Myspace: everyone and their dog has an account on this website. Its original purpose was to connect friends and family through e-mails, comments, and bulletins. However, while the age minimum for signing up was set to 14 years old, this rule is often discarded, and many preteens and young teenagers are using this popular website to not only keep in touch with their friends, but also to meet new, exciting people. The most commonly associated issue with this online method, however, is the fact that over the World Wide Web, a person can be as cool and exciting as they want others to think they are, and no one will know the wiser. In fact, a person could completely reinvent themselves, even create a new identity.
It is fairly clear what kind of problems this could pose, not just on websites, but in instant messaging programs, online multiplayer games, message boards, and online public chat rooms. In late 2007, a 13 year-old girl committed suicide because of a cruel joke that her ex-best friend and her friend's mother played on her; they tricked her into falling in love with an imaginary boy on Myspace who ended up shunning her and turning all of her friends against her. Every day, kids are found on the Internet and fooled into giving personal information to people they believe are “friends,“ only to be abducted, abused, or harassed. When the identity of the individual that one is speaking to is known, perhaps the threat seems lessened; however, on mass multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) or through long-term contact of any kind, a player could become such good friends with a fellow player and feel so connected that, regardless of their age, explicit implications during chat, or interest in your personal life and information, one could be convinced that the friendship is harmless, and that he/she really knows who is on the other end of the keyboard.
But, DO you know exactly who you're speaking to? Could you be at risk to expose private information about your personal/financial life to someone that may use it against you? Age has no limit when it comes to people who want to harm others, nor is there a limit on the people who unknowingly fall for these potentially dangerous feats.
As a teenager myself, I don't want to preach the same as every adult has, and sound like everybody else. Unfortunately, what everyone is saying is correct. Sexual predators, cyber bullies, and online scams are not hoaxes. Everyone should be armed against the many types of Internet threats that are out there:
1.) Cyberbullies
What may seem at first to be a harmless joke between two classmates, for example, may turn into something far worse. When you pretend to be someone else to someone that you already know, for whatever reason, and take advantage of a person's trust, you can never take back the harm that you could cause.
I am not proud to say that I myself have once been involved in a cyber-bullying type of joke. My cousin and I were friends with a girl, let's call her Samantha, that was a couple years younger than us; one day, she decided that she didn't like us anymore, and we were infuriated about how she acted. It seemed to us that she thought herself to be above us, that we weren't cool enough to talk to someone we thought was "a little kid." We were hurt that she “lied” to us about being our friends; Samantha had claimed she never really liked either of us, and that we were stupid and immature for our age.
I was fourteen at the time, and my cousin was sixteen. We decided that, in order to teach her a lesson, we would pretend to be sisters that both became good friends with her. In the end, the youngest of the sisters ended up in a very near fatal car crash, and the older of the two siblings blamed Samantha for it; an instant messaging fight happened just before the accident.
Needless to say that when Samantha found out who we really were, she was outraged and in tears. “How could you do something like that? I felt terrible for days! I can't believe you would pretend that!” Our rationalization that we were teaching her not to lie didn't stop us from feeling bad about the incident. We did apologize, but we definitely proved her point; we WERE acting stupid and immature.
Fortunately, the incident didn't affect Samantha on a large scale. But, that is not always the case; as forementioned, one Internet joke was so cruel, that a young girl committed suicide. What may be funny to one person for a little bit, could be devastating and cruel to another.
