Talking about Facegroups groups on TV January 13, 2009
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Facebook, Media coverage, News media, Television.1 comment so far
Creating or joining a Facebook group in order to publicly state your opinion about something is the most easy thing in the world. In Denmark, whenever specific court cases are heavily mentioned in the news, people start creating Facebook groups discussing the sentencing (which they almost always think is too low).
Yesterday several groups (for instance this one) were created about the sentecing in a child abouse case. I was asked to comments on the groups in the news on Danish TV2. You can see my interviews here and here (but only in Danish).
Basically, I say that I think the news media are partly to blame for the groups being created, because they report so much on the specific cases in the first place. And of course, it is self-perpetuating when the news media then report on the groups themselves.
See my other television apperances here.
Online predators and moral panics June 11, 2008
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Arto, Internet Safety, Moral panic, MySpace, News media.7 comments
The past couple of weeks the Danish social network site for teenagers, Arto, has repeatedly appeared in the news media. This is due to the fact that a journalist from the Danish tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet created a false profile on Arto where she pretended to be a 13 year old girl and got into contact with a number of older men. During a year the undercover journalist communicated through MSN Messenger with four older men (from the age of 35 – 72) who all had a keen interest in meeting the girl IRL. The correspondence between the men and the apparent 13 year old girl had many sexual undertones and some of the men openly indicated that they wanted to have sex with, what they believed was, the 13 year old girl.
When the physical meetings were finally arranged the news paper revealed the truth and the following days they published a number of articles where they – one by one and with video documentation – exposed the men as predators and child molesters.
We have previously seen similar stories in the Danish news media, and the purpose of this blog post is not to comment on these specific news stories, which are part of the ongoing moral panic, which I commented on in an article I wrote in October 2006. However, the public debate that follows sensational cases like these is interesting. (more…)
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