“Social networking sites have created new spaces for teens to interact and they witness a mixture of altruism and cruelty on those sites,” said Amanda Lenhart, the report's lead author, in a statement. “For most teens, these are exciting and rewarding spaces. But the majority have also seen a darker side. And for a subset of teens, the world of social media isn’t a pretty place because it presents a climate of drama and mean behavior.”
And it is a familiar climate; Pew says 95 percent of American teens ages 12 to 17 are online; 80 percent of online teens use social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter compared to 55 percent five years ago.
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“When a child accepts a parent’s friend request, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the parent has a backstage pass to their child’s social life,” said report co-author Mary Madden, in a statement. “Teens can present a limited profile to certain friends and are active users of private messaging channels, so the content that parents see may represent just a small fraction of the activity on their teen’s profile.”
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