Many teens display risky behaviour on MySpace

More than half of teenagers mention risky behaviours such as sex and drugs on their MySpace accounts, according to US researchers. They said many young people who use social networking sites such as News Corp.'s MySpace do not realise how public they...

More than half of teenagers mention risky behaviours such as sex and drugs on their MySpace accounts, according to US researchers.

They said many young people who use social networking sites such as News Corp.'s MySpace do not realise how public they are and may be opening themselves to risks, but the sites may also offer a new way to identify and help troubled teens.

"We found the majority of teenagers who have a MySpace account are displaying risky behaviours in a public way that is accessible to a general audience," said Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children's Research Institute, whose studies appear in the journal Archives of Paediatric & Adolescent Medicine.

In one of two studies, Dr Christakis and Megan Moreno of the University of Wisconsin analysed 500 randomly chosen MySpace profiles of 18-year-olds in 2007.

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