Internet Safety and Social Networking Concerns

Online Social Communities, Discourse, and Forum Best Practices

Oct 13, 2009

The Internet looks as though it's here to stay. Whether site content is good or bad when it's up, it's up (in theory) forever...with ever-growing societal consequences.

The Internet can be a terrifying and dangerous place. Its enormous breadth and range casually referred to as "online" is full of pitfalls and caveats, and often promotes more questions than answers. What is OK and not OK on the web, and how does one identify and police suspicious internet activity? Will a MySpace account really affect my employment or college future?

The Growing Internet and Social Networking History

These are all real and valid questions, to be sure, and deserve drawn out consideration and deep research. Of course, by the time we come to an answer, it may be horribly outdated as according to Internet World Statistics (IWS) the number of Internet users in the world grew by 253,397,634 persons in 2008 alone. That's a 19.2 percent yearly increase, which is likely to go up with computers becoming more affordable and high speed internet pushing into rural areas.

Still, it may be useful to identify some loose ground rules when it comes to online forum and social networking. According to an article by Boyd and Ellison, social networking sites are defined as internet services that allow users to...

Further, according to the same article, "what makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks."

It is no doubt because of this that social networking sites have grown into much negative press, although it is important to remember that they did not start out that way. Ryze, a dot com and one of the first social networking sites, was introduced by its creator to friends and members of the San Francisco business and technology community (A. Scott, personal communication, June 14, 2007).

SNS User Agreements, Copyright, and the Law

But this familiarity and intimacy has all but been blown away by a rush of new and massive use, and sites today are infinitely larger and more intimidating than their warm and genial ancestors. MySpace, for example, had (according to a MSNBC online report) 50 million plus members in 2006, and is still one of the fastest growing web sites in the country.

Further, many social networking sites do not (on the whole) require any sort of meaningful identity verification to become registered, and much of the user activity is on the honor system and self-policed. And even if objectionable material is pointed out, it may take some time before site administrators can clean it up.

But sites like MySpace are not really under any obligation to police content anyway, as they are protected by Section 512(c) of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields sites from content liability if they have a system in place to deal with copyright infringement.

So what can possibly be done in the face of all this unfettered, unfiltered, and generally messy social internet free-for-all if sites are not bound to do anything about content? Well, user education is a good place to start, and one resource comes from Parry Aftab, an internet lawyer. Aftab says, "even kids who don't list their names and addresses can provide enough personal information- such as the kinds of bands and boys they love - for a pedophile to use to con their way into their lives."

Can Online and SNS Content Really Be Harmful?

An issue of the New York Times online describes a promising young University of Illinois candidate who applied for an internship at a small consulting company in Chicago. The candidate looked pretty impressive until the company's president stumbled across his MySpace page, which boasted of drug use, sex, and violence. He was immediately turned down for the job.

That being said, only a handful of colleges report checking on an applicant's SNS posts, and they do so only in extreme circumstances. But they are beginning to look, and according to the National Association for College Admissions Counseling online (NACAC.com) a high school freshman was suspended from a Maryland school because of online photos. And recently police busted an under-aged drinking party at George Washington University after invitations were found online.

So in the end, the best advice may be to stay well-informed, read your user-agreements before you accept them (many sites retain full copyright on whatever you post, even after you stop membership), and don't give away any personal information to untrusted sources.

Above all, remember that whether content is good or bad when it's up, it's up, and it's up (in theory) forever…with ever-growing societal consequences.

The copyright of the article Internet Safety and Social Networking Concerns in Social Networking/Tagging is owned by Jeremy Perkins. Permission to republish Internet Safety and Social Networking Concerns in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.