Early 21st Century · 2005–2008
Social Networking Websites (MySpace era)
Online Predators and Child Safety
In the mid-2000s, as teens flocked to early social networking sites like MySpace (the first mainstream social network most people would recognise, peaking around 2006 with over 100 million users), a full-blown moral panic erupted over online sexual predators. News programmes and talk shows warned parents that predatory adults were lurking behind every screen name. From around 2005, headline-grabbing cases and NBC Dateline's sting-show To Catch a Predator (hosted by Chris Hansen, in which undercover decoys lured suspects to filmed confrontations) fuelled the hysteria.
Frightening statistics spread through the media, most notoriously the claim that "1 in 5 children" had been approached by online predators. That number came from the 2000 Youth Internet Safety Survey (YISS), run by David Finkelhor's Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. Read carefully, it did not say what the headline said. The 1-in-5 figure measured any unwanted sexual solicitation, and roughly three-quarters of those solicitations came from other minors, not adult strangers.
State Attorneys General and Congress reacted with alarm anyway. In 2006 the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), a bill that would have blocked social networking sites in schools and libraries that received federal internet funding, passed the House 410–15 but died in the Senate. MySpace rolled out heightened safety features under political pressure. In 2008 the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (chaired by Harvard legal scholar John Palfrey, with contributions from researcher danah boyd) concluded that the dominant threat to teens online was peer-to-peer bullying and harassment, not strangers. A finding that went largely ignored by policymakers who had already legislated against a panic the evidence never supported.
Frightening statistics spread through the media, most notoriously the claim that "1 in 5 children" had been approached by online predators. That number came from the 2000 Youth Internet Safety Survey (YISS), run by David Finkelhor's Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. Read carefully, it did not say what the headline said. The 1-in-5 figure measured any unwanted sexual solicitation, and roughly three-quarters of those solicitations came from other minors, not adult strangers.
State Attorneys General and Congress reacted with alarm anyway. In 2006 the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), a bill that would have blocked social networking sites in schools and libraries that received federal internet funding, passed the House 410–15 but died in the Senate. MySpace rolled out heightened safety features under political pressure. In 2008 the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (chaired by Harvard legal scholar John Palfrey, with contributions from researcher danah boyd) concluded that the dominant threat to teens online was peer-to-peer bullying and harassment, not strangers. A finding that went largely ignored by policymakers who had already legislated against a panic the evidence never supported.
Useful links:
- danah boyd – *It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens* (Yale, 2014)
- Internet Safety Technical Task Force – Final Report (Berkman Center, 2008)
- Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell & Ybarra – “Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment” (*American Psychologist*; open copy via UMass Boston, 2008)