Be Afraid. Read Our News.
February 14th, 2009 |
MySpace: 90,000 Sex Offenders Removed from Site
When I think of the attitudinal outlook driving moral panics, I think of my experience working as a technology assistant at a one-to-one laptop high school at the height of the MySpace/Facebook sexual predator panic from 2004-2006.
The school organized a series of informational sessions for parents, emceed by the school’s tech coordinator. As a barely-drinking-age, MySpace-and-Facebook-using employee of the school, my job was to de-mystify these sites by demonstrating what these sites do and describing what teens get out of them. My presentation was followed by that of a police officer from a neighboring community who specialized in digital crime, whose role was ostensibly to describe the dangers and provide tips to parents seeking to keep their kids safe.
It was a recipe for disaster. A mere college student cognizant of the dangers but sympathetic to the innumerable teens who use these sites safely didn’t stand a chance against an authoritative cop telling lurid tales of sexual abuse cases and making no secret of his distaste for these sites. Without fail, the Q&A sessions devolved into public witch hunts in which I was expected to defend the entire population of social network site users and explain why parents shouldn’t forbid their children from any and all online interactions.
One interaction sticks out prominently in my mind. An outspoken Luddite father attended one of these sessions and launched into a diatribe in which he all but accused me of abetting sexual predators in their quest to rape his daughter. I began my response by noting that he had grossly mischaracterized my beliefs about the dangers of social network sites.
“What do you believe?” he challenged.
“I believe that most parents overreact, and most teens underreact.” The audience responded with audible murmurs of approval.
His face contorted in disgust. “I don’t know how you can overreact to the things you hear in the news,” he snarled.
I try to make a point not to ascribe to simplistic grand theories of social behavior. But it’s hard for me not to interpret the articles written in the wake of this finding as a basic lesson in the populist theory of media bias.
The appeal of the article is entirely dependent upon the preexisting panic parents feel about strange Internet practices and the inability of most consumers to accurately assess scale. We know hundreds, or at best a few thousands of people over the course of our lives. In that context, a football stadium full of sexual predators is downright menacing.
But in the context of the 76 million unique visitors to MySpace in the U.S., this accounts for a whopping rate of a little of one in a thousand: 0.118%.
No one in their right mind would dispute that some teens are ignorant of the dangers of socializing with strangers on the Internet. Nor that one incident of sexual predation is already one too many. But only two types of reporter would broadcast a 0.1% incidence of deviant behavior as a significant finding: (1) one who is as ignorant as the masses that (s)he seeks to inform, or (2) one who knowingly understands that his or her audience would be awed by the raw figure of 90,000 deviants in a scary context.
“What’s this world coming to?”
