Internet More Dangerous than School Violence, Sexually Transmitted Diseases for Children: survey

A new survey from the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, The National Poll on Children’s Health,
has found that US parents rate Internet Safety as being a more serious
health threat to children than school violence, sexually transmitted
diseases, abuse and neglect.

Yes, the Internet.

No, I’m not kidding.

The survey found that Internet safety is a relatively new health
concern amongst parents. Women were more likely to rate it as a big
problem; 32% of women report Internet safety as a big problem compared
with only 21% of men. Internet safety had no differences in proportion
of concern by education status, income level or marital status.

You may well ask what this has to do with Web 2.0. The report notes:
“state and federal legislators appear to have responded to public
concerns about Internet safety for children, considering new legislation and issuing consumer alerts“.

The ongoing campaign to whip up hysteria around the risks for
children in social networking by some segments of the media is clearly
working.

If the obvious hysteria demonstrated in this survey, and indeed over the last 18 months through countless hours of negative press surrounding MySpace and many other
social networking destinations translates to the ballot box, big
Government is ready and waiting to impose a raft of legislative rules
and regulations on a future generation of Silicon Valley social
networking start ups. Rules and regulations that will have a cost in
terms of compliance and implementation, taking money away from R&D
and making the pursuit of success by any affected start up that little
bit harder.