Cover Story

By Megan Hill

Contributing writer

As if the Internet wasn’t addicting enough already, two Web sites are giving users more reasons to log on.

And more ways to stalk people.

MySpace and Facebook, two networking Web sites, have risen above other, similar sites. MySpace boasts nearly 80 million members, with 6 million new members joining each month. The site is second in page views only to Yahoo!, passing up other popular sites like eBay and Google. They are free to users and supported by ads.

MySpace is based in Los Angeles and was launched in January 2004. Users can post pictures, videos and information about themselves on their profiles, including where they work and attend school. Friends can write comments and view blog entries. A search on MySpace for users at the University of South Alabama yielded 2,070 profiles, 501 at Spring Hill College and 424 at the University of Mobile. MySpace was so popular at one Texas community college, school officials banned its use to free up bandwidth.

MySpace was created to promote bands and musicians, and this is still one of its most popular features. Now, over 1 million artists and bands have profiles on the site.

Facebook first opened to college students and is now available at some high schools. With over 7 million users, every four-year college in the U.S. is on Facebook as well as over 22,000 high schools. Facebook is the seventh most popular Web site.

Facebook users have fewer privacy options. The default privacy settings allow only their friends – people mutually approved as buddies on the site – and classmates to view profiles and pictures. The site is now a staple of the college experience, and one would be hard-pressed to find a college student who is not a member. Membership at Spring Hill numbers over 1,100; more than 6,000 at South Alabama, and almost 500 at the University of Mobile.

Profiles can only be attained by having a school e-mail address, to try to ensure that only members of that college have access. Facebook is not limited to students, though. Staff members, coaches, professors and administrators can sign up if they have an e-mail address with the school.

Facebook users can join “groups” with other members at their schools. Some of the most popular groups at Spring Hill are “The Drinking College of the South has a Jesuit Problem” (307 members), “We’re Not Snobs, We’re Just Better Than You” (246 members) and “Yes, I’m Still in Catholic School” (209 members).

The sites draw a young crowd that wants to keep in touch with friends or find new music. For some, logging in can become something of an addiction.

“They’re very good for wasting time,” said Alyson Gamble, a Spring Hill student who uses both Facebook and MySpace.

“I check both on a daily basis,” said South Alabama student Christian Smith.

Because of their booming popularity, these sites have raised questions about safety and privacy on the Internet. Some students have been reprimanded for what they post on their Facebook profiles, and one college student was expelled in November. Criminal charges were filed against students who rushed the field after a Penn State University football game and then joined a Facebook group to boast about it. The University of New Mexico temporarily banned access to Facebook on the campus network. Texas Christian University began offering seminars on Facebook common sense, because so many students were posting compromising pictures of themselves involving alcohol. Underage students who post pictures of themselves drinking are reprimanded at other schools.

The Secret Service showed up at the dorm of a University of Oklahoma student, who joked on Facebook about killing President Bush and replacing him with a monkey.

While privacy may be an issue for students using Facebook, officials insist it is safe.

“Facebook is the safest social network on the Web,” said Facebook spokesperson Chris Hughes. “Unlike other sites like MySpace where the info is available to over 20 million people, on Facebook, a user’s profile is available at most to a few thousand people who already share in that person’s ‘real-world’ community.” Hughes helped start the Web site in 2004 while he was a student at Harvard University.

Gamble expressed some reservations about posting personal information.

“I’ve removed most of my personal information from the sites, and set my profiles to private, but I still worry about people learning too much about me,” she said. “I tried to stop using the sites altogether, but they provide an easy way to keep in touch with friends who live in other cities. The Internet is much cheaper than long distance.”

Smith said she is not as concerned.

“I don’t feel like my safety was compromised on either. All these articles about privacy issues with MySpace make me mad, because it’s what you’re telling people. It’s not like they are trying to dig hard to find stuff out about you,” she said.

She did say she takes care with her personal information. “I don’t want complete strangers being able to know everything about me, it’s kind of creepy.”

While the problems on Facebook mainly relate to college students’ online indiscretions, MySpace’s issues are more serious. The biggest concerns are with young users, who sometimes compromise their safety by posting information about where they live, work and attend school.

One of the biggest draws of the site, other than the music, is that it allows its members the ability to create an online persona, to express themselves, and to find other people with similar interests.

“I like MySpace, because you can usually find people with similar interests as you and it’s a nice way to meet new people in your area that you normally might not see,” said Smith, who used MySpace to connect with a classmate at South before introducing herself in person.

Teenagers and pre-teens can create their own identity, find validation and meet people their age with similar interests, much more easily than in real life. They can experiment with the Internet, and it is consequence-free. Almost.

All this information floating around makes things easy for pedophiles. A Houston man sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl after connecting with her on MySpace. As many as seven girls were reportedly assaulted in Connecticut by men they met on MySpace. Another case in New York involves a man who allegedly molested a 16-year-old girl he met on MySpace.

It doesn’t stop there. Kids can use MySpace to post threats and harass classmates, as did students in Maine, California and New Jersey. Two Michigan students posted threats to shoot their classmates and were arrested on a misdemeanor charge. In April, five teenage boys in Kansas were arrested when police uncovered their elaborate school shooting plot. They had planned their attack by communicating through MySpace.

MySpace has also been criticized for its age-inappropriate, sometimes graphic content. A quick search on MySpace produces thousands of pages of profiles with links to groups such as Drunks United, which has over 55,000 members. Entrance to the group’s page requires first getting past a warning that it contains adult content.

“MySpace’s terms of use agreement specifically prohibits posting any pictures and or content that displays nudity, hate speech and/or obscene content,” said a MySpace spokesman who declined to have his name used for this article.

But a quick browse around the site shows some questionable content, that either slipped by the scanning or hasn’t been caught yet. Young users may still be exposed to questionable content, and can even access information about where to find drugs, as did one 12-year-old Midwestern girl, who was recently interviewed by ABC’s “Primetime.”

Locally, there have been no major problems with either Facebook or MySpace, said Mobile County Public Schools spokesperson Nancy Pierce. Eric Gallichant, spokesperson for the Mobile Police Department, also said he knows of no problems with the sites that have been reported to local police. He said there are no officers designated to sit at a computer and pose as a child to trap pedophiles, but that any calls about online abuse would go through the Juvenile department or Child Advocacy.

But in case those problems do arise, there are a number of safety nets put in place by these Web sites to protect their users.

“Since its inception, MySpace has developed a series of initiatives designed to protect our users against inappropriate conduct and content, including specific measures to protect our younger users,” the MySpace spokesman said.

MySpace posts a link to Safety Tips at the bottom of each page on the site, which warns users not to post personal information and to be careful about adding strangers as friends. There is also a section for parents and links to Web sites like WiredSafety.org and Netsmartz.org.

The site bans kids under 14 from signing up, but kids get around that restriction by lying about their age when they sign up. MySpace says it deletes profiles of underage users, and it claims to have removed some 250,000 profiles of members who lied about their age.

Users who are under 16 automatically have their profiles set to be viewable by only their friends. Anyone under 18 has to review the safety tips before completing registration.

MySpace claims to actively police its site, reviewing every image uploaded (more than 2 million daily, it says) and works with image hosting sites to make sure members aren’t linking inappropriate material to these sites to skirt MySpace’s terms of use.

“The company currently uses 1/3 of its workforce to scan, screen and process customer care requests and inquiries,” the MySpace spokesman said.

The site limits access to discussion groups with adult content, barring those who are under 18 from entering. Members can also report any of these violations to MySpace.

MySpace has begun working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Advertising Council to issue public service advertisements on Internet safety. MySpace is also partnered with WiredSafety.org.

They’ve even created a new position within the company, to oversee all safety, education, privacy and law enforcement programs. Hemanshu Nigam, the new chief security officer, began work May 1. Nigam worked for the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting child exploitation online.

MySpace claims it is committed to the safety of its members.

“MySpace holds the safety and privacy of its users of paramount importance and the company continues to engage with parents, law enforcement and safety groups to deepen and enrich our understanding of user safety,” the company spokesman said.

He did not respond to questions about whether cracking down too much on safety would detract from the Web site’s freewheeling attraction. The spokesman also did not directly respond when asked whether anyone inside the company has considered making it more restricted and private, like Facebook.

Facebook users can choose to make any element of their profile – or the entire thing – private.

“Users can choose exactly who they want to see their profile, whether it just be their friends, friends of friends, only students, or various other combination of users,” Facebook’s Hughes said. “At the end of the day we’re interested in giving as much control to our users as possible.”

“We have always been interested since the beginning in maximizing students’ control over what information they want to share and who they want to share it with,” he added. “To that end, we’ve built extensive privacy options that give people complete control over their profiles and their profiles’ accessibility.”

Facebook does not offer any links to safety tips, nor does it actively police its Web site content. Its help section does offer ways to stop things like unwanted messages. The site also provides users with ways to report objectionable or offensive content such as photos, ads, profiles and groups. It also bans pornography. If material is deemed offensive, it is removed from the site.

“Because college users must have a .edu e-mail from their schools, no one is ever ‘anonymous’ on the network. Each profile can be traced back to a real person who can be held accountable for activity on the site,” said Hughes. “This makes our users much more responsible than users on other networks.”

The creators of Facebook deliberately chose to make the site one of limited access, instead making it completely open like MySpace, where anyone browsing the Internet can access profile information.

“When we designed it, we wanted to build a site that would be grounded in any given user’s ‘real’ community. When a user logs on, all the profiles she can view are of people with whom she could share a class with, pass on the path, or have a meal together. Facebook.com isn’t meant to be a large, anonymous site,” said Hughes.

The battle for online safety continues to be fought on a number of levels. But it will probably always be an elusive one, with the solution just out of reach, because of the dynamic nature of the Internet.

Megan Hill is a Lagniappe contributing writer and a student at Spring Hill College. E-mail her at mahill@azalea.shc.edu

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