c. 2006 Religion News Service
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. _ The three college students accused of setting fire to nine Alabama churches left a computer chat room trail that was a window into their personalities.
Within hours after Ben Moseley, 19; Russell DeBusk, 19; and Matthew Cloyd, 20, were arrested March 8 on arson charges, reporters were mining their personal postings on the Facebook Web site. All three had registered for the site when they were Birmingham-Southern College students; Cloyd later transferred to the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
The students didn’t talk directly about the fires, but bragged about excessive drinking and partying in messages rife with obscene language.
In one of the few posts not full of obscenity, Cloyd wrote Nov. 28: “Moseley/Monday night/Case of Beer/Powerful Rifle/Lots of Ammo/Green 4Runner/2 complete idiots/1 pack of camel lights/0 law enforcement officers/33 dead innocent whitetailed deer/insanely high speeds+”
The postings illustrate how many students inhabit a cyberspace world in which peers celebrate wild antics under the illusion they are anonymous and isolated, possibly endangering their futures.
“That’s a bizarre phenomenon,” UAB President David Pollick said. “It seems to be giving people a license in words and deeds. It gives one a sense of anonymity, of isolation. That’s an illusion. They do that without regard that they’re creating a living vitae for themselves. They wrote their own letter of reference.”
Internet experts agree.
“A lot of kids don’t understand that anybody who wants to _ police, parents, employers _ can see what they’re writing,” said attorney Parry Aftab, executive director of the nonprofit WiredSafety.org, which offers tips on Internet safety.
She said personal pages, even old postings kept in archives, can be used in background checks when teenagers apply for colleges and scholarships, or when students leave college and apply for jobs. Some firms hired to run background checks on applicants already use them. School administrators monitor them. Police can find evidence of crimes.
“We now have law enforcement who are using Facebook postings to prosecute students,” Aftab said. “Schools have prevented kids from enrolling or expelled students because of postings. It can prevent them from getting jobs because of their postings.
“You are dealing with kids in college who are bright enough to know the difference, but they don’t get it,” Aftab said. “If they are in a computer room typing things in with their friends, they think those are the only kids who are going to see it. It’s open to tens of millions of people.”
In theory, Facebook users from one college cannot view users from another college unless they are linked as friends and have a valid college e-mail address to sign up. But people often steal or borrow what they need to get online.
“Anybody can get on there,” Aftab said. “It’s not as hard as they think. It doesn’t take much.”
Social networking Web sites such as MySpace, Xanga, Bebo, Friendster, LiveJournal and Facebook allow individuals to chat and design their own profile pages with photo galleries, graphics, sound and video clips, profiles and journal entries. They are popular with students but also attract many adults.
Dan Bowman, a counselor for Personal Relationships Inc. who has led seminars on Internet safety at churches, said most parents he counsels are shocked when they see their kids’ profiles on Facebook.
“I’ve had parents cry, reading that their kids had sex or did drugs,” Bowman said. “It’s like a competition to see how wild they are. They feel comfortable saying provocative things. It provides a forum for deviant behavior.”
Facebook, founded in 2004, is based in Palo Alto, Calif., and has several million registered college student users. Faculty and alumni of schools can register and it has recently expanded to high schools. For college sites, a school e-mail address is required to join and to post interests, background, contact information and pictures.
“Facebook’s pretty good at policing their site, but it’s almost impossible when you’ve got millions of students,” said Aftab, who has worked with Facebook and other Web sites on security issues.
Pollick said he’s troubled by the cyberspace culture that seems to obsess the current generation of college students. “It’s mind-boggling,” Pollick said. “This is part of the climate in which we educate.”
The behavior glamorized on the Web site may have created such an approving atmosphere of risk-taking and prank-pulling that it could promote not only uncivil but illegal acts, Pollick suggested.
“What is it that would make somebody think that would be acceptable behavior?” Pollick said of torching rural churches. “You look at their families, their life patterns, there would be nothing to indicate this type of action, this type of blindness. The parents are sitting there wondering how this could happen.”
Some say the cyberchats betray a glimpse of students wallowing in a moral quagmire.
“Knowing young people, one thing led to another, it totally went overboard, way beyond any sense of moral responsibility,” said the Rev. Duane Schliep, pastor of Rehobeth Baptist Church in Bibb County, which was burned to the ground Feb. 3.
“Students today have created a gray world between what is clearly wrong and clearly right,” Pollick said. “How does that become rampant burning of churches? I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t think anybody does. We are recognizing our own limitations.”
MO/PH END RNS
(Greg Garrison writes for The Birmingham News in Birmingham, Ala.)
