The MySpace Moral PanicAnna Buchanan & Alix

Gilmore

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr5EFFIk70Y 6:43

TRUST

- It [was] the most popular social networking site. Passed by Friendster.

- The main point was just to communicate with friends.

- Now it is remains popular by advertising music, movies, etc.

- Primarily consists of individual user profiles.

What is MySpace?

- There is a privacy issue.

- Teenagers giving out to much information – exposing more of their lives online.

- Easy for online predators to reach teenagers.

THE PROBLEM WITH MYSPACE

- Communications Decency Act (CDA): which made it a federal crime to make pornographic materials available online where children could view them.

- The first attempt by Congress to regulate pornographic material on the internet.

- Occurred in 1996. - Added to the telecommunications act as Title V.

LAWS

Child Online Protection Act (COPA)

- To restrict minors to any material defined as harmful to minors on the internet.

- Never took effect.

- 1998.

Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA)

-Requires schools and libraries to use internet filters and other measures to protect children from harmful online content .

- Deemed constitutional in 2003.

Online Predators Act

- Would require schools and libraries receiving federal funding, specifically “e–rates,” to restrict minor access to “commercial social networking websites and chat rooms”

Reasons for these laws

- Protect children from indecent exposure.

Moral panic: Characteristics • Concern: there is a “heightened level of concern over the behavior of a

certain group or category and the consequences that that behavior presumably causes for the rest of society.”

• Hostility: The group is “collectively designated as the enemy” and viewed as evil, anti–social, and deviant.

• Consensus: A majority of population must believe that “the threat is real, serious, and caused by the wrongdoing group members and their behavior.”

• Disproportionality: Victor writes that the concern is not justified by empirical evidence; that is, “the numbers of deviants are minimal or even non–existent and their harm is very limited or non–existent.”

• Volatility: Moral panics come to prominence very quickly and fade out after a period of time.

5

• In order to justify the passage of sweeping laws restricting all minors’ access to the site, this problem needs to be socially significant. I do not believe that this is a socially significant problem. Rather, I believe that it is indicative of a small, visible number of sensationalized cases that have been used by the media to fuel a moral panic around the site. The idea of the “online predator” is further linked to real harms, such as child abuse and child pornography, to create rhetorical significance for legislative–based action.

Not a Moral Panic

What is an online predator?

Typically refers to people who use the Internet to contact minors for sexual contact. It presumably has its genesis in the more common term “sexual predator” and is almost exclusively used to describe men, as there has been less media coverage of women using the Internet to meet underage boys.

How to Catch a Predator show- contributed to the popularity and prevalence

of the term “online predator.”- depicts a sting operation aimed at exposing

potential child molesters to a national audience. The program began as a special report on Dateline called “Dangerous Web,” but garnered high enough ratings to become a weekly show and a popular culture phenomenon

How the show works: Each episode of the show is set in a different city, where NBC works

with local police officers to set up a house which will be the base for the investigation.

Dateline pays the volunteer organization Perverted Justice a consulting fee to collect the episode’s “subjects;” Perverted Justice is a group of people who frequent chat rooms pretending to be underage girls and boys for the purpose of engaging men in sexual banter

Once phone communication has been established with the subjects, they are encouraged to visit the house with the intent of sexual conduct with an underage girl. The house is full of surveillance cameras, and a cadre of police officers is stationed next door or across the street.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZhsfT9wGp0

- Parents need to be involved and monitor what their children do on the computer.

- Be smart!

- Teach online etiquette – what the Koreans are doing.

- Make profile very private!

Solutions!!

- Don’t talk to strangers, be wary, and don’t post personal information (like your phone number and address).

- Teenagers are encouraged to use technology

but the key is to be smart about it.

Critically examining the claims

- The first claim: “50,000 sexual predators are online at any given time,” - This is not checked, no source for this. “A goldilocks figure” - Dateline has now disowned the number, saying solid statistics about Internet predators are hard to find.

- Second: the link between MySpace and child pornography is tenuous, if non–existent. Indeed, there have been no cases, alleged or actual, where MySpace has been directly linked to child pornography.

- The next claim, that “one in five” children has been approached online for sex, is quite misleading. Dropped to just 3%.