In bed with Fox News

If there’s one thing that all college students have in common, it’s curiosity. If there’s one more thing, it’s Myspace.com. Combine the two, and you’ve got a place for stalking. Er, I mean friends.

Before you plaster yourself across the Net for your friends and (hopefully not) family to see, learn about the Web site that you’ve become a part of. Arm yourself with the resources and knowledge to navigate it. And don’t let it navigate you.

First, let’s meet the man who owns your ‘space. In college, you’ll learn that just about everything—produce, coffee, clothing, etc.—has a politicized origin. And an Internet Web site like Myspace is no exception. Rupert Murdoch, half man and half buzzword for the impending media monopoly, owns Myspace. He also owns newspapers on three continents; HarperCollins Publishers; DirecTV; 20th Century Fox Film; and Fox News Channel. That’s right College Democrats of America, your internet profile of personal tastes and interests shares a bed with your least favorite newscasters.

Just eight months after Intermix Media, the owner of Myspace.com, sold to Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005, Fortune magazine reported that the site had grown and was adding roughly 250,000 members each day. Sounds like college idealists were too busy scoping their attractive classmates online to take notice of the buyout.

Should you choose to cut your cyber lifeline over Murdoch’s involvement, you can stop reading now. The 99.8 percent of you who will continue to use Myspace should at least learn how to stay safe online.

It’s exciting to peer into the lives of our Myspace brethren, and it’s thrilling to watch our own profile’s view count increase. But it’s all fun and games until somebody gets messaged by a toothless, amateur porn star. In this case, know your rights. You can activate privacy settings to block anyone who’s not your Myspace “friend” from viewing your profile. Or you might just choose to avoid future advances from that gap-toothed hound by clicking the “Block User” option on his or her profile.

You should also keep your personal information safe by ignoring messages from unknown Myspace users or advertisers who offer you jobs or miracle creams, or ask you to update your accounts. Visit www.onguardonline.gov/socialnetworking_youth.html to learn more about protecting your information, to view the top ten (very familiar) Internet scams, and to learn the process for reporting spammers.

Alarmed? Scared? Bored? Just remember that you and over 100 million fellow Myspacers have rights, even in seemingly-unregulated cyberspace. The more you know, the safer you’ll be. The safer you are, the clearer your head will be to judge strangers based on their taste in music.