Social media can be an amazing tool to inspire civic engagement, raise money for charity and rekindle friendships. But like with anything else, there is a dark side.
There's cyber-bullying. Bullying is hard enough to control as it is. But social media makes it easy, anonymous and just as dangerous. Nine teenagers in Massachusetts were charged last week in connection with the death of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince, who was allegedly bullied to the point where it may have contributed to her suicide. In a separate case in New York, police are investigating the cyber-bullying activities that happened before Alexis Pilkington, 17, took her own life.
Social media has also been used to organize riots. "Flash mobs," spontaneous public gatherings organized through social media and text messages, started out as a harmless, quirky way to have fun. College students would meet in the library during finals week at a specific time to dance or have a giant pillow fight. But now people are using the idea to cause mayhem. Teenagers have organized fights and riots at malls and other public areas. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on four separate incidents where people were injured.
People can be unbelievably racist and hateful, especially with social media tools that allow anonymity. We allow for comments on SunSentinel.com articles in order to encourage healthy debate on current events and public issues. But people hiding behind the mask of anonymity or fake names sometimes turn ugly with racist and homophobic comments. It has gotten to the point where we have decided to turn off comments on obituaries to prevent such comments about the recently deceased.
Some very creepy people use social media sites. Last week, I wrote about chatroulette.com, a popular website that connects people to random strangers across the globe for live video chats. It's a great concept in theory, but most of the people I encountered in the five minutes or so that I used the site were men exposing themselves. The site doesn't require you to register, which makes it easy for children to log on, and they do. I know because I was briefly connected to a group of three young girls.
A Jewish human rights group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, released a report last month documenting the rise of online terror and hate. It identifies some 8,000 problematic hate and terrorist websites and other internet postings — a 30 percent increase over last year. "Extremists are leveraging social media technologies to dynamically target young people through digital games, Second Life scenarios, blogs, YouTube and Facebook depicting racist violence and terrorism," the report says. People are posting to social media sites information on neo-Nazi networking websites, terrorist-recruiting videos and tutorials on how to become a suicide bomber, according to the report.
Instead of railing against social media, the center is asking people to e-mail iReport@wiesenthal.com so they can report them to the proper law enforcement agencies. They also have a Facebook page and Twitter account. Go to http://www.weisenthal.com/ireport to read the full report: Digital Terrorism and Hate 2010.
My advice is to ignore people who leave anonymous comments if they don't have anything intelligent to say, report inexcusable activities and talk to your friends and family about the dangerous situations that could surface online. Talk to your children about what they have learned online so you can help them distinguish fact from fiction.