“To Catch a Predator” is not a news program but a reality show, driven by ratings. Some time ago, the host, Chris Hansen, mentioned the “50,000 Internet predators online” statistic. I tracked down the origin of that, and came to the conclusion that it could not be substantiated by any statistical evidence.

I noticed that after I had posted a news article taking that mythical statistic to task, the statistic is no longer used.
http://www.chatmag.com/news/071506_50000_predators_myth.html

To be sure, there are predators on the Internet, predators of both children and adults. Scammers, spammers, and con artists of all flavors are active, and it is up to the individual to be on guard.

It is also up to the individual to question statistics and emotionally charged TV shows and news articles. We look to the journalism community for fair, unbiased information in order to make informed decisions that affect our lives. Creating panic and using doctored statistics does not serve that process.

They may not have declared, but they are already running. If they were truly interested in going after sexual predators, they would have followed the Florida AGs lead and ask for more law enforcement resources to attack the problem, not make social networking the easy political scapegoat.

Thanks so much for clarifying. I didn’t know originally whether you were just describing what you saw as a ‘right to fear’ or asserting a right to fear. Sincere apologies.

Good heavens. Perhaps I should have said upfront that I’m completely in agreement with your post and with Anastasia’s comments. (I also agree with the rest of your comment!) I wasn’t advancing either of those positions - just trying to understand what goes on when emotional reactions are given more airtime and greater credence than critical thinking.

I mean, this isn’t the first news story where journalists have hyped up emotional responses and downplayed inconvenient evidence - I don’t even think it’s the first such story this week. So, why do intelligent writers do it - why do they think this kind of approach makes sense? I agree with Suw’s general point about evidence - science is hard sometimes, especially if you’ve spent most of your life avoiding it - but I think there’s something else going on as well. I think there’s an increasingly widespread belief that emotion is authentic - and that what’s authentic is true. So, if you tell somebody that what they’re upset about doesn’t actually exist, you’re not helping them but challenging them - denying the truth of their fear, so to speak.

Thanks for the detailed comment. As for the motivations of the AGs, I’ll cede that in the broader debate about youth safety online this is immaterial. It doesn’t automatically disqualify their concerns or their proposals. Their proposals should be evaluated based on whether or not they address the issue of youth safety.

My point, and Steph’s point (in the interest of disclosure, Steph is a friend and we’ve spoken about this topic at length) and Anastasia’s point really is the nature and scope of the problem. Who is at risk? What is the risk? And what are the risk factors that lead to these ‘criminal seductions’?

As a journalist, I know that anecdotes are effective in personalising a story, but they can also be misleading in framing a story. Does the anecdote that is chosen for a story accurately represent the problem? That really was what I was getting at.

Politicians and advocates choose anecdotes that support their framing of an issue. That’s fair. Their role is different than mine as a journalist. They are trying to persuade the public and their colleagues that a specific course of action should be taken.

My job as a journalist is different. I have to choose anecdotes that fairly represent the situation. Anecdotes personalise, but statistics help contextualise. Yes, there are horror stories of abduction and violence that would frighten any parent, but do these represent the broader reality of the problem?

Dr Finklehor said in testimony before the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee a more representative anecdote of the problem is this:

“So for example, Jenna – this is a pretty typical case – 13-year-old girl from a divorced family, frequented sex-oriented chat rooms, had the screen name “Evil Girl.” There she met a guy who, after a number of conversations, admitted he was 45. He flattered her, gave – sent her gifts, jewelry. They talked about intimate things. And eventually, he drove across several states to meet her for sex on several occasions in motel rooms. When he was arrested in her company, she was reluctant to cooperate with the law enforcement authorities.”

This is a troubled young girl who has been criminally abused by an older man. It is a problem, and it requires a broad response from society - from government, companies, parents, teachers, media, etc. However, it is a much more complex and much more difficult problem than is being presented in the media and in many public policy debates.

As for the proposals, I’ll let a couple of AGs speak in their own words.

I found the North Carolina proposal online:

http://www.ncdoj.com/DocumentStreamerClient?directory=WhatsNew/&file=S132%20Summary%20final.pdf

CT AG’s Richard Blumenthal’s May testimony is here:
http://www.ct.gov/AG/cwp/view.asp?a=2129&q=333604

For a counterpoint, Mark Sullivan on PCWorld expresses concerns about the NC proposal:
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004990.html

I certainly am not saying that no action should be taken. I also did not say in my post that it is entirely the role of the parents to deal with this, to quote you ‘as many do’. I am not a person who believes that just because one proposal could use some work (or doesn’t work) means that no law could be crafted to address a problem that society believes needs to be addressed.

There is also an education role for parents and students. As someone in part responsible for an online community, companies that host online communities also bear some responsibility in maintaining a safe environment for their users.

Now, to address whether blogs and online discussions about this issue are complex or simplistic. You mentioned danah boyd’s brief post to support your assertion that the online debate lacks nuance. You’ve chosen one post out of several that I linked to in support of your claim. Steph, for one, has written three, extremely detailed posts in the last two days on the subject. danah was simply linking to one of those posts. Also that post by danah is just part of her extensive research on this issue and other online issues, and it is welcome that she makes her work publicly available and blogs. For those not familiar with danah, she was one of the people chosen to speak to the same Congressional panel about youth safety online as Dr Finklehor.

Phil, I think it’s a little hyperbolic to say that Anastasia or anyone is “denying (parents’) right to be afraid”, and I think it’s a stretch to characterise my comments as a personal insult to parents. As I said in my post, I recognise parents are afraid. Fear does not always have a rational basis. However, the question must be asked, what are they afraid of? If they are afraid of someone coming into their house and abducting their child because they found the child on the internet, that’s not really happening in large numbers based on recent case studies, not just the statistics of statutory rape cases from 2000. (Jay, I agree that this figure is questionable in the context of social networking because mass use of those sites amongst youth didn’t happen until the last two years.) Certainly, we can find anecdotes that present the story of abduction. Certainly those stories are harrowing and deeply worrying to parents.

My concern is that by presenting anecdote after anecdote in the media of cases like these that we misrepresent the scope of that problem and needlessly scare parents. It gets eyeballs to watch TV and people to buy papers, certainly, but it doesn’t represent the majority of the cases.

I’m not questioning the validity of anyone’s fear. However, fear certainly should not be the only motivation in our public response to problems. And if we in the media are needlessly frightening parents, we are being irresponsible.

Quick manual trackback to my post in French about this: http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/07/27/myspace-supprime-les-profils-de-29000-delinquants-sexuels/

“both fear-based and divorced from reality” is very neat (cf. Team McCann.) Perhaps the underlying problem is that we blur the line between the emotional reality of fear and its validity or appropriateness - so to deny the reality of what people are afraid of is tantamount to denying their right to be afraid, which is an insult to them personally.

Neither of the AGs quoted in the articles about MySpace are at risk politically. Both AGs have declared that they are not seeking higher office. What is the opportunism?

Yes elected officials have to be reponsive to their constituents no matter how safe their seats are, but reflecting the desires of constituents is not neccessarily political opportunism. In fact, it often is not.

It is also not nuanced to state, as many do, that this is a parent’s responsibility and not a government responsibility. Discussions about the safe use of the internet should be a parent’s responsibility, but not solely a parent’s responsibility. When there are other messangers, including elected officials or teachers or corporations, who share parents concerns, it can re-enforce the message to children.

Sometimes steps must be taken to create laws that enhance safety becuase parents can not or will not take certain steps. Those are actually complex and nuanced decisions and if you read the proposals by the State AGs and responses to those ideas from corporations running sites, I think you will find there is no simplicity to either side. Rather than finding complex and nuanced blog posts, I actually find that the discussions on blogs simplify these proposals, or more often, the writers have not even read them.

In any event, not all parents are sophisticated or “nuanced”. Sometimes it takes a jolt, like “29,000 offenders are kicked off” to remind them of the need to check in with what their kids are doing on the internet or elsewhere. This should not be offensive, it should be welcomed as more parents are brought into an area of their children’s lives that they may not understand.

Finally, it is such an oversimplification to say that politicians or companies have a PR effort and can get printed what they want. In my experience that is simply not true. The media prints what it wants to print. Elected state AGs talk a lot about parental responsibility in conjunction with corporate responsibility, or lack thereof. Whether a reporter chooses to print that or not is the reporter’s decision.

The facts don’t bear that out, however; more books are printed and sold each year in the US than in the year before. My argument is that it’s useful for the novelists to argue that television is damaging the public and driving the novel into obsolescence, because the novelist can thereby create what amounts to a cultural wildlife preserve for the novel, in which it can develop and maintain an elite audience that thinks of itself as marginalized by the mainstream.

My sense of the mainstream news coverage of issues like sexual predators on MySpace is much the same: as conventional news organs feel themselves threatened — for audience share, for cultural centrality — by newer media forms, it’s in their interests to find ways to represent the damage that those newer forms are ostensibly doing to the public. In this way, television news outlets can come to be seen as “family values” oriented, as standing up for the threatened, marginalized desires of the folks who are ostensibly being left behind by all this newness.

None of this is to say that no one has ever done anything bad on the Internet. But it is to say that television and print news sources have deeper motives than simply “the truth” in making sure that such stories get wide dissemination.