layout.
Re:Good Candidate for Safety Czar (Score:3, Interesting)
It's about time the Steve Ballmer chair throwing
Everyone pull together, if you find yourself writing "Steve Ballmer leaned towards the chair, hefted it and....", replace it with "Dick Cheney cocked his shotgun, downed a couple of beers and...."
We can make this cliche work.
Re:responsible design (Score:2, Interesting)
Most pedophiles are female? Most witches were too (Score:0, Interesting)
Lets see? Who is most likely to get in your little kids pants? The lonely shy old guy down the street raking the leaves in his yard? Or that woman at the child care day center that changes your kids diapers every afternoon and wipes them clean? How about the babysitter you leave them with? How about your wife, because you don't like cahnge diapers? Your family doctor, when you take your kid in for a check up? I thought so.
The friendly old guy down the street you think is weird and who you are spreading whispered slander and suspicions about around the neighborhood is just being friendly because he's lonely and has no access to your kids pants.
Most people "assume" women just have more integrity and care and would never do such to children because of their natural assumed inclinations to "motherhood" (rather ignoring that there is a counterpart natural guy inclidnation to something called fatherhood). At any rate, I decided to put this to the test.
I made a profile of someone who looks like a little girl on mate1, which allows female to female communication for free. Its been up for over a year now, and let me tell you, I can be logged in for only minutes and I get flooded by sleezy chat requests and emails from an ocean of lesbians. You think guys are perverts? They can't hold a candle to depraved imaginations and fantasies of lesbian and bisexual women.
As a control, I made a profile of a friendly average looking guy at the same time, just to see how much interest he would get from females. I would subtract that amount from the amount the girl profile got. Let me tell you, they don't even compare. I get maybe a few winks a month and emails to his account. To the girls account, I must get 30 emails a day from perverted females wanting to write nasty to her or meet in person.
Makes you think, don't it?
You know, this whole pedophile scare thing though, has all been done before in history. Except back then it wasn't pedophiles, they were called "witches". All you had to be was accused of being a witch, and all kinds of injustices and slander was levied against you, and in the end you ended up dead whether you confessed or not. This pedophile witchhunt is just that, a witchhunt. Have you ever met a pedophile? I don't imagine so? And of those that are out there, are they really bad people, or just lonely misguided people. Everytime I go to the mall I can walk through an ocena of people without ever being spoken to... which makes me wonder... our society of fear of the unknown grossly isolates us from each other.
As I studied and read on it further, I began to think in caveman terms, that what is called pedophila actually had some purpose in our evolution. Most instincts did, its just our modern interpretation that labels them as evil. For example, murder was a way to defend yourself and survive, but today it is socially unacceptable. The same for theft. Rape, possibly considered one of the most heinous of crimes today, is deeply ingrained into our biological strata as the fundamental way to perpetuate the species. If you watch animal species, you see, probably about half the sex is consensual, and half is not at all.
So where does pedophilia, this interest in childrens genitalia, fit into our evolutionary instinct tree, even though today it is socially unacceptable? Well, if children aren't cleaned up after they defecate, I imagine all kinds of nasty infections and so on can result. T
I've seen very few sane people on Myspace (Score:4, Interesting)