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Teenagers Post Risky Information On MySpace

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 January 2009, 07:45 CST

More than half of U.S. teenagers write about risky behaviors like sex and drugs on their MySpace accounts, according to researchers.

Experts believe young people do not realize how public sites like MySpace may be opening them to risk.

"We found the majority of teenagers who have a MySpace account are displaying risky behaviors in a public way that is accessible to a general audience," said Dr. Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children's Research Institute.

"The ones to me that were most surprising and most worrisome were the sexual references," said the doctor. "We often found males and females describing the circumstances around the loss of their virginity. Females would describe things males could do" to have a better chance of having sex with them. "They'd say, 'I like a guy who brings me flowers and takes me to dinner and (if you do that) I might consider having sex with you.'"

The research is published in the journal Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine.

However, according to a second related study, a number of teenagers cleaned up their MySpace profiles, deleting mentions of sex and booze and boosting privacy settings, if they got a single cautionary e-mail from a busybody named "Dr. Meg."

Dr. Megan Moreno sent the email. She is the lead researcher of a study of lower-income kids that she says shows how parents and other adults can encourage safer Internet use.

Her message read in part: "You seemed to be quite open about sexual issues or other behaviors such as drinking or smoking. Are you sure that's a good idea? ... You might consider revising your page to better protect your privacy."

Moreno cautioned that parents and even doctors who care for adolescents "should feel very comfortable looking up" their children's or patients' profiles on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Young people don't consider the consequences of posting their drinking habits and sexual behavior, Moreno said.

Several wrote back to "Dr. Meg" saying they had no idea their pages could be viewed by anyone. Such social networking sites have privacy settings, but they're not always used.

The e-mail was most effective at stopping references to sex, with 13.7 percent of profiles in the group that received the warning deleting all references, compared with 5.3 percent of those who were not sent the message.

"People who work with teens often have this idea that teens are hard to reach," she said. But many young people publicly post their hobbies and interests on MySpace or Facebook and expect people to look. "It can be a great icebreaker," she said.

The researchers’ first located 190 MySpace public profiles in a single city ZIP code, all the users said on their profiles they were 18 to 20 years old and their pages included three or more references to sex, drinking, drug use or smoking.

Half were sent the "Dr. Meg" e-mail; the other half weren't contacted.

Moreno said the results suggest the e-mail intervention had a positive impact on "the hardest-to-reach teens, which gives us great hope that a similar intervention could be used to reach teens as a whole."

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On the Net:

• Seattle Children's Research Institute
• Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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