West Canada Valley student charged in threat on My

[losjibaros]

www.uticaod.com/homepage/x254753100



simple solution.. when a incident happens.. if the offender is under the age of 18, fine myspace. that will force them to follow the rules that they chose to ignore by allowing kids to have accounts.

[Swimmy]

Yeah, those kiddies should not be allowed to have such accounts, they're too young to understand the dangers of the Internet and they all use it to sound adult. My mother has shown us several myspace accounts of her students dressed in lingerie, or smoking pot, or in sexual positions with their girlfriends. You'd think it was the playboy mansion's homepage with some of them and they're only 15.

be kids when you're a kid, you'll have the rest of your life to be irresponsible and promiscuous, it's called adulthood. use any politician as an example...

[losjibaros]

Myspace is the tip of a much bigger iceburg... How can you market to teens legaly in the US? well you cant collect information about them on the internet.. but you can allow them to lie about their ages so you can saturate them with more ads a day than a lifetime of satuarday cartoons...

Eventualy this whole generation of Easily Influnced Teens will fall right in line with a man who is so powerful and so willing to use his empire to reach his own goals.... China might never need to fire a shot to take our country over... they might just buy it from this ASSHOLE>

www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/07/b122948.html

[losjibaros]

This is also the guy many believe to have snubbed Ron Paul by not inviting him to debate on his channels.

[Swimmy]

I remember reading a few articles about him a couple years back. I am reminded of the 007 flick, Tomorrow Never Dies where Bond battles a media mogul to stave off a war between England and Japan. Say what you will about James Bond, the underlying idea is pretty scary. And I remember thinking that it's not as cheesy a story line as one might think after reading up on Rupert Murdoch, as that site suggests.

[froggy]

So, this kid, who has never been in trouble before, makes a threat against the school bullies. Fine, the kid is in deep for making a threat. what about the bullies? What trouble are they in? Had it not been for their actions, no threat would have ever happened.

Myspace isn't the problem. Kids lie their ages all the time to create accounts. My kids all set up accounts. Whether a kid posts on myspace that he will bring a gun to school or whisper it in someone's ear, it doesn't matter. Myspace is not the problem, its the high tech way of passing notes in class, if you will. The problem is, in this particular case, that no one wants to step in and stop school bullying. You look at a majority of school shootings that have occurred or that were twarted and they all have one thing in common, the shooters were all victimized by kids in school. that is the reality of it, not myspace, cell phones, text messaging, or whatever other excuse people will make up.

[losjibaros]

myspace isnt the only problem froggy, but in this case it is the problem.. it gives people an opprotunity to interact without supervision... that interaction is fine for adults for the most part but not for kids...

myspace clearly states you must be a certian age to join... than lets you lie about your age... this is wrong in so many ways, #1 myspace is a COMMERCIAL website. It is no different than watching TV except there are more commercials and the content is not regulated. It is illegal for any company in the US to collect personal information about any person under the age of 18 on the internet without a parents permission.

By not having a method for people to prove their age, myspace gets around this, basicaly spitting in the eye of the law.

With a cell phone.. instant messaging or a phone text message you have to know the person you are sending the message to, with myspace you can hunt down the person you are looking for with some basic computer skills... Big Difference.

If the officials are saying they have multipule incidents involving myspace.. myspace needs to address this....


recently i had a guy i used to be friends with create a myspace accout so that it looked like it was me.. he was messaging an old girlfriend of mine, pretending to be me.. he went so far as to ask her for naked pictrues of herself and than while i was at my grandfathers funeral.. told her that she should come and comfort me.... when she finaly had enough of it she contacted me and i had no idea what she was talking about.. i went to the police with it... i was told they get complaints like this all the time. from kids and adults.... I have a great recorded phone call ( at the police officers advice) of this guy crying like a little bitch begging me not to have him arrested as he would lose his job at the downtown utica bank he works at and his wife who is a teacher and cheerleader coach would probably leave him.

I played it for jduges, he can back me up that this story is true....

Lets not forget how many registered sex offenders have myspace accounts and how much fun they have with it...

froggy you can lump technology together and say that its the problem but its not.. a kid text messaging a friend is far different from a kid posting a threating message for 1,000,000's to see..

School bullying will always be a problem.. if you are the parent of a kid getting bullied... sign him up for kung fu....

[Swimmy]

No, myspace is not the cause of this behavior, it's an enabler. Before tools such as Myspace, bullying usually stayed at the school; now it's constant and harsher.

Myspace helps kids try to be grown up or gangsters, etc. We as a society try to force children to grow up faster than they're capable of doing. Myspace only enables a furtherance of that. And kids think they're better for knowing this stuff.

Yes, bullies did create the threat and will probably not see any disciplinary action. It's a way of life, survival of the fittest, if you will. The kid just needs a better role model to teach him how to handle bullies. The bullies will get their comeuppance in time. The kids who get bullied need to better learn how to handle it.

[losjibaros]

please approach the bench

i never said they are the cause, i said myspace is a major contributor to the problem... if they followed the law and closed off any accounts for any kid under 18 or required a creditcard or parental consent... half this shit would just fester out before it blows up..


look at technology as a gun.. myspace is simply a bullet


Froggy.. clear your cookies out of your computer before your kids log-on to myspace again.. after they log out go look at your once empty cookie folder... people dont understand how dangerous this site is... between the affiliate codes, the tracker bugs the occasional spyware and the amazing hyjackbots that can run just from viewing a photo....

[Swimmy]

I was agreeing with you, los jibaros. Myspace is the enabler.

[losjibaros]

i know just goffin around with ya.

[froggy]

Well, I wasn't saying technology is the problem, its just another means to communicate. The problems kids face now are the same problems kids faced in the past, its just that they are all connected much more closely now. And threatening text messaging occurs just as threatening myspace messages. We went thru a round of this with my step daughter and some kids from school harassing her. they kept texting her phone. As far as the kids' myspace pages, my wife monitors those very closely to make sure things are staying friendly.

I stil don't believe things like myspace are an enabler at all. Gossip happens whether people have a computer page or not. Sure it makes it easier to do it but its still going to happen. Kids can be cruel.

And I stand behind what I said earlier, what punishments do the bullies face? This kid who levied the threat is now in trouble because he was probably tired of the lack of response to act on the issue. While I don't agree with the severety of the threat he issued, I can understand it. When people get pushed and pushed and pushed, and the ones who are supposed to be there to protect them don't, what are they left to do than to take matters into their own hands.

[Swimmy]

The difference is that myspace gossip reaches many more people than a cell phone text message or hearsay gossip among friends in person.

If myspace was around in my high school swimming days, some of the bullying I received at school would easily be spread to my fellow swimmers in Maine or Virginia (yes I competed all over the place). I know some of them were bullies in their own high schools, but they respected me as an athlete and competitor. I can't imagine how the tables would have turned had myspace been around for them to see what I put up with at school. Instead of having to face the bullies during school hours, I would have had a constant 24/7 barrage of attacks and the pool of people to share in the spectacle jumps from a couple hundred to a couple thousand. Myspace would have enabled many more people than just my school to laugh at me and harass me. Kids of the local school districts would be able to chime in, not just the other fellow swimmers I competed against. Myspace enables a larger audience of people who might not have noticed or cared otherwise.

While the people were not able to stop the bullying, I could see how a bullied kid would easily lash out with a threat like this kid did. Was it right? Certainly not, one Columbine or VA Tech incident is one too many. I agree that this violence is rooted in the bullied bullying the bullies. But bullying will never be stopped, so you need to better teach the bullied kids to deal with it. As losjibaros suggested, take the kid to kung fu classes for self-defense. And teach the kid mental techniques to combat the verbal abuse.

My ex cyberstalked me on myspace. After our breakup, she'd message any girl on my friend list and tell them all kinds of stories. Thankfully my friends are reliable and they told her where to go stick it. But she was contacting my law school friends still in MI. After that, she would constantly check my profile and started to track my brother's profile. It was horrible. I subsequently deleted my myspace profile because I don't need that crap in my life. Since then, my ex has stopped her attacks. But myspace enabled her to do more damage than just spread rumors amongst her friends.

The point is that the technology available to kids today enables much more abrasive behavior that is accessible by an exponentially larger audience than when you or I were kids.

I disagree that we faced the same problems that kids do today.

[froggy]

There are ways to set myspace pages to "private" so that only friends on your list can view and send you messages. I'm not sure how to do it but there are ways to do that.

I do understand what you are saying, swimmy. Yes, myspace puts it out there to a broader audience, shall we say. But that's only if people are paying attention to it.

The interesting thing with this case, had this kid used other means to deal with it, like karate or the like, seeing how he hadn't been in trouble before he could have hid behind a self defense claim much easier than threatening with a gun. Chances are good that the bullies are known to the staff and kids and it would give more credibility toward the kid defending himself. In this day and age you can't say gun or reference one without throwing red flags all over the place. And rightly so. But in this particular incident, hey need to closely take everything into consideration before charging this kid with an actual crime. Did he have access to a gun to really act upon his threat? And being that he took the thread down quickly after posting it shows he had no real intentions of carrying it out. Sure suspend him a few days from school, educate him on why it was wrong and how to better handle those types of situations, but I firmly believe any criminal charges are way overblown and not necessary.

[Swimmy]

froggy said:

There are ways to set myspace pages to "private" so that only friends on your list can view and send you messages.
...
Sure suspend him a few days from school, educate him on why it was wrong and how to better handle those types of situations, but I firmly believe any criminal charges are way overblown and not necessary.

I forgot to mention, that she took a list of my friends' before removing me from her friend list. My profile was set to private, but many of my friends' aren't. And while I "blocked" her, it only prevented her from sending me messages. The feature is so weak, some of my friends who did "block" her still received messages from her. Myspace claims it's working on fixing that problem.

After the Holland Patent incident and the uber anti 2nd amendment mentality (the subject for a different thread), I'm not surprised the kid is facing criminal charges. Out of proportion? Sure. Uncalled for? Given the recent local events involving gun violence, I don't know.