You might want to save this message -- you will likely need it.
Below are the most relevant provisions of the MySpace terms of use. You can
also find this on their web site.
I am in the final stages of a book on Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats. It
will be published by January, possibly before. I am also working on student
curriculum.
This weekend I received an email from a counselor asking for guidance on a
MySpace problem. Late Thursday, a mother brought her a MySpace blog where a
13 year old boy was describing, in explicit detail, his sexual interactions
with an 18 year old male. My guidance was: call the police. They,
unfortunately asked, "What is a blog?" The divorced parents are trying to
deal with the situation. But my other advice was to prepare for major
trouble. Sure enough, all of the students at school now about this. How to
destroy your life in a blog. Students do not seem to understand that
whatever they post is totally public!
Here are the pertinent terms:
Content Posted on the Site.
a. You understand and agree that MySpace.com may review and delete any
content, messages, MySpace.com Messenger messages, photos or profiles
(collectively, "Content") that in the sole judgment of MySpace.com violate
this Agreement or which may be offensive, illegal or violate the rights,
harm, or threaten the safety of any Member.
b. You are solely responsible for the Content that you publish or display
(hereinafter, "post") on the Service or any material or information that you
transmit to other Members.
c. Å
d. The following is a partial list of the kind of Content that is illegal or
prohibited on the Website. MySpace.com reserves the right to investigate and
take appropriate legal action in its sole discretion against anyone who
violates this provision, including without limitation, removing the
offending communication from the Service and terminating the membership of
such violators. Prohibited Content includes Content that: i. is patently
offensive and promotes racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind
against any group or individual; ii. harasses or advocates harassment of
another person; iii. involves the transmission of "junk mail", "chain
letters," or unsolicited mass mailing or "spamming"; iv. promotes
information that you know is false or misleading or promotes illegal
activities or conduct that is abusive, threatening, obscene, defamatory or
libelous; v. promotes an illegal or unauthorized copy of another person's
copyrighted work, such as providing pirated computer programs or links to
them, providing information to circumvent manufacture-installed copy-protect
devices, or providing pirated music or links to pirated music files; vi.
contains restricted or password only access pages or hidden pages or images
(those not linked to or from another accessible page); vii. provides
material that exploits people under the age of 18 in a sexual or violent
manner, or solicits personal information from anyone under 18; viii.
provides instructional information about illegal activities such as making
or buying illegal weapons, violating someone's privacy, or providing or
creating computer viruses; ix. solicits passwords or personal identifying
information for commercial or unlawful purposes from other users; or x.
involves commercial activities and/or sales without our prior written
consent such as contests, sweepstakes, barter, advertising, or pyramid
schemes.
e. You must use the Service in a manner consistent with any and all
applicable laws and regulations.
f. You may not include in your Member profile any telephone numbers, street
addresses, last names, URLs or email addresses.
g. Å Although MySpace.com cannot monitor the conduct of its Members off the
Website, it is also a violation of these rules to use any information
obtained from the Service in order to harass, abuse, or harm another person,
or in order to contact, advertise to, solicit, or sell to any Member without
their prior explicit consent. In order to protect our Members from such
advertising or solicitation, MySpace.com reserves the right to restrict the
number of emails which a Member may send to other Members in any 24-hour
period to a number which MySpace.com deems appropriate in its sole
discretion.
h. Å
i. You may not attempt to impersonate another user or person who is not a
member of MySpace.com
(This rule addresses the problem presented by the student impersonating the
principal.)
Nancy
-- Nancy Willard, M.S., J.D. Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use http://csriu.org nwillard@csriu.org"
email 2
"From: Tom Shuman
Bob,
Take a look at the following article. To find more do a google search
for Pope John myspace. They are all over place.
http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051024/NEWS01/510240324
Tom Shuman
Lafayette Twp School
Lafayette, NJ"
email 3 -
"From: Randy Edwards
Looking at this issue, what do we really have?
We have yet-another-free-webspace .COM site who is doing a poor job in
policing kids who fake their ages. The law passed by Congress which
regulates the young teen/privacy issue was doomed before the ink was dry on
the paper. The Internet is now a global phenomenon. Given the wanton greed
that permeates the 'net, it's rapidly devolving into a sewer. Now we can
receive phishing scam spams from anywhere in the world, not just Nigeria.
In its present form, the Internet can't be regulated or maintained, and
there are solid reasons why it shouldn't. I maintain servers in Europe --
are those machines under American law or EU law? Does my porn site1 have
to conform to the "community standards" of someplace in the Bible Belt, USA,
or to Hanover, Germany where its server is located? If I register my domain
name with a company in India does that make my domain an Indian domain? How
can US laws be enforced on a global Internet? Answer: They can't.
The fact that kids are lying about their ages shouldn't surprise anyone who
has been to a bar or a convenience store on a Saturday night. The fact that
there are huge numbers of poorly maintained web sites shouldn't be a surprise
to anyone who witnessed the original privatization of the Internet and
resulting growth of the .COM sector, or to anyone who lived through the
late-90s .COM boom/bust.
> I would encourage you to first -- if you haven't already -- create an
> account and go scouting for references to your school and your principal.
Now that sounds like a black hole for time. How many MySpace.com clones
are there out there? How soon after MySpace.com becomes "uncool" will some
other new company attract the attention of disgruntled students?
> I would like to start a petition to have myspace.com
> <http://myspace.com>shut down. However, I am unsure of what good it
> would do.
On what grounds? That some teenager fooled them into believing s/he was 18
and trashed his teacher/principal -- and that MySpace.com did not react
quickly enough? Good luck waging that battle.
Some things are best ignored, especially when they happen out of the
jurisdiction of a school, and in a global medium where anyone can pretend to
be anyone else.
Regards,
Randy
Footnotes: 1. Gimme a break; I don't run porn site(s), this is just an
example. Get your mind out of the gutter. :-)
--
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the
Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons
ever devised." -- No doubt?! George W. Bush, lying to the American people, in
a speech from the White House, March 17, 2003."
11/14 - You may want to look into Sherry Turkle's book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. She is a social pyschologist that examines the effect of the digital world on the individual's sense of identity. Since there isn't an abundance of things written on mySpace and Facebook (though there is a good deal in the Chronicle of Higher Education which is a journal publication you can access from our library), these are the sorts of research avenues that you will need to look into. I am not as familiar with this text, but you may also want to check out Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community Ed. by S.G. Jones.
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