The dark side of teen texting | Hacker News Reader

The dark side of teen texting

pcmag.com

9 pointssonabinu21 comments

> For parents, there's a pretty serious downside to all this teen texting, however. A full 28 percent of polled teens said they had sent fully nude photos of themselves over SMS. About a quarter of American teenagers participate in "sexting," according to Wilson's sources, which include research firms like Nielsen and Pew, as well as media and government organizations.

What is the "serious downside" for parents now? I convinced two girls when I was 14 to show me their boobs. We didn't have smartphones back then. You think about nothing else when you hit puberty and is totally normal behavior.

Btw how do you send a full nude picture over SMS?

"serious downside" may be that the pictures can remain around forever, and can get shared with 10,000 people in 2 seconds. The two girls you chatted up were exposed just to you for a short period of time, and had you not told us, no one except the 3 of you would ever have known.

The big difference is, sending a picture puts it out into the world where it can be forwarded, saved, uploaded to the web, shared with the entire school ...

It can get way out of hand.

It's much more of a Pandora's box than the private "show me yours" that you describe.

Well, this seem to be a good case for the use of DRM.

But it's users the ones who will hold the keys for the kingdom, not corporations.

DRM only needs to fail once. Then an image is in the wild and can be endlessly replicated (think Streisand effect / network effect).

For a movie, or for the pictures of someone famous?

Yes, lots of people will be trying to break that DRM.

For a random no-one in some small country? Out of millions of random no-ones?

It's a lot better than the current no-protection-at-all scheme.

He must have meant MMS, where you can send photos, which functions almost exactly like SMS.

Agreed on this being a terrible article, but it does highlight one thing; punishing teens for this is not the way to go. I think diluting the sex criminal database with a quarter of the upcoming generation is a little counter productive.

I removed it, i try to be less judgmental.

I am not in the US, but I would probably have done "sexting" instead while being at that age. Looking at these percentages, it seems like the laws don't display the reality. At least they should make exceptions when the other part is at a similar age.

Agreed. An interesting article on the subject that was posted a few months ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495914

Cheers

He implies that the security of a teenage sexual experience is responsibility of their parents.

Aren't all of those sexting teenagers "sex offenders" according to the inexcusable USA laws?

Which really makes me want to stand up and go burn a church or two.

While I'm sure you can find many church members who would say it's wrong for teens to send nude photos to each other, I doubt you're going to find a lot of support for harsh, punitive government actions in response.

For that matter, I suspect you can find a lot of non-church members who would agree on one level or another its wrong (or at the very least a bad idea), but also would not agree to harsh punitive government actions.

This is out of control government and policians fearful to be seen being even remotely soft on child porn lest they get smeared by their opponents in the next election, not the ever-less-Puritan American public or any portion thereof.

The peoblem is, we have an out of control situation and an utter lack of people to blame for this. Everyone it kind of not supporting the shit but nobody actively prevents the shit from happening.

The people to blame for this is the people not to blame for this.

No, I'm pretty comfortable blaming lawmakers for this. It's their job to keep the laws up-to-date, and they've failed in this case. It isn't random people on the street locking these kids up, except by a very extended and tenuous (albeit real, but still, small) connection, it's the lawmakers who keep it illegal without regard to human costs, who would rather send teens to prison and blaze them with the closest thing our society has to a Scarlet A (and ours is in many ways worse, certainly harder to escape), rather than risk their reelection prospects, who are to blame.

It may feel more gratifying to blame it on $DUMB_YOKELS, but given that this problem seems to exist everywhere regardless of their influence, it would seem to be an emotionally-driven decision, not a logical one.

Lawmakers are just an example of people doing their job poorly. The only people ever defending these broken measures happen to "believe".

Tragedy of the commons.

Weren't there cases where underage girls got charged for distributing child porn?

This is so ridiculous when you think about it, destroying the life of the individual the law should protect.

Also, the dark side of infographics. Bar charts with just one bar make me giggle. :)

They mention that texting is on the decline.

I wonder how much of that comes from iMessage on the iPhones, which as I recall, doesn't use SMS but rather data to send messages.

Another mobile site fail, forced to use portrait mode and then you can't scroll down. I really wish I could block mobile sites on my iPhone.

tl;dr

teens still use texting quite a bit (even though they were not around when it was invented). girls use it more than boys.

reason? because it's easier than calling.

there is also an infographic. fascinating!

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