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On-line safety through common sense
- Posted by Rob (#1) on July 4, 2006 12:45 CEST
Please put down that webcam for a while and while you're at it, put those boobs back where they belong as well. Profile sites such as MySpace are dangerous. Join any such network and you will soon end up in some pervert's basement. Raped and prostituted if you're lucky, dismembered in all other cases.
Or that's the impression one would get by reading The Dead Kids of Myspace for a while. It doesn't even matter whether you are the stereotypical 14-year-old inexperienced virgin (as if!) or not:
Two girls - 14- and 15-years-old - chatted on MySpace with a man for two weeks, claiming to be an 18-year-old named "Natalia." When the man showed up for a tryst at Natalia's supposed apartment, the two girls robbed him at gunpoint!
Scott Granneman's defense of social networks quotes heavily from the list of MySpace victims, but then fortunately makes the same point I've been making for the past eleven years, when I first started to meet people "from the Internet" in real life:
Look, I know there are really bad people using MySpace to do really bad things. If its criminal, they should be caught and punished. But I also know that there are really bad people in the grocery stores, at the movie theaters, in parks, and even on the other end of the phone.
Dead on. I'm also sick of the "Internet is dangerous" hype. The majority of MySpace's 87 million users know and apply the decades-old common sense rule to never meet in private and on your own, so why can't most policy makers, columnists and parents? Follow common sense and MySpace offers long weekends full of consensual sex yet void of dismemberment. No amount of parental guidance or law expansion necessary whatsoever.
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