The top of the Drudge Report currently has a special link with the teaser “TEENS ONLINE: SEX, DRUGS AND TEXT MESSAGES…”. If you click on the link, you get to this story:
Study: Teen Online Chats Largely About Drugs, Sex
(CBS) NEW YORK Parents who think their teens’ online conversations with peers are innocent may want to reconsider. A new study shows 1 in 10 of their messages discuss drugs or sex.
The messages are posted on common online message boards.
“‘Crunked’ is like the cool way of saying ‘I got drunk,'” said 19-year-old Lucky O’Donnell. “‘Scag’ is one of the harder ones to figure out and that’s heroin.”
O’Donnell knows the risks all too well. He went online to find out where to get cocaine. He’s now in recovery.
“Mostly it was, where are we going to meet up to get it,” he said in reference to scoring some cocaine.
A new study by Caron Treatment Centers finds 1 in 10 messages analyzed involved teens seeking advice from their peers on how to take illicit drugs “safely” and without getting caught.
Could it really be that teen online chats are largely about drugs and sex, and that 1 in 10 messages were about how to take drugs safely without getting caught? What is happening to the youths of America with their Internets?
Well, I found the “Caron Treatment Centers” report, posted on line here (.pdf), and it turns out that the report is pretty different from the news coverage of it. The report studies where teenagers go to discuss and learn about alcohol and drugs online. The key finding is that teenagers tend to discuss these topics on message boards more than on MySpace or blogs, which the authors plausibly explain as resulting from the greater anonymity of message boards.
So how much discussion of alcohol, drugs and sex are there online? Well, the report doesn’t cover discussion of sex. If I read the study correctly, however, it says that about 1% of the content of postings in “teen communities” (which I think includes message boards, blogs, myspace, etc.) are about about drugs, and another .6% or so are about alcohol. (see p. 19) Plus, at least according to the press release, about 10% of that content (about .1% of the total, I gather) is about how to take drugs safely without getting caught.
I guess the headline, “Less Than 2% of Teen Discussions Posted Online on Drugs and Alcohol” was too wordy.