Politicians Use Teens to get Votes

Politicians were and are never worried about child abuse, child sexual exploitation, and Internet safety, until it comes to getting votes. How many times have you heard a politician running for office that says, "I promise to find more missing children"? or "I pledge to reduce the number of children who are abused by 90%"?

You don't here those as campaign slogans. You know why? Because voters don't care about those issues as much as the economy, the war in Iraq, unemployment, or illegal immigration. Thats right. Thats exactly what I said. American voters care more about many other issues over the welfare of children.

I have never seen any survey that asked voters what their top issues are for an election that including missing and abducted children, child abuse, or online sexual predators.

But now with the popularity of myspace.com and with inflated figures from the NCMEC, that they cannot prove or verify, that one out of five children is approached online by a sexual predator, it has now become a political issue and politicians are rushing to capitalize on it.



Of course there are teenagers who are solicited for sex online. It does happen and needs to be dealt with. The police have and are dealing with it. One in Five cannot be proven even though the NCMEC insists on using that figure.

Basically a long time back someone did a survey with a question like "Has anyone talked to you in a sexual manner online?" and one in five said yes. However, they were not asked if it was other teenagers talking to them that way or adults.

They left that out on purpose because funding comes from places who want numbers that show there is a problem. Having the actual details might not get them as much money.

Now, . . .

MySpace and other social-networking sites like LiveJournal.com and Facebook are the potential targets for a proposed federal law that would effectively require most schools and libraries to render those Web sites inaccessible to minors, an age group that includes some of the category's most ardent users.

Fitzpatrick and fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, on Wednesday endorsed new legislation (click here for PDF) that would cordon off access to commercial Web sites that let users create public "Web pages or profiles" and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.

That's a broad category that covers far more than social-networking sites such as Friendster and Google's Orkut.com. It would also sweep in a wide range of interactive Web sites and services, including Blogger.com, AOL and Yahoo's instant-messaging features, and Microsoft's Xbox 360, which permits in-game chat.

Fitzpatrick's bill, called the Deleting Online Predators Act, or DOPA

More like Dopey. Censorship is not the answer. Education is. I mean educating parents not just the teens. Be a real parent. Quit using the computer to babysit your children. Parents these days are "too busy" to be parents. They first used television as a babysitter and now it's computers and they want laws passed that make it a better babysitter.Hey let's take away their cellphones too. And we can put a lock on the house phone, lock them in their rooms, slide food under the door, and they will be safe and we won't have to spend too much time making sure they are safe.

Schools are no better than the parents. Of all the money they get, they spend very little out of every dollar on actual students where they could be hiring people that can educate students about Internet safety.

Any real parent has already learned that forbidding teenagers to do anything is making certain that they WILL do it. Censoring these websites won't work anymore than prohibition worked on adults. These teens know far more about the Internet than their parents and certainly more than teachers whose last days in school was when the TRS80 was the hot new computer.

They will get around whatever system that is put in place and do it more because you are trying to forbid them than any other reason. The idiot republicans behind this law are desperate to retain voters that are tired of the bush-neo-con-almightier-than-thou-crowd and they think that banning teenagers from myspace will do it for them.

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The actual proposed law that would block social networking websites.
borrowed quotes from; News.com