aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Pandering pols or protecting minors?

We’re pretty well aware these days of the problem of predator priests in the Catholic church. Now the Southern Baptists stand accused of ignoring the sex predator pastor problem in its rank; just yesterday Pam pointed to this example.

Still the focus of the attorneys general of all 50 states is:

...to pressure MySpace, Facebook Inc. and other Internet social-networking sites to put in place greater parental controls and age-verification tools so minors can’t access the sites so easily.

Led by Richard Blumenthal and Roy Cooper, the attorneys general of Connecticut and North Carolina, respectively, the group is working together to pressure the social-networking sites for changes and push for new laws.

The facts about online youth victimization are clear. It’s politics - a politics of fear - that is dragging us down this road and keeping us from more effectively assessing and addressing the very real problems. On Boing Boing danah boyd reacts to the WSJ piece:

The AGs have been perpetuating a culture of fear around SNSs for a long time now, but most of their fears are ungrounded.  Research by Ybarra, et al. has shown that safety efforts have focused on the wrong things.  (A broader roundup of research in this area is discussed at the Internet Caucus’ seminar on the topic; video, audio, and transcripts can be found here.) The AGs have also been screaming danger since they learned that 29K people on MySpace are on the sex offenders list.  BBC reports that there are over 600K people registered in the States (meaning that less than 5% of sex offenders have profiles, indicating that sex offenders are far less likely to have profiles than average adults).  On top of that, most sex offenders on the list have nothing to do with children.  (Stephanie Booth does a great job of discussing who all is on these lists and why.) Combine this with the National School Boards Association report that less than .08% of teens meet someone offline without parental permission and you realize that very few teens are at risk. MySpace and Facebook are far far far safer than most places that teens hang out (including their own homes, schools, churches, etc.), but the AGs gain a lot more public credibility by screaming “danger!” when talking about social network sites than they do when talking about homes, schools, churches, etc.