Recent social networking news has me thinking and I’m really getting pissed off.
There’s the 13 year old girl named Megan who took her life because she met a person she believed to be a real boy on MySpace, which is a “social” website. When he broke it off with her, she killed herself. What she didn’t know was the boy was
…created by members of a neighborhood family that included a former friend of Megan’s.
Run a search for kids who kill themselves or are killed due to Facebook or MySpace incidents and you’ll find plenty of horrible stories. Not only are young people committing suicide, but in some cases, their own parents punish social site users by killing them. This was the case for this poor Facebook girl shot by her father.
Recently a young man announced he was going to kill himself, and in front of a live cam, took an overdose of pills, laid down on a bed and proceeded to pass away while viewers watched.
Biggs’ family was infuriated that no one acted sooner to save him, neither the viewers nor the Web site that hosted the live video, Justin.tv. The Web site shows a video image, with a space alongside where computer users can instantly post comments.
Thinking all this was new, I discovered this event from 2005, in which a teenager posts a suicide note and kills himself but first, leaves instructions on where to find him in his MySpace page. Two hours after he died, he was being eulogized on his web site.
What the hell is happening?
Who is responsible?
I keep thinking that the CEO’s and inventors of social media and social networking never imagined their ideas would cause the deaths of so many people, especially young people. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something I put online was an instrument of death. I’d take the web site down.
But, the owners of MySpace and Facebook are making millions in revenue. I wouldn’t expect them to let that money stop flowing even when the blood of innocent people is spilled for it.
What about dating sites? How many people live and die or have good days and bad days depending on how many people respond to their profile?
What gets me is how the Internet is helping sick people find outlets for their bad behaviors. It’s easy to sound intelligent and place a veil over mental illness. Social conversation is the perfect way to spread hatred, conduct revenge, control conversations through covert editing and playing out every possible drama. There’s always an audience of inexperienced people who can be snared and trapped. There’s always going to be unstable people with no self worth willing to place their lives in the hands of people who merely type words.
I find myself saying the same thing I do when children are scared by movies or TV shows.
“It’s all fake. It’s all pretend. None of it is true.”
I wish more social site owners were compassionate enough to remind their users that their sites are not reality. Before you go any further with this so-called “social” experiment, I suggest you STOP, STEP BACK and consider what people are doing with your web site experiments. They’re abusing them.
What are you going to do about it?
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