The dangers of "owning" the community

Negative press surrounding safety fears for young users of MySpace have prompted News Corp to launch (WSJ) a multimillion dollar “public service” ad campaign. The campaign does not explicitly mention MySpace, but instead promotes online safety, especially for teenage girls, in conjunction with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the centre’s website Cybertipline.com.

The move highlights the possibly-insoluble quandary in which News Corp finds itself as the owner of MySpace. The site gained popularity with the fickle youth demographic precisely because users could customise their pages in any way they chose and treat the site as an online community free of supervision or moderation – see Danah Boyd’s excellent paper on the subject. Children like MySpace because it gives them a (virtual) public space in which to socialise free, however illusorily, of adult scrutiny. However the ever-expanding popularity (Editorsweblog) of the site, particularly with minors, combined with its acquisition by a high-profile mainstream media company, has encouraged legislators and lobbyists to seek safeguards (WSJ) or de facto moderation of the site to exclude pornographic material and restrict the activities of younger children.   

If News Corp gives in, or is forced to give in, to the chorus of voices calling for greater moderation of MySpace, none of the effects seem likely to benefit any of the parties concerned. News Corp’s first attempt to censor the content of MySpace, by blocking links to YouTube, was defeated roundly by the site’s users (BrandRepublic). If it takes the route of turning the apparently unsupervised public spaces of MySpace into something its young users don’t trust, the most plausible reaction is a mass defection to one of many, potentially even less-regulated, alternatives – an effect almost diametrically opposed to that sought by those calling for a safer digital environment. Jeff Jarvis told us a few months ago why you don’t want to own the community, and the reasons still stand – first, you can’t own the community, you can only provide a space to facilitate it, and second, as soon as you try to control too many of the activities of the community, you find it gone.