The suicide of a Dardenne Prairie, Mo., teenager after she was teased on MySpace has brought fresh scrutiny to honesty on social networking Web sites.
Megan Meier, 13, committed suicide after she was relentlessly taunted on MySpace by a fictional teenage boy using an account linked to a neighboring family.
MySpace and similar site Facebook both have rules against faking identities, but the high volume of users makes policing difficult, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Thursday.
"It's become, in my view, a pretty serious problem with the Internet," said Frank Farley, a psychology professor at Temple University and former president of the American Psychological Association. "Who do you trust?"
"It's just so much easier to pretend to be someone else online. People are very eager to try it out," said David Whittier, a professor at Boston University's School of Education. "There's really nothing wrong with that. In a way, it's a wonderful thing."
However, he said the line must be drawn when someone uses a fake identity to hurt another person, as in the Meier case.
"There should be an appropriate penalty for what these people did," Whittier said. "I'm hoping our civilized societies will work together to develop laws and guidelines to make cyberspace more civilized."
Copyright 2008 by UPI
