Judgement Call: MyLOL.net and the Demise of Morality and Parenting
By Brandon Ching
On July 19th, 2008
Browsing through my Google reader today, I came across this article. Apparently, today’s over-sexed, disease-proliferating, premarital-pregnancy-crazed teenage population is in need of the services of a teen dating site.
While I attempt to refrain from a violent outburst of profanity-laced verbiage, let me highlight some of the finer points of this site (please remember that this site is marketed towards teens…from 0-18), after the jump:
- Owned and operated by an 18-year-old out of Australia who recently (June 2008) purchased the site for $10,000 (A. The kid looks like a sleazier version of Joseph Francis, which is pretty hard to do, and B. How in the hell does an 18-year-old get $10,000 to buy what’s essentially a kiddy porn site? But I digress…)
- At least 1/4 of the members are 16 or under (1/4 of the members from the UK match this criteria so it can probably be generalized.)
- Many of the members are pictured in swim suits and or sleeping clothes/underwear.
- The “Most Popular Profile” has pictures of what appears to be an underage girl posing in her underwear and in a number of provocative positions.
- Has banner ads like, “Is your love cheating on you?” and Fling.com, an adult “dating” social networking site (read: anonymous sex advertising.)
- The majority of the comments on member profiles are even less intelligent than the average MySpace comment: “omg soo hot”, “omg u have a great arse” and my personal favorite, “ill f*** u from behind.”
- It appears that there is a point ranking system involved with this site…and I’ll let you guess what types of profiles have the highest points. Here’s a hint, the less clothing there is, the higher the points.
OK, I think I’ve held my rage long enough. Why in the hell is this site still up? Do we really need more provocation for our kids to be exploited and brainwashed into thinking that sexuality is a joke? Why in God’s name is a site with 13-year-old girls lifting their shirts up and exposing their midsections, etc, in their main profile photo? Not only is this a pedophile’s dream treasure chest, but it seriously exploits our youth. It forces them to grow up too fast by imposing screwed up adult standards of social acceptance onto young individuals who, in all likelihood, lack the intellectual competence to truly understand their actions.
Now, I’ll be the first to advocate for the freedom of speech. But this shit is not free speech, this is exploitation. The day that a 13-year-old voluntarily posing in a thong with a “quiz” question of, “would you f*ck me” becomes free speech, someone shoot me because I do not want to live in a society where behavior like that has become acceptable. For the love of all that is sacred (which apparently is not much anymore), this site needs to be taken down.
But enough about blaming the site and the brainless youth who use it…where the hell are the parents? If my mom ever caught me doing half the shit I’ve seen on this site in just the last 10 minutes she’d have slapped the silly right out of me—and I’m a guy. Why aren’t these kid’s parents doing that? Are they that clueless? Unfortunately, they probably are. I understand that technology is hard to grasp as you get older, but if you want to be a good parent, you better step up and learn EXACTLY what it is your kids are doing. Otherwise you are failing society and, most importantly, you are failing your kids.
For all the great things that the Internet has brought, enabling child exploitation should never be one of them. Kids will be kids, but in order for them to become productive and successful members of society, they must be guided that way. As professionals in the IT field, we need to stand up and take action when the very thing we love and work with everyday begins to turn bad. And I’m not talking about wrongs like copyright violations, morally questionable content (racism, etc), or censorship, and the like. I’m talking about universal wrongs like child exploitation and the social corruption of children. These are things that nobody can ignore, least of all us. So please, take a moment to report mylol.net to one of the following watchdog sites:
- http://www.asacp.org/
- http://www.missingkids.com/cybertip/
- http://childwise.net/report_child_abuse/child_pornography.php - Australia based (where the site’s owner resides)
- https://www.afp.gov.au/online_forms/ocset_form.html - Australia based
Tagged with: child exploitation, mylol, parenting, teens
Posted in: Rants
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For what it’s worth, I see very little difference between a site like this and MySpace, frankly.
Since we lack a fundamental, accurate way to verify someone’s age on a website, and since any 11 year old smart enough to open a web browser can also click through the “yes, I’m 13″ warning, it makes it increasingly difficult to police this sort of behavior.
My personal take is that the parents need to be responsible and that more effort needs to be put into notifying parents on what can be done on the internet. Instead of just bundling PCs with antivirus software, they should be bundled with a must-read pamphlet on what sort of sites your kids can visit and share information with in as few as literally two clicks.
Social networking tools like MySpace are extraordinarily powerful, but MyLOL.net has raised your hackles because it’s targeted specifically towards teens. And that it’s (apparently) highly sexualized. (I can’t access the site; it’s getting pretty well slammed. So cheers to BBC on that.)
This is essentially just that. I don’t know if I’m prepared to say that I don’t think 13-18-year-olds should have a place to socialize and keep in touch with their friends. But I think that such a place would need to be considerably more tightly controlled. Digital-everything makes it far too easy to “overshare” and when kids aren’t taught to know better, the boundaries blur and you end up with what’s effectively exploitation, whether willing or not.
MySpace has been forced to bring into effect some tools that make it considerably easier to report questionable content, and they move quickly on it. Suggestive photos of “underaged” individuals is a legal gray area, even though it probably shouldn’t be.
You can’t unring the bell, though. There will always be providers of tools like this because they’re so simple to create and the barrier to entry is so little. And because proving intent is surprisingly difficult and there are PLENTY of reasons why a website owner shouldn’t necessarily be responsible for the content of their site as contributed by members, with very few, very certain exceptions. (Judges insisting that bloggers will be responsible for ALL comments EVER left on their site, etc. The spammers win.)
The long and short of it is that, regrettably, reporting this site won’t *really* matter. Parent education will. And you’ll always have a chunk of parents who either don’t know or don’t care and it’s unfortunate but the reality of the balancing act and free exchange that is the internet is that there’s very little we can do to crimp the mirth and stop that particular sort of grey-area behavior from happening.
You’ll notice that flat out child pornography actually has something of a lid on it, because there are proactive attempts to stop its proliferation and because the consequences are SO dire. With a site like this, there’s really nothing that’s technically illegal going on, in the eyes of the kids nor in the eyes of the law and therein lies the problem.
You can ring my beee-eeeee-eeel, ring my bell. I love that song.
Chris, I agree with you that the real source of the problem here is parenting. And I’m sure you know me well enough to know that I believe in a free Net (yes, Stallman’s version of free), probably more so than most people. I do not believe that site operators are necessarily always responsible for content and actions performed on their site. For instance, I see nothing wrong with torrent search sites and P2P applications, despite the obvious proliferation of copyright material.
But I think there is a VERY big difference here when talking about loss of profit sourced in a specific behavior vs. profit gained through child exploitation. MySpace sells itself as a social networking site to connect people. It targets everyone for the purpose of communication and connection. There’s nothing wrong with this. People will use it, as they will, good or bad. Yet MyLOL sells itself as a “teen dating” site. This premise presupposes an interest in romance and “finding love.” When you consider other things in the site like a point scoring system, age range search that includes “12 and under,” and adult advertising (Fling.com), there are things that just don’t jive. If they are targeting teens, why have adult sex/relationship advertising (I also saw a Westin hotel advert there too…as if teens can afford to travel and stay at a Westin), why have an age search category for reaching members aged 40+?
Unfortunately, you are right that this technology is so cheap to implement these days that it is difficult to control new sites springing up at any given time. And yes, unfortunately, the demand for this type of service is there. Yet, while I am usually always against forms of control and coercion in society, I also realize that there are certain compelling interests that force control over certain domains. We have status-offenses for underage smoking, drinking, curfew, and sexual behaviors (statutory rape) because society has deemed these actions harmful to youth. While it is obviously debatable, I think that this specific type of business model (targeting youth while promoting adult sexuality and promoting “deviant” youth behavior) might present a compelling enough interest to society and government to sanction its use. I mean, personally, if kids want to have sex and their parents are not in the picture or don’t care, then whatever…it happens…they’re not my kids. But the main thing is that I’m not promoting them to do it, not enabling them to do it, not providing an arena of pressure to do it. This site is. That’s the biggest difference.
Kids may like and want this sort of thing, but they also like and want cars, guns, drugs, and alcohol. Yet these are restricted to kids, to varying degrees, in most developed nations for the simple fact that it harms them at an early age. I mean really, is it that hard to wait until they reach 18/21, then they can strip, sleep with, shoot, race, smoke, and drink whatever/whoever they want. But in the mean time, this site is PROMOTING and permitting behavior that many people might agree is damaging to young minds (like drugs, alcohol, guns, etc). Thus, I feel it should be taken down (or at the very least, stripped [no pun intended] of adult advertising and moderated for content).
You may be interested to know that following an investigation by the BBC, the site has been reported by the NSPCC and they have called for it to be shut down.
It appears to be run by just a couple of thick headed 18 years old college kids who dont give a damn about the kids and just want to make money
ure a dickhed who wrote this article, youve jsut used clever persuasive techniques to make this thing look bad. theres dickheds on it, theres dickheds on myspace and everywhere,, the young kids that are into it, are obviously into it anyways if not on the computer then what else are they gonna go do, the real thing, u cant stop people from being people and doing what theya re doing, but you can give heavy warnings, and people 13 and up which have the warnings slapped in there face, no the consequences, epsecially this day and age, as harsh as it is the conciquences are there own. and the guy who made it is my mate, and hes a good decent bloke so those comments are judgemental and unnessary
Well spoken, “kretty.” But frankly, encouraging kids to do sexually impulsive things online is a pretty fucking stupid thing to do and endemic of the problem, not a “well, it’s all gone to hell so might as well profit from it” point of view.
Thanks for expressing yourself so eloquently, though. It really makes your side of the argument shine. Ass.
“You need a license to fish… Any jackass can have a kid.”
Prime example of absentee parents. They either don’t know, or don’t care. Hence, we’ll have a generation of whores running around in no time.
All the more reason for me to separate myself from this great big pile of… Society, and go live in the beautiful mountains of Colorado.
I think it just depends on how smart the damn kids are. Seeing as most are acting quite stupid on sites like MyLOL, it doesn’t make that good an image for the site. The smart ones who actually WANT a relationship, or friends, few as they are, for some reason aren’t ever accounted for. I’ve met the owner, Lipari, whatever you want to call him, and he’s far from sleazy, and is actually a good-hearted guy who’s modifying the site at the moment to make it a safer place. And he’s also a VERY good friend of mine, and what you said was judgmental and rude, seeing as you don’t even KNOW the guy. Believe it or not, as a lawyer’s daughter, you can’t do shit to shut it down, no offense. It isn’t “kiddy porno” or whatever you call it. If there is too much being revealed, the kids are either A. Banned by the moderators hired for the site, or B. BANNED, and they can’t make a new one with the same email. Don’t judge what you don’t know. You obviously don’t know that all kids aren’t looking for sex on this. Most go on, don’t put pictures up, and just talk to people in the chat room. I’m not defending it fully, actually. Most girls on there are misguided and slutty and fake. And most men are complete perverts. But next time, account for the smart ones, will you? Because good god, my friends go on that site, and they don’t do all those stupid ass things. And I met my own damn current fiancee on there, we’re planning on getting married. If it’s used right, the site can actually be a nice place. It’s just that so many people abuse it and don’t use it for the reason it’s there for. For kids to meet other people, make friends, and if you’re lucky, hell, maybe a decent boyfriend. But don’t get me wrong, there are probably a few pedophiles on there, and many perverts. You can tell who’s for real or not without being a rocket scientist. Can you tell the difference between “hey im a hot musician, any hot single girls in here?” and “Hi guys, whatsup?” Or the difference between a picture of a famous person, and an actual person? I personally think though that personal information should not be permitted to be given out, unless if they are truly sure that the person isn’t a fake (webcam, etc.), but most kids don’t give a shit no matter HOW many damn warnings are slapped in their faces. But I’m actually pretty offended by this, seeing as you’re insulting a bunch of kind, good people (that I KNOW are real, by the way) who are only looking for friends and/or girl or boyfriends for many of their own reasons. If it’s used properly, it’s not the horrible place you make it out to be.