The pretenders
THE other day after school, in his family’s spacious kitchen, Thomas Banks fired up the computer and signed on to MySpace.com, one of the most popular and fast-growing social websites in the country. Thomas’ picture appeared: a slightly goofy tough-guy pose. A snatch of heavy metal -- his theme song -- started playing. Then his “profile” popped up: his eye color, his height, his heritage (“Europe and that crap, aka white boy”). And his age: 26.
Thomas is not 26. He is a slight, freckle-faced 11-year-old who sometimes rides his skateboard to South Pasadena Middle School. Technically, he has no business being on MySpace, since the website tells kids younger than 14 to scram. Not that the hordes of middle-school children who use the site bother to listen.
“How could they ever prove you’re not old enough to be on there?” asked Thomas’ older brother, 14-year-old Alex, who also has a MySpace profile.
They can’t. And so it would appear that sites like MySpace, which is huge among middle-schoolers, are helping to spawn a generation of uninhibited liars.
As far as Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Rocky Costa is concerned, that may not be such a bad thing. “It’s weird, and it’s a shame,” said Costa, project director of the Southern California High Tech Task Force, a multi-agency group that targets computer-related crimes. “But MySpace has absolutely exploded, and the only real way to protect ourselves -- besides filtering and firewalls -- is to always tell yourself, ‘I am not gonna give out authentic information.’ ” (His MySpace moniker is Buff63, for “big ugly fat fellow.”)
To kids, said MIT sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, this is a mixed message at best. “You’re encouraged not to be you, but then if you go online at a place where you shouldn’t be and are not you, then we don’t like it. Then, as soon as they’re 18, we tell them to go to Match.com.”
For millions, social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Xanga represent the perfect intersection of art, commerce and the human need to connect. Musicians, comedians and film studios use the sites to create fan bases. Advertisers buy space on them.
Yet at the same time, there’s growing concern among some parents and school administrators that such websites encourage kids to share salacious stories and sexually charged photos and perhaps leave them vulnerable to predators. Many schools have sent notices to parents to be aware of possible problems. Others have lectured students on social etiquette and safety on the Internet.
‘Addicted’
Kids are certainly enthralled. “I know tons of people who are addicted,” said Rachel Beshoff, an eighth-grader at Hewes Middle School in Santa Ana. “When they get home from school, they’re like, ‘MySpace! MySpace! MySpace!’ ” On the site, 13-year-old Rachel identifies herself as a 100-year-old Buddhist.
Although parents may be horrified by their children’s online behaviors and personas, Turkle said this is to be expected; adolescents try on and discard identities like clothing.
MySpace tries to patrol its site and has deleted profiles of users who say they are younger than 14. To stay online, though, youngsters quickly learn that all you have to do is lie.
Teens, who have had messages of Internet safety drilled into them for years, give lip service to the idea of keeping safe online. Sure, they say, they know not to make conversation with strangers, not to give out personal information such as phone numbers or addresses. And yet the MySpace profiles of these supposedly sophisticated youngsters, often organized by which school they attend, are full of intensely personal information -- height, weight, eye color, hometown, full names and sometimes even phone numbers.
“The problem is when you begin to create an environment for kids,” said Costa, “it now is gonna draw in the people who victimize and prey on kids.” He is not aware of any L.A. County prosecutions involving predators and MySpace, but in September, a 16-year-old girl in Port Washington, N.Y., was sexually assaulted by a 37-year-old man she’d met on MySpace, according to USA Today. He found her at her job, which she had written about. And in June, according to the Sacramento Bee, a 35-year-old Rancho Cordova man was charged with molesting a 12-year-old Folsom girl he met through MySpace.
MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who recently sold their company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million, would not be interviewed by phone but agreed to answer questions by e-mail. (“They just don’t have the bandwidth,” said a spokeswoman, referring to their busy schedules.) They relayed their answers through a public relations firm and would not specifically address the great number of underage users on the site. (“All safety tips are located in the bottom tool bar of MySpace’s main page under ‘Safety Tips,’ and they detail ways in which users can have a safe and meaningful experience on the site,” they wrote.) They ignored a question about the sexual assault in New York.
For parents as well as younger users, the “Safety Tips” tab at the bottom of the MySpace site is a valuable source of information. It includes tips from Parry Aftab, founder of WiredSafety.org, which provides information about staying safe online.
Unlike instant messaging, in which a conversation typically takes place in real time between two people, MySpace offers each user the opportunity to create a personal website. Users can invite other users to be their “friends,” via e-mail. People who are each others’ friends may post messages to one another on their MySpace sites. Whether or not you are someone’s “friend,” though, most profiles are accessible to viewers.
Many of the youngsters who use MySpace don’t realize that. They also may not be mature enough to understand that what they think is funny, predators might see as appealing. And for a 12- or 13-year-old, Costa pointed out, a “predator” can be as young as 16 or 17.
One 13-year-old girl posted a photograph of herself crawling like a vixen across her father’s sports car. A male classmate posted a message asking if that was the car in which he’d had sex with her last summer. It was a profane joke, but her parents were not amused and made her take the photo down. The father of a 16-year-old was shocked when he followed his daughter’s trail of friends through MySpace and found her joking with them about buying drugs, getting high and drinking alcohol to the point of vomiting. On the nights in question, however, she was at home, which led her father to the conclusion that she was making up stories to seem cool, trying on identities depending on whom she was messaging. He took away her computer privileges.
In one sense, said Turkle, the lying that a site like MySpace tacitly encourages -- and authorities like Costa explicitly encourage -- is part of the great adolescent struggle for identity. “The job of adolescence is to fall in and out of love with people, to fall in and out of love with ideas, to join and shed organizations and affiliations,” she said. “The appropriate job for adolescence is to try things out in a relatively consequence-free zone and see what fits. This is what we do now on the Internet because there’s nothing in anyone’s life that feels consequence-free anymore.” On the other hand, she said, “You only have the illusion of safety ... and privacy.”
MySpace, which counts 42 million members and has surpassed EBay, Google and AOL in number of page views, is a place that invites strangers to mingle. This is what worries Costa, but kids are flippant. As South Pasadena’s Alex Banks put it, “I get a friend request about once a day. I don’t always know who they are. Sometimes they’re kids from my school that I’m not friends with or other people I met before.... But sometimes I get requests from these random people and I just say no, you can’t be my friend.” He counts among his 125 official friends a few people he doesn’t know -- people advertising bands or music, he said.
Which ones are strangers?
The bigger problem, as Costa said during an interview in his Santa Fe Springs office, is this: “It’s no longer a matter of ‘Don’t talk to strangers.’ The situation right now is no one really knows who is a stranger.”
Schools know that parents aren’t always aware of what their children are doing online and have taken steps to bring the potential problems of MySpace to parents’ attention. Earlier this year, Santa Monica’s Lincoln Middle School sent a letter home. Around the same time, at Marymount High School, a Catholic girls school in Los Angeles, the school’s director of technology, Patrick E. Lynch, became concerned about the amount of personal information his students were disclosing on MySpace, including where they go to school.
“Students were putting up pictures that were not appropriate,” Lynch said. “They were giving phone numbers, addresses and many pictures ... and more often than not, they were caught in compromising positions in the photos, doing things at parties with friends. They don’t exhibit the best judgment.”
More than that, he said, “They have no concept of how putting that information out could work against them.” In a move that infuriated some students, the school banned access to MySpace from its computers. “I have a pretty good relationship with some of the students, and they barged into my office and said, ‘Mr. Lynch, how could you do this to us?’ They squirmed for about four months, they tested all the machines on campus.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District blocks access to MySpace from all school computers, said district spokeswoman Stephanie Brady.
At Windward School, a private secondary school in Mar Vista, administrators were alerted to the potential problems this fall when an eighth-grader walked up to Eric Mandel, director of the middle school, and said, “Hey, Eric. I saw your profile on MySpace!” Mandel had never visited the site.
Someone had scanned in a photo of him from the school yearbook and written that his goal was to “find the woman of my dreams.”
“It could have been a lot worse,” Mandel said.
As he navigated the site, though, Mandel was surprised to learn that many of his students listed themselves by their school affiliation. He sent parents a warning letter: “We are deeply concerned that the pictures, personal information and contact information contained in these profiles leave our students vulnerable to child predators who roam the Internet searching for potential victims.” The letter included detailed instructions on how to sign on to MySpace and strongly suggested parents look at their children’s sites.
“I always tell parents, don’t expect that to be a Kumbaya moment,” said Tammy Haylock Clem, the middle school’s director of counseling. “The kids are gonna be angry with you. You are the devil. So be OK with that.”
Costa suggests that if kids have computers in their rooms, the screens face the door, so parents can see what’s online any time they wish. Parents should ask to see e-mail and photographs, too, to make sure contacts are appropriate.
Mostly, though, said Costa, parents of teens need to develop stronger backbones.
“I really believe that parents think that breaks some kind of sacred trust with their child and that they are communicating to their child that they are doing wrong and have to be watched,” he said. “I know it’s tough, but parents need to get involved.”
Windward’s director of teen health, Gail Holmes, recently invited Costa to talk to the school’s students about Internet safety. So he put the finishing touches on a humorous PowerPoint presentation and delivered it to several groups of ninth-graders.
Costa focused on MySpace, since it is the social site of choice for this age group. He explained how the Internet works, how unscrupulous employees at the phone company or at Internet service providers could trace users, and why no one should ever give out personal information or post real photographs of themselves.
“The biggest group using MySpace is 13 to 25,” he explained, “but they’re not the only folks in there. Police are accessing it, parents are accessing it, so are the predators and pedophiles. We’re all there.”
A teen raised her hand. “Do you have any suggestions for a friend who is trying to arrange a face-to-face meeting with someone on MySpace, on how to convince them otherwise?”
Costa’s smile disappeared. “Oh, man,” he said with a sigh. It comes down to a choice, he told her: “You’re gonna have to hate yourself at some point in time. You either have to hate yourself on the front end for snitching ‘em off, or you hate yourself on the back end for not saying anything. So the question is, when do you want to hate yourself?”
The girl nodded somberly.
