MySpace or OurSpace?
School administrators and even cops are policing the social networking site. For teens used to living their lives online, that isn't fair.
By Alex Koppelman
Read more: Life, myspace, Alex Koppelman
June 8, 2006 | In October, 17-year-old Dimitri Arethas posted a doctored photo on his MySpace page depicting his public high school's black vice principal as RoboCop. Arethas said he found the photo, which had a racial slur scrawled on it, on another student's Web site, and that he posted it to his own MySpace page thinking it was funny. Arethas, of Charlotte, N.C., claims he didn't mean the post to be racist and says that most of his fellow students thought the post was funny too.
But one anonymous student didn't, and brought it to the attention of school administrators. As a result, Arethas says principal Joel Ritchie, who did not respond to a request for comment, suspended Arethas for 10 days.
Arethas, who says he apologized and removed the photo when he was initially confronted, was incensed by the suspension, and contacted his local paper, the Charlotte Observer, and the American Civil Liberties Union. With the help of ACLU lawyers, Arethas was able to convince the school to end the suspension. He returned after two days.
"Maybe what I did was wrong, morally," Arethas said in a recent e-mail, "but I had every right to express myself. I just chose to do it as a picture, instead of rambling down the hallways yelling, 'Man! This school sucks.'"
Arethas isn't the only student to be disciplined for what he posted to his MySpace profile. The past few years have seen an explosion in the number of schools taking to the Web to find out what students are saying and doing. And punishment has followed, from a Pennsylvania school that suspended one student for creating a parody MySpace profile of his principal to a California school that suspended 20 students simply for viewing one student's MySpace profile, which contained threats against another student. And some public school systems, like Illinois' Community High School District 128, are even taking steps to monitor everything their students say on sites like MySpace. According to the Chicago Tribune, under new guidelines, students who participate in extra-curricular activities will need to sign a pledge in which they agree that the school can discipline them if it finds evidence that they have posted any "illegal or inappropriate" material online. Even some police are beginning to patrol MySpace, seeing the site as an effective tool for catching teenage criminals.
All of this new scrutiny poses a vital question for MySpace, which claims 76 million users and is now the largest of all the Web's social networking sites: What will happen to the site if and when users no longer feel safe expressing themselves there? And in an age where teenagers are accustomed to living their lives online, what will happen when they learn that what they thought was private is, in fact, public, and not without consequence?
"I never thought [this] would happen," Arethas says of his suspension. "I figured only my friends would see my profile page."
Most large online social networking services have undergone similar challenges as they've grown, with users feeling safe in the widely held though mistaken perception that what they posted was private, or at least that it would only be seen by a select group of people. Other sites have also, like MySpace, dealt with users who have preyed on other more gullible ones, as with the recent high-profile arrests of men who used MySpace to lure young girls. But few sites have grown as large, and as quickly, as MySpace, which was acquired in July 2005 by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million. And few have specialized so effectively in encouraging kids to get comfortable and open up.
As with all forms of electronic media, people still have a hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that little online is truly private. A sampling of MySpace's offerings reveals the evidence: Posts explore almost every aspect of users' personal lives, from typical teenage angst about acne and unrequited crushes to more incriminating fare -- sexually suggestive images and photos of drinking and drug use -- as well as professions of love, anger and every emotion in between.
"MySpace has encouraged its users to be aware that what they post on their MySpace profile is available for the public to see," says MySpace spokesman Matthew Grossman, adding that "part of why MySpace has been so successful is because people can share their feelings." While Grossman stresses that MySpace does not spy on its users, or share their information, the site will work with law enforcement "if they [law enforcement] go through the proper legal channels," such as a subpoena or warrant. The site's privacy statement makes that caveat explicit. But many users haven't heeded those warnings. They do so now at their peril, because more and more, they are being watched.
"We patrol the Internet like we patrol the streets," officer James McNamee, a member of the Barrington, Ill., police department's Special Crimes Unit, says. "We'll go in on a MySpace or a Xanga, we'll pick out our area and we'll just start surfing it, checking it, seeing what's going on."
McNamee says the fact that police have only recently realized what a powerful tool social networking sites can be for investigative purposes may be what makes MySpace users feel the site is their own private realm.
"We're still playing catch-up," McNamee says. "I wouldn't say we're super far behind, but we're learning as we go and I think that's the reason some [teens] feel like, 'Oh, this is an invasion of our privacy.' Well, no, it's not, it's just that we were behind on learning that we should have been paying attention to this, and now we're paying attention."
In the eight months the Barrington Police Department has been patrolling MySpace, McNamee says, they've found pictures of graffiti, with the artists standing next to it, "smiling, all happy about their activity," they've found evidence of drug dealing --"where they could hook up, who was dealing drugs ... photos of their money ... photos of their drugs" -- they've even found a "We Hate Barrington Police Department" blog. ("We don't care," McNamee says of the blog. "It's kind of funny to us; we'll let them vent that way.")