News organizations are a lot like sheep. They graze together. Where they graze, the pretty much eat everything, right down to rock. When one gets spooked, they all get spooked. A sheep stampede is a thing to behold.
Writing for Poynter, Kelly McBride notes an outbreak of highly negative coverage of MySpace.com: "In the last month most MySpace stories come in three categories: Advice for hapless parents, criminal behavior and danger."
Meanwhile, Wired News cites "the great MySpace crackdown of '06" and says: "In recent weeks newspapers from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Rutland Herald have pressed out stories -- often on the front page -- with headlines like 'Online Danger Zone' and 'The Trouble With MySpace.' An NBC Dateline show in January colored MySpace "a cyber secret teenagers keep from tech-challenged parents."
MySpace.com may be this season's black sheep, but I hope editors aren't missing an opportunity to learn from it. For me, one of the fascinating things about MySpace.com is that much of the social networking is among people who already know each other in the "real world." Techno-mediated interaction is being overlaid on physical community. It may look new and different, but in some ways MySpace.com is stepping into the role that ought to be played by a good local newspaper: building deeper connections between people and their own geographic communities.
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Myspace is the new AOL for youth
I recall how AOL had a similar spate of coverage about the same child safety issues in the mid to late 1990s. They responded quickly, going so far as to hire one of the original authors of the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act -- COPPA -- which was created partly in response to a similar media focus on sexual predators in AOL communities. AOL then went on to create one of the "safest" online communities for kids and teens, culminating in AOL Parental Controls. Many households now continue to subscribe to AOL at a premium because of its safety and security features.
Meanwhile, what happened? Kids and teens, being smarter than their parents, perceived "safe" as basically "lame.". They learned how to bypass parental controls and find other ways to connect with friends online, outside of AOL. They congregated at many different sites, but in just a few years Myspace has succeeded in attracting the biggest party of young people anywhere. Part if its success is undoubtedly due to the fact that it hasn't payed enough attention to COPPA.
Now that Myspace is owned by a major media company, the COPPA watchdogs are paying more attention. And Murdoch, ever the businessman, is taking notice and taking action. News Corp. recently announced that it will be spending more resources on safety and security. This curiously comes at the same time as Playboy is planning a "Girls of Myspace" calendar.
We've tried to get ahead of this issue on Bakotopia.com and our other community and social-networking sites by requiring users to be 13 years of age for reviewed participatory-media sites like Northwestvoice.com, and 18 for open common-carrier community models like Bakotopia.com. There's no way to keep sexual predators out of an open community (any attempt to do so would prevent any meaningful type of community experience), but there are precautions you can take. I suspect Rupert Murdoch is wishing he'd thought more about this before he decided to spend more than $500 million to purchase Myspace.com.