Irresponsible sites: Web 2.0's other darkside

Worried parents may find some comfort in seeing the list of teen-safety improvements MySpace has made (see Business Week). But parents also must be aware that there are many social sites besides MySpace, some showing little to no corporate responsibility – if there are even corporations behind the latter type of site. Take for example EncyclopediaDramatica.com, a public wiki (mocking Wikipedia.org) where public and private individuals are being parodied and bullied. Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use emailed me and other child advocates this week about a person she'd heard from who'd been victimized in this site, which says in its disclaimer, "We take no responsibility for any of this." Not just the parody site it purports to be, it encourages trolling (inciting insults, flaming, bullying, defamation, etc.) and jokes about rape. Referring to this site and the page someone created about her, the person who emailed Nancy for help wrote, "There are hundreds of offensive and hurtful pages on there…. 99.9% of the information is obviously ridiculously false. What really kills me is the portrayal of my having been sexually assaulted as a big hilarious fabrication. That doesn't belong in my life…." For more on this, please see this week's issue of my newsletter.