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More than half of teenagers mention risky behaviours such as sex
and drugs on their MySpace accounts, US researchers said.
They said many young people who use social networking sites such as
News Corp's MySpace do not realize how public they are and
may be opening themselves to risks, but the sites may also offer a
new way to identify and help troubled teens.
"We found the majority of teenagers who have a MySpace account are
displaying risky behaviours in a public way that is accessible to a
general audience," said Dr Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children's
Research Institute, whose studies appear in the journal Archives of
Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine.
In one of two studies, Christakis and Dr Megan Moreno of the
University of Wisconsin analyzed 500 randomly chosen MySpace
profiles of 18-year-olds in 2007.
Overall, 54% of the publicly available accounts they checked
contained information about high-risk behaviours: 41% mentioned
substance abuse, 24% sexual behaviour and 14% 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.
In a second study, the researchers identified 190 individuals aged
18 to 20 whose MySpace accounts displayed multiple risky
behaviours.
Half were sent a message from Dr Meg from Dr Moreno's MySpace
profile.
The message warned about the risks of disclosing personal details
online and offered a link to a site with information about testing
for sexually transmitted diseases.
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had withdrawn references to sex and substance abuse and tightened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 behaviours 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% of profiles in the group that received the warning deleting
all references, compared with 5.3% of those who were not sent the
message.
Christakis said displaying sexual information online can expose a
teen to advances from sexual predators.
Employers and universities may also check those sites.
