The New York Times’ Tom Zeller has this sound piece today on the MySpace Madness. He likens all the parental paranoia over predators lurking on the popular teen networking site to the now-hilarious movie “Reefer Madness.” (As an interesting aside, does Zeller’s piece read more like a blog entry than traditional journalism usually does? He even links to blogs that commented on an earlier NYT article — is this a new feature by the NYT to capture what’s going on in the blogosphere?)
Bottom-line: danger lurks everywhere but that’s no reason to go off the rails over MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. Zeller says the answer to this problem lies in the original title of “Reefer Madness.” It was “Tell Your Children.”
But suing MySpace for this problem makes about as much sense as suing the park system for setting up playgrounds. As Zeller notes:
“Suing MySpace for a sexual assault perpetrated by a predator on their network is a bit like suing the car company who made the car he picked her up with,” said Anthony Citrano, a co-founder of the technology public relations firm Fama PR in Cambridge, Mass., and a blogger at CosmicTap.com. “Both of these things made the assault possible, but no sane person thinks a car company should accept responsibility for every act a person could commit with it.”
Along with Friendster, Facebook, Xanga and lesser stars in the social networking constellation, MySpace and its ilk are, by design, fairly unregulated, unconstrained hangouts.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:27 AM|Comments(0)
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