My term paper

My topic for the term paper was “Social networking and Teenagers”. I chose this topic because with the passage of time the websites are being used by younger people and lots of individuals start using them in their early teens. This could severely affect their future since they might get involved in a sexual harassment, cyber-bullying or impersonation case. I mainly did my research using articles and websites generated by Google scholar. I came across several criminal cases involving Facebook and myspace usage by teens. I have discussed two cases in detail: a sexual harassment case by a 15 year old teenager in Wisconsin and a cyber bullying case wherein a 13 year old teen girl committed suicide after derogatory comments being passed on her MySpace profile. In addition, I have discussed privacy issues and how important they are when teenagers create their profiles. I was pretty surprised to see that not many teenagers care about their privacy, they are just looking for a medium to share information and a space to talk about them. I still remember how reluctant I was to post my pictures on Facebook when I first created my profile in high school, however, after visiting the website more often and looking at other friends open up, I became comfortable as well and started posting content on my profile. When I did this paper, I saw lot of similarity between the threats posed by Facebook and the fears I had in my mind when I started using it. I really enjoyed writing this paper, it was very educational in terms of the criminal cases and verdicts I read and ethical conclusion drawn from them.