Social Networking ThreatsSocial Networking threats are real and growing exponentially. Recently, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper's announced that MySpace (one of the popular social networking site) had found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders' profiles on its site. Not long ago, police in Connecticut arrested a 21-year-old man, accusing him of raping a 14-year-old girl he found on MySpace. With the advent of these social networking sites, the social networking threats have also surfaced. Since children and teens post lot of information about themselves, social networking sites are heaven for online predators. Hobbies, interests, date of birth, hair color, friends and much more is often listed for anyone to see on social networking sites. You can imagine how frightening it can be for someone to target your children, if your child post that he/she is going to be at some particular at a particular time and date. There have been several cases where online predators are charged using MySpace or other social networking sites to contact youths with whom they later had sexual contact. The Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported more than 2,600 incidents of adults using the web to target children online in order to engage in sexual activity. Then there was a case of a gay student attending a Christian college was expelled after administration officials viewed photos of the student in drag on Facebook. Twenty middle school students in California were suspended after participating in a MySpace group where one student allegedly threatened to kill another and made anti-Semitic remarks. There are numerous cases like that, and one of the popular case that I like to point out happened in Kansas, where authorities arrested five teenagers after one of the suspects used MySpace to outline plans for a Columbine-like attack on the boys' school. All the above incidents highlights the social networking threats. The problem lies with a fact that social networking pages aren't censored, and any internet user can read on the foul and abusive languages. Do you really want your children to see all those four-letter words? The problem is not limited to content or language, it's the subject, too. Many MySpace or other social networking pages talks about drugs and drinking, and references to "adult" subject matters abound. I am sure that no parents would like their children to read content like this. One of the way to censor the abusive content on social networking site is to use an internet filter. As I mentioned earlier, the social networking sites also provides the facilities to post images. Many images found on those social networking sites are sexually suggestive. Even if your child hasn't posted a lightly clad photo of herself, you can safely assume that she has seen numerous such pictures of other people. After images there comes videos too, and in those videos there are graphics to frighten young children. Lastly, on social networking threats, I like to emphasize on a fact that the people your children meet online do not have to be online predators. In real life, we as parents tend to meet our children's friends, giving us the chance to decide whether or not they're the kind of people we want our children to spend time with. On social networking sites, they could meet anyone at all and we may have no clue. Do you want your 12-year old daughter to have 18-year-old male friends, no matter how innocent she claims it is? Our children are too young to make informed decisions - they need our help. Read on the solution or guidelines on social networking to provide safe socializing environment to our kids. You might be interested to know that more than half of American families with teens use filters or some sort of parental control to limit access to potentially harmful online content, according to a 2005 survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. I sincerely hope that this "social networking threats" article has created an awareness among you.
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