Teenagers who post their photos online or who participate in social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are much more likely to be contacted by strangers, including strangers who make the teens feel scared or uncomfortable, according to new data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
And girls are more likely than boys to be contacted by people they don’t know, and to feel scared or uncomfortable by that contact.
In fact, as you can see from the chart from Pew, almost half of online girls surveyed who posted their pictures online were contacted by strangers, although as the report notes, “strangers” includes everyone from random spammers to online perverts.
The report also notes, though, that being contacted by strangers may be considered “part of doing business” among teens who post on social networking sites, since part of the purpose of those posts is to meet new people.
And the report adds that some of the teens on those sites are actually deliberating flirting, and that sort of behavior draws contact from strangers like flies at a garbage dump.
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