2008 Woodie Awards
Are you the next MySpace victim?
Johnson, Marion
Issue date: 10/5/06 Section: Points Of View
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At any given point in the day millions of people, pre-teens, teens, adults and those a little bit older are logging onto MySpace.
MySpace allows people to create their own pages that aim to represent their personal identities by listing a variety of information from age to favorite bands, even allowing users to post pictures and personal blogs, giving their innermost thoughts out there to the inter-world.
MySpace has made keeping in touch with friends and making new ones less daunting.
Enhancements to MySpace since its birth have included adding calendars to track important events and displaying and creating a link to one's closest friends right on the page.
With all of this information available, it is no wonder MySpace is rapidly becoming predators' number one search engine.
Almost every day news anchors, as well as newspaper journalists, are reporting new tragedies hosted by MySpace.
The world has seen countless minors kidnapped, molested, raped and murdered because of the free access given to predators via this site.
Recently MySpace violence has escalated. Instead of targeting just one child for some perverted fun, whole schools are getting violent threats.
Such is the case in Vevay, Indiana, at Switzerland County High School earlier this week.
After a bomb threat some days earlier, numerous students received violent threats against their lives sent to them not through telephone calls or a good old creepy magazine cut out through the mail slot, but a message through MySpace.
This means someone wishing to cause great harm to countless children searched out each of their pages, was able to look up any of the personal information that any of these kids put up, and then sent them a message promising severe danger to each and every one of them.
While yes, this is a horrible occurrence, and it is even more horrible that it could happen to anyone simply because they post a profile on MySpace, what's even more horrible, and just as true, is that everyone who posts a profile on MySpace, is begging for this to happen to them.
MySpace allows people to create their own pages that aim to represent their personal identities by listing a variety of information from age to favorite bands, even allowing users to post pictures and personal blogs, giving their innermost thoughts out there to the inter-world.
MySpace has made keeping in touch with friends and making new ones less daunting.
Enhancements to MySpace since its birth have included adding calendars to track important events and displaying and creating a link to one's closest friends right on the page.
With all of this information available, it is no wonder MySpace is rapidly becoming predators' number one search engine.
Almost every day news anchors, as well as newspaper journalists, are reporting new tragedies hosted by MySpace.
The world has seen countless minors kidnapped, molested, raped and murdered because of the free access given to predators via this site.
Recently MySpace violence has escalated. Instead of targeting just one child for some perverted fun, whole schools are getting violent threats.
Such is the case in Vevay, Indiana, at Switzerland County High School earlier this week.
After a bomb threat some days earlier, numerous students received violent threats against their lives sent to them not through telephone calls or a good old creepy magazine cut out through the mail slot, but a message through MySpace.
This means someone wishing to cause great harm to countless children searched out each of their pages, was able to look up any of the personal information that any of these kids put up, and then sent them a message promising severe danger to each and every one of them.
While yes, this is a horrible occurrence, and it is even more horrible that it could happen to anyone simply because they post a profile on MySpace, what's even more horrible, and just as true, is that everyone who posts a profile on MySpace, is begging for this to happen to them.
