MYSPACE (long)
 

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Last December, a mischievous student used a home computer to create an account on the social networking site MySpace bearing the name and likeness of his school principal, Eric Trosch.

The profile the Hermitage, Pennsylvania, Hickory High School student bestowed on his principal was not kind. For "birthday" he listed "too drunk to remember." And for vital stats like eye and hair color he wrote, simply, "big" -- a poke at the educator's girth that he managed to weave into most of the 60-odd survey questions in Trosch's fictional profile: Do you smoke? "Big cigs." Do you swear? "Big words." Thoughts first waking up? "Too … damn … big."

The teen told some friends at school about the gag. Big mistake.

As a judge would later put it, "word of the parody … soon reached most, if not all, of the student body of Hickory High School," and the fake MySpace profile, along with several less nuanced commentaries crafted by other students, became a monster hit at the school. The administration banned student PC use for six days, canceling some classes, while they traced the profile to 17-year-old senior Justin Layshock, who promptly confessed and apologized.

"We grounded him and didn't allow him on the computer for two weeks," says Layshock's mother, Cherie Layshock. But the school had stronger medicine in mind. Layshock was suspended for 10 days, then transferred into an alternative education program for students incapable of functioning in a regular classroom.

A gifted learner who had been enrolled in advanced-placement classes and tutored other kids in French, Layshock spent the next month in a scaled-down three-hour-a-day program where a typical assignment saw students building a tower out of paper clips as a lesson in teamwork. The punishment led to an ACLU lawsuit that is ongoing, and garnered the school district a slew of critical stories in the local papers.

And that's how the thin-skinned educators of Hermitage joined the great MySpace crackdown of '06.

Similar scenes are playing out around the country, as school teachers and administrators hold community conferences or send home bulletins alerting parents to the dangers of allowing their kids to use MySpace unsupervised.

In recent weeks newspapers from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Rutland Herald have pressed out stories -- often on the front page -- with headlines like "Online Danger Zone" and "The Trouble With MySpace." An NBC Dateline show in January colored MySpace "a cyber secret teenagers keep from tech-challenged parents."

Meanwhile, schools are racing to block the site at the campus firewall. "Some argue that it's educationally valid, others say they're seeing kids beat up over it," says David Trask, a junior high teacher and technology director at Vassalboro Community School in Maine. "In my view, it doesn't have much (educational) value."

MySpace's rapid transformation into the largest community of teens and twenty-somethings in history made a backlash perhaps inevitable. In the three years since its launch, MySpace has gathered over 57 million registered users (counting some duplicates and fake profiles). As of last November, it enjoyed a 752-percent growth in web traffic over one year, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

In July the site was purchased for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., and late last year launched its own record label in partnership with Interscope Records.

Concerns over the site fall generally into two categories: unease over the type of content teens are posting, and fear of the type of people they're meeting.

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolf says to his knowledge the backlash hasn't caused any advertisers to drop their support of the site. "We get phone calls from time to time, but when we describe the safety measure that we've put into place generally the advertisers are relieved and feel good about what we're doing."

But the backlash isn't toothless. This month, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced a criminal probe into the service's practices, after reports that as many as seven underage girls in one region of the state were fondled or had consensual sex with adult men they'd met through the site, and who had lied about their age. In a press release, Blumenthal called MySpace "a parent's worst nightmare."

In a rash of similar sex abuse cases around the country, adult MySpace users are accused of preying on underage girls. This month, 26-year-old Nathan Contos of Santa Cruz, California, was arrested in charges of molesting a 14-year-old girl he met on MySpace while allegedly posing as a teenager himself. Jaime Freeman, a 22-year-old Bakersfield, California, man is facing similar charges after allegedly molesting three underage girls he met through MySpace. Last week, a 27-year-old Maine resident was sentenced to three years in prison for his relationship with a 14-year-old girl he met on the site. She claimed to be 19 in her MySpace profile but he continued to pursue the relationship even after learning her real age.

The spate of MySpace-related sexual predation stories undeniably has the feel of an epidemic, and it stands as the most persuasive evidence for the "parent's worst nightmare" viewpoint. But put in context, it's also the most overblown.

In actuality, the incidents that have been publicly linked to the site are dwarfed by the overall number of such cases historically prosecuted nationwide. An August study by the National Center for Juvenile Justice estimated there were about 15,700 statutory rapes reported to law enforcement agencies in the United States in 2000, based on an analysis of data collected by the FBI. That amounts to 43 cases per day. In fact, with a reported population of 57 million users, MySpace is arguably safer from such crime than other communities that haven't been the subject of the same scrutiny. One example: California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million.

Novelty makes news and new technologies tend to pick up and draw new attention to old problems that never went away. "It's reminiscent of some of the coverage of chat rooms when they became popularized, and there was much talk about how people were exposing themselves in chat rooms," says Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The notion of somebody claiming to be a teenager has been around since IRC…. How dangerous is MySpace compared to other mediums? As compared to the real world?"

UC Berkeley researcher Danah Boyd has studied the MySpace phenomenon for two years, and she concludes teen users are generally more savvy than their parents and the media give them credit for.

"I ask if they ever get e-mails from older men, and they say, 'Yeah, I just delete them. They're gross,'" says Boyd. "There have been more articles on MySpace predators than there's been reported predators online. It's a hyped up fear, and it scares the **** out of parents."

There's a sense of déjà vu surrounding the MySpace furor. Parents in the 1950s were horrified to discover that the comic books their children were reading contained violent and sometimes gruesome cartoon imagery, leading to congressional hearings and the formation of an industry "comic book code" that held titles to wholesome standards.

In the 1980s, parents opened their kids' bedroom doors and were buffeted by heavy metal music, leading to another round of panic and "Parental Advisory" labels on albums. In the '90s, it was rap. In the wake of the Columbine massacre, wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt to school could be grounds for suspension.

This time, though, the target of the crackdown is content created by teens and not just consumed by them.

The very design of a teenager's MySpace page can be shocking to adult eyes. A highly customizable amalgam of blogging, music sharing and social-discovery services, a typical page is a near perfect reflection of the chaos and passion of youth: a music-filled space, rudely splattered with photos and covered in barely-legible prose rendered in font colors that blend together and fade into the background.

"The profiles are hideous," says a technology specialist at a southern Oregon school district that's recently started blocking the site for safety reasons. "I've seen yellow text on a red background before."

"It looks like a teenager's bedroom," says Boyd. "It's not parsable to most adults, because it's not supposed to be for them."

When adults do parse it, it looks pretty bad. Teens are posting provocative photos, and they frequently summon the kind of language parents would rather not see under their children's bylines, while swapping sexual banter, dishing on school faculty or peers and sharing stories about drinking and drugs.

In a trend that first came to the fore on the online diary site LiveJournal, they're posting information online that they wouldn't offer their parents or teachers, as though they can't imagine that their virtual space would ever be visited by paternalistic eyes.

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The most oft-stated concern about all this information is that predators might use it to track down the kids, then abduct or attack them. Actual cases of this happening are hard to find. Instead, like Layshock, the teens themselves are being treated as offenders, garnering punishment for writing about their teachers, school administrators or each other.

In November, a 16-year-old girl at Paramus High School in New Jersey had three days added to an existing suspension for posting mean comments about another student on her MySpace page. Last month, seven students in Lincoln, Nebraska, were suspended from their high school basketball team after a MySpace message mentioned they'd been drinking alcohol.

Early this year, administrators at Powell High School in Tennessee suspended two sophomores and a junior for as long as 30 days for posting off-color messages under a teacher's name. Last week, under threat of an ACLU lawsuit, Littleton High School in Colorado reluctantly readmitted a 16-year-old MySpace user who had been suspended for posting a satirical commentary on the school.

In many of these cases it's clearly the adults who are misbehaving. Under a 1969 Supreme Court decision Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, even on-campus student speech is afforded First Amendment protection at public schools, unless it "materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others."

Several lower courts have applied the same standard to off-campus speech that has on-campus impact, but have held that criticism of faculty doesn't qualify as material disruption, even if the author uses four-letter-words.

A rare exception is a 2000 Pennsylvania case in which the court ruled against an eighth-grader whose website depicted his algebra teacher's severed head dripping with blood, an animation of her face morphing into Adolph Hitler and a solicitation for $20 contributions "to help pay for the hitman."

Compared to that, Layshock's "big" website is rarefied social commentary. "For them to punish the student by interfering with his schooling is really beyond the pale," says Pennsylvania ACLU legal director Vic Walczak. "At some point school districts need to wake up and understand that there are limits to their authority to punish students for out of school speech.… The principal can't play parent when the student is doing something at home."

School and district officials declined to comment for this article on the Layshock case.

What schools can legally do, Walczak concedes, is block MySpace from campus computers. And they're doing it. Of course, some resourceful students are finding ways around the campus firewall, typically by routing their web surfing through internet proxy servers. When officials close one hole, the kids start looking for another.

"They'll tell me straight up, 'Dude, that filter stinks, I went right around it,'" says the southern Oregon educator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "You do what you can."

If one accepts the proposition that MySpace is dangerous, then even an effective on-campus block is a bit futile: Kids have plenty of access to computers. To address this, Trask is organizing a local "internet safety night" in early March that he hopes will be attended by 200 or more parents. He's inviting a police cyber-crime specialist to speak.

A thoughtful educator who admits to mixed feelings about blocking the site, Trask says he has never tried to punish kids for their MySpace use -- he just wants parents to know about it. His junior high students are at the youngest end of MySpace's user base. "My goal is to let parents know, 'Guess what, this is out there. And your child may be on there.'"

Not all teachers are in favor of blocking the site.

"When someone says 'You can't', to an adolescent, that means, 'This must be cool,'" says Nick Fenger, a teacher and technologist at the small Trillium Charter School in Portland, Oregon. Fenger says the MySpace furor has generated a vigorous debate among his school's administration and faculty about how to respond. In his view, the site's popularity provides a "teachable moment" that could be used to guide safe internet habits, and even to improve student writing and grammar skills.

"Maybe the MySpace medium is another channel where we can be working with our students," says Fenger. To that end, he's forming a student-teacher committee to explore positive uses of MySpace. "The reason I think a lot of schools don't go this way is it takes staff, it takes resources. It takes faculty time and it takes students' time."

Boyd argues persuasively that MySpace is serving an important role for teens who need to interact with one another away from adults as part of the normal socialization process. "We all forget that teenage years are all about hanging out," she says.

Teens are doing this on the internet, in part, because there are fewer public places they can claim as their own, and safety-conscious parents are more reluctant than past generations to let their kids go out into a real world unsupervised.

"Let your kids go hang out down the street with their friends, and they won't spend so much time online," says Boyd. "But that's not happening."

CEO DeWolfe is careful not to dismiss parents' safety concerns, and he says the company has plans to hire a full safety director -- "somebody to think about safety and security 24 hours a day, seven days a week" -- in addition to a variety of other existing safety enhancements and partnerships. But he attributes part of the backlash to the service's relative newness as a social force.

"MySpace … may be the fastest-growing site of all time," DeWolfe says. "I think any time you have that kind of social phenomenon, especially one that not everyone totally understands, sometimes I think people will lash out against things that they don't understand."

Justin Layshock started regular classes again last week, though the lawsuit continues. "The school's policies are very vague and need to be changed," says Cherie Layshock. There have already been some policy changes in the Layshock household -- Justin isn't allowed to use the home computer without asking his parents first, she says.

As for MySpace, she hadn't heard of the site before Justin was busted for the fake profile of his principal. But afterwards she thought to ask her son if he had a profile of his own. He did. "It was just general information about himself," she says. "There was nothing bad on it. It was okay."


Long, but stupidly funny IMO.

quite long... but, informative, and yes, funny

WOot! To myspace!

My, Myspace

www.myspace.com/shankstah

LoL Cliffs notes please???

and yea thats gay they suspended him for that? what the hell...if i was the teacher i'd play it off as funny and make a myspace profile of the kid with the ugliest girl at school...lol

I said it was long from the get go...

Ya need to read the majority of it... not just the first 3 paragraphs:rolleyes:

Well u posted it, so give me the cliffs notes...

make yer own cliff note.

Go back and read the "title"

It is labeled MYSPACE (LONG)

not myspace long cliff notes...

dont like it? tuff... make yer own cliff notes:rolleyes:

Myspace is for middle school kids and the 40 year old men that want to touch them. :D

i got thru the first sentence then gave up...we need cliff notes....haha

Well then...Giggity All the way to the school!...lol actually there are quite a few old people on here...hmmmm Innnteresting...

myspace is ****!n lame...... its pretty funny though, how the kids act like themselves, and the parents blame their behavior on the website, not on the kids. just suck it up and accept ur kid isnt the perfect little angel u think he/she is.........

And today in Hampton Roads Va. A student was 'long term suspended' from a local high school because a MySpace Blog led investigators to believe he was plotting to manufacture and plant a bomb at his school. Police searched his house and found powder, wire and other supplies needed to make this bomb. After further investigating, it was discovered that his mom videotaped him setting off a test bomb in a remote field outside city limits. The mom might be facing criminal charges also.

people are just stupid...they have to realize that police look at these websites for this kinda crap...uhhh, what else to say...

lol, f**k yes....

damn your a dick. why not just post the link or something. instead of wasting bandwidth with this crap. no way in hell is anyone going to read this.

LOL HAHAHAHAHAHA +1

true true. SO TRUE!!! I don't dig the myspace thing. Its just a bunch of little kids tryin to be grown a** people. just my 2 cents

bandwidth?

i highly doubt text takes up that much...

idk tho, so....