GrimJack said:
Admittedly, this guy is an asshat.
However, these shows are bull. They are trying to cause a panic by 'proving' that Myspace is just a breeding ground for predatory behavior. Their tactics stink - they leave out facts like Myspace has an online user base that's larger than the population of LA... and that most of the members lie about their age, and so on.
In short, sure, there are predators on Myspace and similar sites. However, your kids are more likely to face sexual assault walking down the street than they are online - and walking down the street is by no means very likely either.
The media used to be informative, and a source you could trust. These days, it isn't about being helpful and informative; it's about inducing paranoia, and trying to see who can get the most shocking, perverse piece of junk on the air. I think they like to call it "groundbreaking".
"My kid was molested because they got on the internet". What? There's a large segue missing between the cause and effect.
This somehow reminds me of the parent who e-mailed "Robert Hamburger", the guy who made real ultimate power.net, and claimed that their kid got ideas from his website and started misbehaving. She's blaming the website's author. People want to blame everyone else for their own shortcomings. Maybe if the mother curbed their kid's internet time, or monitored them and GOD FORBID, acted like a parent, the kid wouldn't be "getting ideas" from websites. People are too lazy to be real parents, and they need a scapegoat for when something goes wrong.
When I was 16 and we first got a decent computer with the internet, the computer was in the living room. There was a specific amount of time I was allowed, unless I was working on a school project. I knew how to build a computer. I worked, bought parts, built my own, put it in my room and that's when I started doing "bad things" on the internet. As soon as parental supervision is gone, the chance of the internet leading to bad things in real life increases thousandfold.
