What could Web sites do to make their site safer for kids? post thumbnail

What could Web sites do to make their site safer for kids?

This is one of many questions we have received via email over the last several weeks.The answer is a bit more complicated than many adults realize.If there were a quick fix, Web site administrators would have implemented the changes by now.I don’t think it is so much a problem with Web sites.Clearly, Web sites need […]

Indictments Filed in Megan Meier Case post thumbnail

Indictments Filed in Megan Meier Case

Indictments were filed yesterday in the Megan Meier case. For those of you unfamiliar with the case, you can read the story here. In short, Megan Meier was the 13-year-old from Missouri who committed suicide after being cyberbullied on MySpace. To make matters worse, the offender was a fictitious 16-year-old boy who was created by […]

Teenage Girls, Physical Violence, YouTube, and our Culture post thumbnail

Teenage Girls, Physical Violence, YouTube, and our Culture

So…I’m sure by now you all have heard the news story and seen the attendant video of the cheerleader in Lakeland, Florida who was lured into a “friend’s” home and then severely beaten by that friend and other cheerleaders. All of this for basically talking smack over MySpace (cyberbullying?) about those friends. So what we […]

Personal Information of Adolescents on the Internet: A Quantitative Content Analysis of MySpace post thumbnail

Personal Information of Adolescents on the Internet: A Quantitative Content Analysis of MySpace

Many youth have recently embraced online social networking sites such as MySpace (myspace.com) to meet their social and relational needs. While manifold benefits stem from participating in such web-based environments, the popular media has been quick to demonize MySpace even though an exponentially small proportion of its users have been victimized due to irresponsible or […]