MySpace is not the Enemy. But ignorant parents and predators are.

Posted on June 20, 2006 by irishsof

This story was all over news sites this morning.  And it drives me insane.  A 14 year old girl alleges she was assaulted by a man she met on MySpace, so her mother decides to sue MySpace for - get this - $30 million dollars.  WTFO?

First off, let me state two things up front.  One, I'm a law student, so usually I would reserve judgment based on only hearing what the media wants to tell us about this.  (Hopefully my opinion below is independent of the whether or not the allegations are true.)  Two, I'm liberal.  And I mean I'm a dyed-in-the-wool, labor-union lovin', New Jersey blue blood. (That's lowercase "blue", as in liberal.  Not uppercase "Blue" as in rich Blue Blood….that I ain't.)

But the little itty bit of conservative in me came roaring out this morning on this news.  This story pisses me the hell off.  Assuming the allegations are true, then yes, it's very bad that she was assaulted.  And yes, the guy who did it should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.  I have 2 nieces about this girl's age and if anyone assaulted either of them, believe me that poor soul would live to regret what he did.  In fact, he'd regret it every day from the pain I'd inflict upon him.  Remember I'm from Jersey, know what I'm sayin'?

HOWEVER, this mother should be smacked and smacked hard.  Where was she when her kid was on the internet?  Why doesn't she know who her kid is talking to?  Why doesn't she demand to see the list of friends and grill the kid on everyone?  I get it - you have to pick your battles as your kids are growing up, but g*ddamn it, this is one you fight! It's time to stop this insanity of "I'm going to sue you because you aren't parenting my kid for me" crap.  And that's exactly what this is.

I have one message for this girl's mother.  Shut up.  Shut up and accept responsibility for your parenting.  Shut up and don't feed me a line of crap about how hard it is being a parent.  You brought her into this world, so it's your job to teach her what is and is not appropriate and/or risky; it's not MySpace's job.  Shut up and don't blame the internet for being the enemy.

*Whew*

Okay, so now that rant is off my chest, and yes, I'm horribly opinionated for a person who has no kids.  Nor do I plan to have any and stuff like this is the reason.

I don't intend for this blog to be full of rants, which it appears to be turning into, so I promise the next post will be something I find interesting or amusing.

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One Response to “MySpace is not the Enemy. But ignorant parents and predators are.”

  1. Scott Bradford, on June 20th, 2006 at 5:58 pm Said:

    Yet another symptom of a society with little/no value placed on personal responsibility. It's MySpace's fault — not the predator (who can surely blame his bad upbringing) or the parents (who were probably too busy with 80-hour work weeks to talk to or monitor their child).

    Although I also have to wonder about a 14 year old who doesn't know better… 14 is old enough to know better than to go meet random internet people alone.

    That said, I place 99.99% of the blame on the predator and the predator alone. The remaining .01% is shared between the parents and child. I don't blame MySpace at all as they're just a communication medium. Might as well sue the phone/cable/ISP company that provides Internet service or the Internet backbone companies for carrying the data.

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