Teen blogs: Too much information?

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Personal Web sites let teens express themselves, but experts warn that uninhibited disclosures open a door to danger.

Date published: 1/26/2006

By LAURA MOYER

The girl in the prom dress says she's 16, a high-school student in Stafford County. She's in love, and she's been to bed with her 18-year-old boyfriend. His full name is in her profile on the popular teen blog site MySpace.

The boy with the shaggy brown hair says he's 40, a fib that makes him visible to people browsing for Fredericksburg-area friends on MySpace. Once they click on his user name, they find out he's really an eighth-grader who wants to meet girls.

Answering a popular survey posted on MySpace, the boy says he once shoplifted and that he drank alcohol within the last month.

For teenagers online, it's good to be a little bad.

Many MySpacers casually acknowledge smoking, drinking and getting high. They say they get along with their moms and dads, then describe how they deceive them.

Almost no one comes right out and gives a full name, an e-mail address or a phone number. But with a few mouse clicks, any stranger can find out at least a first name and often multiple photos of the blogger. Names and pictures of their friends also pop up.

Hundreds of area teenagers divulge copious personal information and daily life updates on MySpace, Facebook and other booming Web sites that serve as an instant social network. Blog--short for Web log--sites have been around for a while, but only in past 12 months have they become a raging teenage fad.

MySpace ((link), whose representatives did not answer an e-mailed request for an interview, is by far the most popular of the free blog sites. It had 32,209 unique visitors last month; in December 2004, the site had 5,837, according to market researcher ComScore Media Matrix. That's a 452 percent increase.

Facebook ((link), a blog site that started for college students and expanded to include high-schoolers, went from 2,208 visitors in December 2004 to 12,414 last month.

MySpace has been in the news in connection with two recent teen deaths in Virginia. Locally, Courtland High School athlete Baron Braswell II was fatally stabbed Friday at a Spotsylvania County CD release party publicized on MySpace. Afterward, his friends used MySpace to post memorial tributes.

And after 17-year-old Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Taylor Behl was abducted and killed last September, investigators found that she had posted photos and other personal information on MySpace. Her profile mentioned that she was moving to Richmond and hoped to meet "someone who is kind." Police have charged a 38-year-old Richmond man in her death.

As teenage blogging booms, many parents are left in the dust and in the dark. Some parents of young bloggers don't even use the Internet, said Staca Urie, outreach manager for NetSmartz, the online safety unit of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

And she said many parents who are online don't have a clue what their teenagers are posting. They might not know how to access the public blog sites, or they might just assume their children's blogs are a harmless social outlet.

That's not always the case, said the NCMEC's John Shehan, who heads the organization's predator-fighting CyberTipline. His group gets about 50 reports a week of suspected Internet-enabled crimes against children. In 2005, he said, the group referred 41 such cases to Virginia law-enforcement agencies.

Computer-savvy predators pick out potential victims by what they post, Shehan said, often seeking vulnerable youngsters who write about being unpopular or unattractive. The predators use the young bloggers' own information to form a bond--liking the same music, for example, or sharing an interest in religion.

Some try to entice their targets to meet them in person. "It really can turn into a worst-case scenario," Shehan said.

Sexual predators are the Internet's bogeymen. But teen blogs carry lesser risks, too, Urie said.

For one thing, teens invade their own privacy. They reveal too much, and they have no future control over the information and photos they choose to make public.

And, Urie said, the blogs and photos' "comment" functions can be a swift, effective means for students to bully each other. It's a real-time way to spread rumors and exact revenge for a perceived insult, or just pick on an unpopular peer.

While much of teen bloggery is tame, even inane, a few hours' perusal of the MySpace site turned up dozens of Fredericksburg-area profiles in which children and teenagers reveal intimate personal information.

MySpace states that users must be at least 14, but the Internet is well known for blurring the lines between real and imaginary.

So the "40-year-old" eighth-grader--who claims in yet another spot to be 18--has plenty of company as he crafts a semifictional online identity. In fact, several teen blogs slam the prevalence of phonies and liars encountered online.

But while teens clearly know that they can't believe everything they read on the Internet, they seem to trust without question when it comes to posting their own material.

A 16-year-old Stafford girl posts a picture of her bare midriff with a suggestive message written on it. Another 16-year-old poses in a tight T-shirt, arms raised, pulling back her hair. Among the "comments" for that picture is a response from a hairy-chested older man in Woodbridge whose own photo shows him wearing only a Speedo.

A 17-year-old's main photo shows him dragging on a cigarette. Another 17-year-old shows a picture of himself drinking from a bottle of liquor.

Even MySpace users in their later teens downplay or dismiss the possible consequences of their posts.

Alex Kelm, a high school senior from Stafford, said he's gotten wiser about what he should and shouldn't post online and has changed his MySpace postings to reflect that.

But he believes adults who don't understand MySpace overreact to perceived dangers. "The people who are afraid of it are afraid of change," he said.

Kelm, who turns 18 on Saturday, said he joined MySpace several months ago to make friends beyond school lines. He's chatted online with dozens of other teenagers and met some of them in person. A few of those acquaintances have become good friends, he said.

Never once has an online contact claimed to be a teenager but turned out to be a grown man or woman, Kelm said.

"Maybe one in a hundred people might have a bad experience" online, he said. "That experience shouldn't ruin it for the rest of us."

Though Kelm said he's careful about what he posts online, he believes anything he chooses to reveal about himself is protected by the First Amendment.

That's only partly right, Urie said. Teens are "protected in the right to put that out there, but it's in the public domain now," she said. "It's free, and it's searchable. It's public information."

Online admissions of lawbreaking have already proven to have serious ramifications.

In a widely publicized case last month, a Florida 18-year-old involved in a fatal car crash pleaded guilty to manslaughter after he wrote "I did it" on his online journal. The teen had previously told investigators he couldn't remember the crash.

And Urie and others emphasize that material posted online can show up years after it's been deleted. It can be archived on a service that "caches" Web pages, or it can simply be saved by an individual user.

Urie especially urges teens not to post revealing pictures of themselves.

"You can never take it back," she said. "Once your picture's on there, it can be printed and put in a wallet anywhere in the world."

The lack of control over online material is something 19-year-old Katie Shively of Stafford said she realized early in her MySpace adventures.

She started two profiles, one to promote her hip-hop performing career under the name Artharitis, and another more personal site she intended to be seen by her friends.

The music profile has been great, she said, logging 22,000 views. But she said she's taken almost everything off her personal MySpace profile.

"I'd get really odd messages from people who were like three times my age," Shively said. "It's creepy."

But scary possibilities don't justify yanking minors' blogging privileges altogether, said Steven D. Krause, an English professor and blog expert at Eastern Michigan University.

Like anyone else, teenagers need to learn what they should and shouldn't put online, he said. And as they learn, they'll probably make mistakes.

"I don't think there's any question that young people use poor judgment in what they post," Krause said. "But you know what? They make poor judgments in face-to-face situations, too. Part of the job of teenagers is to do stupid things."

While teenagers and 20-somethings may use MySpace and similar sites as personals ads, Krause said, blogs are also a powerful, accessible communication tool. He encourages his college students to blog as a way to publish their writings to an audience beyond the classroom.

Like more serious topic-related or news blogs, teen blogs are here to stay, Krause said.

"I think kids must be onto something if it's getting people this scared," he said.