The
government wants to get involved with helping protect children from the bad things that some
Myspace users do.
There have been a number of incidents of kids getting contacted or even initiating the contact with adults and ending with the adult abducting or doing some other bad things to the kids.
One proposed bill would prevent students from accessing websites in schools and libraries that let users create a public profile or offer a discussion board, chat room or e-mail service. That would pretty much take away most of the internet.
I was at the public library a couple days ago. I saw no fewer than ten kids in the late junior high/early high school age group working on various computers throughout the building. EVERY SINGLE KID was on Myspace.
Myspace has become the new Dungeons and Dragons. A social interaction group that "grown ups" don't understand. When bad things happened to a few kids playing D&D, parents everywhere were outraged and started banning their kids from playing role playing games. I had to sneak around for years to play Bard's Tale and other RPG's on the computer.
Myspace is gaining much more attention because there are over 90 million accounts. I don't know what the odds of really bad things happening to people in the wild but .01% seems like a pretty small number. Let's say .01% of people using Myspace have something really bad happen to them. That's 9000 people a year. That's a pretty alarming number. That's the kind of thing that will attract politicians and lawyers attention.
"If we could save one child, then it's worth it--that one child, that innocent child who may fall prey during the school hours because the legislation wasn't enacted," said David Zellis, an assistant district attorney in Bucks County, Penn., who testified at the hearing.
That's the kind of statement that tugs at the heart strings. That one innocent child. Everybody always says they want to save that one innocent child.
I don't really have much of a problem with schools shutting down access to sites in the school. I think it should be a school district decision and not really something mandated by the federal government, but whatever.
But, they are suggesting that sites like Myspace should be shut down at public libraries, too. That's crossing the line.
Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick said:
"When children leave the home and go to school or the public library and have access to social-networking sites, we have reason to be concerned."
So my kids would be able to come home log onto Myspace and hang out online with their friends, but would not be allowed to do it at the library. That doesn't sound so evil. Annoying, but not evil.
What about the kids that don't have computers with internet access at home? According to
PCWorld.com 73% of kids 12-17 have access to the internet. That's a pretty big percentage, but nowhere near 100%. Later in the article, the numbers get a little more skewed:
Furthermore, 82 percent of families with a household income of over $75,000 per year had Internet access by the end of last year, while 38 percent of households with incomes below $30,000 per year were online, Pew says. The study pointed out that a greater percentage of lower-income households gained access to the Internet in the second half of 2000, up from 28 percent by June 2000.
Apparently it is okay for kids from families making more than $75K a year to access sites like Myspace, but the kids under that $30K line, well at least we'll be protecting them.
We'll be drawing yet another line in the class divide in order to save kids from bad people. While Myspace might be annoying, millions of kids are learning how to type, write, make friends, and even program html because they use Myspace.
People don't even think about dumping their kids at a movie theater, mall, amusement park or any variety of places where bad things happen to kids all the time, but for some reason it's not okay for them to hang out at the library and play on Myspace. I'm not sure I get it.
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