Content on MySpace.com is filled with nudity, sexual and gang images and profanity, a California State University, Fresno professor found in her second research project examining the social networking site that is popular with teenagers.

Dr. Tamyra A. Pierce, assistant professor of mass communication and journalism, randomly selected and analyzed the content on 700 MySpace sites across the United States and found pervasive sexual material.

MySpace is a popular social networking site used by teens and others as a meeting place. Like diaries available to the public online, the sites allow users to tell about themselves and their activities, post pictures, play songs and chat with “friends” around the world.
 

Pierce’s analysis of the sexual visual material posted on the sites found:

• 59 percent of the individuals included risqué/sexual poses

• 28 percent included partial frontal nudity of males

• 17 percent included partial frontal nudity of females

• 9 percent included links to pornographic sites

• 6 percent had full frontal nudity of females

“If I found this content on just a small percentage of randomly selected sites, a young person seeking out this type of material can easily find many more sites with pornography,” Pierce said. “It’s obvious the pornography industry is having a heyday with this.”

Because the MySpace users often accept links from “friends” that they actually do not know, visitors to their sites may go to other sites they do not control. Pierce said some of those would be pornographic sites.

“Not only are those behind such sites posting sexually explicit pictures on their sites for all ages to openly see, on at least one site I found they were also recruiting girls to send pictures of themselves,” she said. “I found up to 20,000 ‘friends’ linked to these sites.”

In addition, Pierce found young girls individually are exposing themselves on their personal sites. She found that the youngest users – 14-15-year-olds – had sexual poses on their sites 71 percent of the sites. The other age groups and incidence of sexual poses on their sites were 16-17-year-olds (65 percent sexual poses); 18-19 years (63 percent); 20-22 years (56 percent); 23-30 years (54 percent); all other age groups (less than 5 percent).

The analysis on content follows Pierce’s research earlier this year on contact from strangers for users of MySpace and other social networking sites.

That research found 51 percent of teenage survey respondents said they had been contacted by a stranger and 10 percent had met with a stranger they first became acquainted with on online social networking sites.

In her latest research, Pierce also found that “aggressive material” was common:

• 54 percent of the sites included profanity

• 37 percent included sexual profanity (“f” word or “mother “f” er)

• 16 percent included gang-related visuals (i.e. gang hand signals or gang graffiti)

• 6 percent included a photo of a weapon

Pierce said her two research projects strongly point to the need for parents to educate children about the possible dangers online and the risks that come with certain online behaviors online.

“As parents, we teach our children to not talk with strangers and to not open the doors to someone they don’t know. But we probably never think about saying to them, ‘don’t expose yourself to strangers,’ yet that’s exactly what they are doing in MySpace and other social networking sites,” she said