Social Networking

Family and friends mourn over Kayla Reed, in Northern California. The 15-year-old was a member of Myspace until the day of her disappearance. Mother, Majalie Cajuste, grieves over the murder of her 14-year-old daughter, Judy, in New Jersey. Friends say she told them about a man, in his 20s, that she had met on the website Myspace.com (Sexual 1). "Social networking and blogging sites accounted for 17% (about one in every six minutes) of all time spent on the Internet" (Are Social 1). Such topics, such as: cyber bullying, identity theft, sexual predators, and many more are all said to link back to the constant problem that rises today concerning sites like Facebook and Myspace. Social networking sites are beginning to become a dangerous problem towards the safety and privacy of those involved and need to be limited.

Social networking sites have been around since about 1997. Sixdegrees.com is considered to be the first social networking site ever created allowing its users to create personal profiles about themselves and links to other friends. Since then the creation of more and more social networking sites have been made. From the years 2005 to 2009 the popularity of Facebook, twitter, Myspace, and other familiar site have more than quadrupled. As popularity increases so do the types of users starting from young teens now moving towards adults, some even over the age of 50. Facebook reports having bout 90 million US users and 300 million worldwide users, Myspace is said to have more than 32 million users in the US and 130 million worldwide, and Twitter has approximately 54 million worldwide (Are Social 3). These websites are now seen as more than connecting within your friends. Kids are using them as a way to boost their popularity. They are

viewed as "cool" to have a lot of page visits and friends. "It provides a vehicle for youngsters to become "popular" at least online and in their own minds" (Myspace 2). The views on social networking sites from 1997 to now have completely changed. Children are getting the wrong impression with these sites and soon it is going to lead to a major problem in society.

"Just like a car accident, it can happen to you," says high school student Julia Rinaldi (Sexual 2). Children are oblivious and feel invincible when it comes to sexual predators and sites like Facebook and Myspace. They think it cannot happen to them, but only to someone else (Maglio 2). "The Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported more than 1,200 incidents last year of adults using the Internet to entice children" (Sexual, 1). Today children and teens are unsafe, especially on the Internet. Kids lacks common sense when it comes to these sites and are not careful about what kind of information they post on their pages. Not only do they include their zip code, location, school they attend, and full name some even put their phone number (Sexual 2). By releasing this information on the Internet your son or daughter are becoming the next potential victim to a sexual predator (Maglio 2). Social networking sites are unable to control who enters their sites; they cannot verify if people claim to be who they really are, which makes it easier for sexual predators to disguise their true identities. This leaves people unable to figure out who really is a predator and who is not. "In Feb. 2009, Myspace identified 90,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on the site," (Are Social 1). With sexual predators joining these sites with masked identities, making it difficult to

identify all of them, it makes it almost impossible for these sites to remove them completely.

Cyberbullies are seen to becoming a more prevalent problem on social networking sites then those problems regarding predators. Technology is taking bullying to the next level because students are now being exploited in their own homes through social networking. Children's conflicts are now being exploited through social networking allowing them to humiliate others for everyone to see. Starting with just a click of a button, rumors can be spread through emails, instant messaging, facebook, and myspace; thus, damaging a persons social life and reputation. In Washington, a popular 8th grade girl was targeted through cyberbullying. Posts like, "I feel like throwing up just thinking of you" and "everything you do is just a ploy to raise your popularity…u slut…" (Simmons 1). School officials did not take action of this rising problem until the girl got the urge to kill herself. The school then had the students remove the information from the website but did nothing more to stop the bullying from going on. Cyberbullying