all this myspace stuff is getting rediculous,... yeah i feel bad for the people who've been abused but my whole school administration is going crazy about it 'advising' everybody to delete theirs saying college admissions and employers will see these and deny you of a position at a school or job in actuality i find it all bullsh*t

What the fuck are you talking about?

Come again

all over the news around where i live theres talk about banning myspace because its just another way for sexual predators to get in contact with teens which hes led to the assualt of 3 girls,... ring any bells?

Sounds a bit, how do you say, reactionary

here. i'll decode.

all of the recent news headlines surrounding myspace and the people who use it is getting ridiculous. while i feel badly for the people who may have been abused through it, it seems as though everytime something goes wrong with a young person, the news outlets try their hardest to find their myspace site and try and make some assumptions about the type of person that they were. anyone remember that guy that killed his girlfriend's family? how about the gay-bar attacker?

now, my school's administration, in their overzealous attempts to keep us safe and productive members of society, have recommended that we delete our myspace profiles, saying that colleges or possible employers will find them, sift through them, and then deny us admission/jobs.

personally, i think it's bullshit. thoughts?

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now, i'll comment.

no college is going to hire people to sift through myspace profiles. first of all, there's a slight problem in tracking them all down. they'd have to ask for your myspace address on the application for admission and anyone with something to "hide" would just leave that part off. one of my friends, dan, has a myspace. if he told me to track it down, i wouldn't have been able to, and i know him very well. i don't think a college could possibly ever find it. secondly, there's the problem of the sheer number of people that apply to a college. i'd imagine that sorting through the applications is already a pretty daunting task. no one is also going to want to add sifting through your myspace to see what sorts of possibly offensive content you have on it. third, i'd think a lot of colleges would be in pretty deep shit, considering most of them support facebook, which as far as i understand it, is practically the same thing.

employers aren't really going to take the time to do that either. first, i'd have to assume that most people that hold down "serious" jobs are adults. it's not often that you'll see a kid fresh out of high school working as a computer programmer. and, for the most part, the "adult" profiles on myspace aren't offensive. the pictures may be at times slightly goofy, but they're pretty clean and generally used to find old friends. i honestly couldn't see an employer saying "well, you're really qualified for this job, but you have a myspace profile, so i'm not going to hire you." secondly, i'd have to assume that, if you're really a crackpot, that's gonna come through in your personality and employers aren't gonna have to go looking at your myspace profile in hopes that you're posing with a gun or have posted rap lyrics advocating shooting everyone up.

finally, i'm not sure that a school or employer could deny you admission/employment based on the fact that you have a certain type of website. denying admission based on a myspace site is the equivilent (in my mind, at least) to denying admission based on the fact that i have a xanga, or run a poetry site, or keep a paper journal, or wear a spikey belt, or drive a green car. and as i said before, most colleges have facebook services available, and i understand it to be practically the same thing. it would be hypocritical to deny admission to someone with a myspace only to allow all students attending the university to sign up with facebook.

if you're really concerned about it, though, go clean up your myspace profile. clean up your language, clean up your pictures, make the damn thing readable, and try to hide the pictures of half-dressed chicks. but you know what? you're sixteen, and i'd think you have a while before you have to worry about it.

I got denied admission to Ohio State's law school b/c I listed Vanilla Ice as my favorite band.

If you don't want to be blacklisted by employers, then cancel your fucking myspace account.

If you are worried about people finding you (predators) then don't set up dates with people you meet online. Also, don't post for the whole world to see when/where you are going to be so they can "coincidentally" meet you there.

Stupid bitches.

I was in a position to hire employees for about 4-5 years. You've got to be fucking nuts if you think I'd even consider trying to find someone's myspace page.
We read resumes, call references, and interview. That's it.
Anyone who's applying for a job that does background checks so thoroughly that they're searching desperately to see if they have a blog, myspace, or personal webpage probably is adult enough to not have that kind of shit on there.
It's a non-issue. Christ.

My last job used mine.
Actually, they went to my personal page, which links to my myspace. I had accidently left up a pic of me with one of my kids after my profile went public. (anyone who uses myspace has delt with the page of red X's while updating pics. I honestly had forgotten it was there, and knowing what i look like, don't look at my own pics very often.) There wasn't anything on the site that linked me to where I worked, and the kid wasn't named, so it wasn't as though it put anyone in danger.
They used that to suspend me, then used the fact that I emailed digital pictures from my house to my partner's house to print them out for a father's day gift the next day. Well, that's what I actually did.
They fired me for stealing pictures off of their website (Yes, that's right - they have a website with kids pics, the address where to find them, and the hours they're open. Clearly, they're worried about internet predators. ). Which absolutly 100% never happened.

All this was after about 5 months of 'watching' me because I didn't belong there. They couldn't find anything wrong with my job performance, so they went into my personal life.
Basically, if your company wants to get rid of you, they'll find a way. It's bad enough that they own your ass 40 hours a week. It's not worth it to let them dictate what you do with yourself on your own personal time.

How did they find your website? Did they go searching?

http://www.JenniMae.com doesn't require massive amounts of brainwork to find, which is good, because massive amounts they don't have.

I was never secretive about having a website, so it wouldn't take long for someone I know to mention it to someone who didn't like me to pass that info along to the management.

i was talking to someone on one of my college-themed messageboards about facebook. she went into this long story about how her friend interviewed for a job, knew she was qualified, but somehow didn't get the job. so she calls the potential employer and asks why she wasn't called back, and the lady told her that some revealing pictures had turned up in her facebook account.

could be bullshit, but ya never know.

I don't think that's enough...
I think you should be denied access to society for that...

Well that's her own fault, that skank.

Jim, what kind of job was your friend applying for where they gave a flying fuck about her private photo collection?

i'm predicting that within a month there will be a huge nationwide backlash against myspace by parents too concerned with other's parenting skills. it will be mindlessly debated for weeks for no real reason whatsoever.

Probably one of those crazy companies that actually cares about their public image.