by Daniel Hekman

Created on: January 28, 2012

MySpace - and much of life in general - is as safe or as dangerous as you make it. There are, of course, a non-trivial number of cases where teens and members of other age groups have gotten into trouble from what they put on MySpace. Some have undergone the horrible experience of abduction, or worse, but far more have merely had to deal with the consequences of earning a bad reputation on the internet. The questions are whether or not this a unique problem to MySpace and if MySpace encourages these negative outcomes either through malicious intent or irresponsible negligence.

I will begin with exploring the first question: are these risks-ranging from a bad internet reputation and the effects that can have on employability and social relationships to the risk of being the victim of truly heinous crimes like abduction-unique to MySpace? As a long-time blogger who's tried a number of different sites, there are two variables I see at play: accessibility and traffic volume. By accessibility, I'm referring to the ease in which strangers can access strangers' blogs. MySpace is one of the more open blogs around, as compared to Facebook or Blogspot, but sites like Xanga are considered both safe and as open, if not more open, than MySpace. Furthermore, the majority of Facebook users I've encountered don't take advantage of the so-called security settings. In terms of how MySpace stacks up against other internet sites, I have difficulty conceiving of a way in which MySpace is in any way more safe or more dangerous, in-and-of-itself. As far as traffic goes, MySpace is on the decline, but that is still the one thing that could possibly make MySpace more dangerous than Xanga, but it's certainly now less than Facebook. Although I could spend pages on the effects of traffic volume on incentives, that's getting out of scope. The short story is that an increase in volume tends to elicit greater care which more than compensates for the increased risk (that is still small) that a truly dangerous person is mixed into that traffic. For more perspective on this interplay of risks and reactions, I would recommend The Armchair Economist.

But is it possible that MySpace is just the posterchild for internet dangers generally - an unfortunate consequence of getting big first - and the internet as a whole is a dangerous place? While I find this more plausible than the claim that MySpace is more unsafe than Facebook or LiveJournal, again I have to disagree. My argument is that seeing

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