Studies Show Over Half of Teens on MySpace Exhibit Risky Behavior

We’ve written about the dangers of inappropriate MySpace use on the ReputationDefender Blog in the past, but it seems to be a recurring theme in the Internet Age.  Recently, the New York Times picked up a Reuter’s article describing a study published by Dr. Dimitri Christakis, of the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and Dr. Megan Moreno, of the University of Wisconsin. The study measured 500 randomly chosen MySpace profiles for 18-year olds.

From the article:

Overall, 54 percent of the publicly available accounts they checked contained information about high-risk behaviors: 41 percent mentioned substance abuse, 24 percent sexual behavior and 14 percent violence.

Christakis said many teens are unaware of how public and permanent Internet information can be, while parents often do not know what their kids are up to.

“No one says, “Whoa! Why are you putting that up there?’” Christakis said.

This echos a sentiment that ReputationDefender has been promoting for sometime. Publishing information on the Internet is like getting a tattoo. If you don’t think you’ll be comfortable with something you posted today 5, 10, or 20 years from now, you should think twice about posting it. Unfortunately, this kind of long-term thinking isn’t often employed by teens without someone else prompting them.

This can be observed most easily in the second study conducted by the doctors. In this study, 190 profiles were selected for demonstrating multiple high risk behaviors. Half of them received a message from “Dr. Meg” warning about the potential damage of posting too much information on MySpace. The other half was left alone.

From the article:

Three months after this single message, many of the young people had withdrawn references to sex and substance abuse and tightened security controls.

“It really provides the opportunity to reach millions of potential at-risk teens and try to modify their behaviors or at least prevent them from disclosing them to the entire world,” Christakis said in a telephone interview.

The e-mail was most effective at curtailing 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.

In other words, the study shows that the most effective steps in combating Internet risk are proactive. Parents should talk to their kids about responsible Internet use early and often, before they begin using social networking sites. While this might put parents in uncomfortable territory, particularly if they’re unfamiliar with Internet technologies, in the post-privacy age, there’s few alternative options.

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