When Peter Chapman was arrested in October of 2009 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of seventeen year-old Ashleigh Hall, traditional print and online media were there to point the finger at Facebook and other social networks, slathering a huge serving of blame across Facebook in particular and social networking in general. When the thirty-two year-old was convicted this week of those crimes, the media again sprang into action. Nearly every sensationalist headline about the crime made specific mention of the fact that Chapman used Facebook and other social networks to troll for young girls, and nearly every article made mention of the fact that Facebook and other significant social networks have had a very hard time keeping sexual predators off of their sites.

All of this begs the question – how much blame can we assign to social networking? How much are social networks like Facebook and Myspace ultimately responsible for policing sexual predators on their site?

Social networks like Facebook have repeatedly made attempts to take ownership over their users’ content. That means Facebook wants to own Chapman’s status updates, his fake accounts, the messages and status updates he used to lure teenage girls into having sex with him. They want to own all of that content, but they don’t want to take responsibility for it when it goes bad.

Nearly every social network in the world does some sort of internal policing of accounts in an attempt to keep their users safe from sexual predators like Chapman. In February of last year, TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld wrote an article about sexual criminals, booted off of Myspace, seeking refuge on Facebook. Armed with a database of names of predators, Schonfeld confronted Facebook, who admitted that although they actively investigate and police their sites, there are always those who slip through the cracks. In the end, Facebook disabled all of the accounts in Schonfeld’s database that had Facebook User ID’s associated with them. TechCrunch patted itself on the back (they're very good at that), Facebook congratulated their PR people (they're very good at that), and the rest of us went about our business, pretending the whole thing was solved and that it would never happen again (we're very good at that).

There’s one huge problem, though. Chapman wasn’t using his real name when he registered for those social networks. He wasn’t even using his real photograph – he was using a photograph of a sexy fifteen year-old, a far cry from his shave-headed, emaciated appearance in real life.

The fact remains that if criminals want to create completely fake Facebook accounts, or for that matter, fake accounts on almost any social network, there’s absolutely nothing to stop them from doing so, and there’s no way that those social networks can be expected to find them. Peter Chapman used fake accounts on as many as nine different social networks, sometimes using multiple fake accounts on the same network, as he did with Netlog. None of those fake accounts gave any indication of his actual identity or history as a deeply disturbed individual with multiple arrests for sexual crimes, including multiple rape charges.

Which begs the next question – if social networks themselves can’t be held responsible for finding the fake accounts of sexual predators, who should the blame be placed on?

Let’s try out the next logical rung on the blame ladder: the parents.

Parents are ultimately responsible for the welfare of their children. Parents are the ones who ultimately decide who their children get to talk to and who they should be sheltered from. Perhaps, then, parents are the ones to blame when children get ensnared by predators like Peter Chapman, because even if Chapman was using a fake name and a photograph of a 15 year-old to hide his true identity, his status updates like “Wanna have sex with me?????” should have been a huge tip-off to parents that he was trouble.

Except that the parents didn’t see those status updates. The parents didn’t know that a wolf in the body of a fifteen year-old boy was stalking their daughter.

And there’s the problem, right there. With the technological gap between the young and the old growing seemingly wider by the moment, how can parents be expected to police every single thing that their children do online? How can parents be expected to know who their children are talking to, and how can they be constantly vigilant every second of every day? Even if they’re tech-savvy and install cyber-security and monitoring programs on their own computers, what happens when their children use their friends’ computers, or their iPhones, or any of the myriad other ways to connect that youngsters understand and parents don’t?

Let’s take the blame one step farther up. Let’s blame the government.

Most of the governments of the world are lagging incredibly far behind the fast-changing trends in social networking and the internet. When Lori Drew, a middle-aged suburban mom, used a fake Myspace account to string along young Megan Meier, a teenager with whom her daughter was enemies, ultimately leading to Meier’s suicide, the United States judicial system found that they didn’t have a single law on the books that says you can’t create a fake Myspace account, pretend to be a sixteen year-old boy, start a cyber-relationship with a young, impressionable teenage girl and then convince her to kill herself. Drew walked free with nothing more than a misdemeanor charge.

And that’s seriously messed up.

The government has turned a blind eye to social networking for years – hoping that one of the world’s fastest growing industries will work out its kinks and figure out how to regulate itself. Because self-regulation worked so well for the energy and financial industries over the last few years.

If the world really wanted to be kept safe from sexual predators online, they would make laws to protect people from them – but they don’t. Creating a social networking account usually requires nothing more than an email address, which you can get from Gmail or Hotmail in less than thirty seconds, without providing a single piece of verifiable information.

So why doesn’t the government pass laws that state that users are required to give a social security number or other form of verifiable identification when they create an email address or social networking account? South Korea requires a government ID for all social networking users; why can’t we do the same thing in the US, where Meiers was coerced into suicide, or the UK, where Hall was raped and murdered?

Just why don’t we have those kinds of laws? Who should we place the blame for the lack of governmental oversight and regulation over social networking and the inability to verify a person’s real identity?  Who is responsible for creating and perpetuating this culture of anonymity?

We are. The blame falls on us. It’s our fault.

If we weren’t so obsessed with our illusions of privacy, if we weren’t so protective of our boring, meaningless online activities, if we weren’t so paranoid that the moment we link anything to the government, Big Brother is going to force us into an Orwellian world of Doublethink and constant government monitoring and oppression, we could pass those laws. Those laws, and other laws like those, have been proposed – but we, the voters, won’t approve them, because our so-called "privacy" is more important to us than the lives of these children, and the countless others like them.
 
Who’s ultimately to blame for the death of children like Meiers and Hall? We are. And we’re the only ones who can do something about it and work to prevent it from happening again.