Our book MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents is now available at the How-To Primers bookstore and at!


Browsing lots of blog posts about MySpace and safety, I came across one titled "Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?" at the "Many-to-Many" blog at The post was made by Danah Boyd / zephoria, who is concerned that the "moral panic" in the press may cause MySpace to falter, to the detriment of youth. While I certainly agree that MySpace is a very positive "space" for teens to be able to enjoy, I think the point of view expressed is a bit one-sided. So I posted a comment, which I'll repost here as a little opinion essay.


I don't think it's as simple as "MySpace is good" and the "moral panic" is bad. There are dangers related to online activity just as there are dangers related to walking down the street. With respect to the latter, the dangers are well known, and so children are taught about them at a very young age: "don't step into the road in front of an onrushing car." And, there are safety-related regulations that apply to the sources of danger too: "cars are not allowed to drive on sidewalks."With MySpace, the dangers have not been integrated into the society's knowledge base such that there is common sense teaching that is automatically passed from parent to child. Instead, the parents are typically ignorant. So, when they suddenly see that an unanticipated danger is present, they over-react, and try to pull the kid away from the danger. Parents clearly need to educate themselves.Meanwhile, there also is not a set of common-sense regulations that apply to the vehicles by which the risk is conveyed. MySpace software clearly facilitates malicious actions of the small population that chooses to use it for those purposes. MySpace lets them in essence "drive on the sidewalk" in pursuit of their victims. The book my wife and I are writing about MySpace lists plenty of specific examples of this. Go to the web site above if you'd like to see some of what we've found.

My point is: the technology and the MySpace way of interacting is too new for society to have fully adjusted to it and accomodated it in a manner that lets its freedom-providing assets be enjoyed within the context of safety.

At the end of our book we have a "Petition to On Safety" that suggests about a dozen ways that MySpace could make the site safer without limiting the freedom of teens to enjoy interacting with their friends. In fact, we think our suggestions would enhance the quality of enjoyment, because there would be less reason to fear predators, because the ways the current software facilitates their ability to hide would no longer be available to them.

Parents have a lot to learn. Many teens have no common sense. But societal institutions (which MySpace is, already) must also be structured such that they do not facilitate the actions of criminals, when simple changes would protect their customers by providing a safer and more secure environment.