Social Networks - The Danger

“Statistically, one in ten people live next door to a pedophile. But I don’t, I live next door to two beautiful seven year olds.”

The past few years has seen a huge rise in people's activities on social networks. We have gone from spending between 1-2 hours online in a day to spending an average of 31 hours online per week. If that was divided equally into seven days, it works out to be 4.4 hours per week spent on the internet. 3 hours out of that is spent on social networking, whether through instant messaging, facebook, twitter, bebo or myspace. When we look at it, that's a lot of hours, and teenagers as young as 13 are on these websites, adding strangers as friends and becoming accustomed with them. Because so many people are on facebook and twitter especially, it has become a new medium for con-men, pedophiles and bullies to victimize their preys.

Teenagers make friends with people online who have good looking pictures and the picture portrays them as someone in their age group but the person on the other side of the line is actually a fully grown person, playing on the young person's intelligence. This is something that has started happening to people and also being acted out in movies, for example, catfish.

A real life example that comes to mind when i think of this is Ashleigh Hall, a teenage girl who was killed after meeting up with a 32 year old sex offender who was posing as a 16 year old boy on facebook.

That's just one of the many cases that have propped up over the last few years. This in turn have led a lot of bad publicity towards social networks and some parents are restricting their children from going on these websites. Personally, i think its the wrong move, because this will now mean that these kids will be going on the websites behind their parents back and being secretive. All this could have being avoided if the parents just decided to start monitoring their children's activities on the internet