CHICAGO — Many young adults cleaned up their MySpace profiles, deleting mentions of sex and booze and boosting privacy settings, if they got a single cautionary e-mail from a busybody named “Dr. Meg.”
The e-mail was sent by Dr. Megan Moreno, lead researcher of a study of lower-income young adults that she says shows how parents and other adults can encourage safer Internet use.
Her message read in part: “You seemed to be quite open about sexual issues or other behaviors such as drinking or smoking. Are you sure that’s a good idea? . . . You might consider revising your page to better protect your privacy.”
Parents of young adults, and even doctors who care for them, “should feel very comfortable looking up” their children’s or patients’ profiles on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, said Moreno, a pediatrician and adolescent-medicine specialist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It’s not creepy or an invasion of privacy, she said, but more like reading posters on their walls or slogans on their T-shirts.
Young people don’t consider the consequences of posting their drinking habits and sexual behavior, Moreno said. Several wrote back to “Dr. Meg” saying they had no idea their pages could be viewed by anyone. Such social-networking sites have privacy settings, but they’re not always used.
The sites can be a window into a teenager’s world.
“People who work with teens often have this idea that teens are hard to reach,” she said.
But many young people publicly post their hobbies and interests on MySpace or Facebook and expect people to look.
The study, published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, shows that adult supervision of MySpace can raise adolescents’ awareness of how accessible their pages are, she said.
The researchers first located 190 MySpace public profiles in a single urban ZIP code, randomly selected from the 10 U.S. Census areas with the lowest average income because researchers wanted to target young adults who might have less access to doctors. Moreno said she could not reveal the city because of privacy restrictions.
All the users said on their profiles that they were 18 to 20 years old, and their pages included three or more references to sex, drinking, drug use or smoking.
Half were sent the “Dr. Meg” e-mail; the other half weren’t.
After three months, 42 percent of those getting a “Dr. Meg” e-mail had either set their profiles to “private,” meaning only people they had chosen as MySpace “friends” could view it, or they removed references to sex or substance use. Only 29 percent of those in the group who had not been contacted by Dr. Meg made such changes over the three-month period.
