After students at a San Antonio high school posted messages on MySpace threatening the school, the school district said it would hold MySpace “accountable” for the problem.
San Antonio Warren High School had an anxious day Monday, as 2,600 students either stayed away or left early because of threats left on MySpace.com, WOAI News reported.
Four suspects, all students at the school, have been identified and face felony charges for terroristic threatening and disruption of a high school campus. A school district representative discussed the issue in the report:
“About mid morning today we were able to confirm that the web site ‘MySpace-dot-com’ allowed several students to post threatening messages on it’s web site, messages threatening Warren High School,” Pascual Gonzales of the Northside School District said. “This message said two boys were planning to show up at school with guns.”
“It just seems to me that if you put up a public web site, and you allow students, teeangers, minors to post their thoughts and ideas, and not monitor it in an adult manner, you are asking for trouble,” Gonzales said. “This particular web site has been a pain for all Bexar County schools for a long time now, and it just seems that the owners of MySpace-dot-com should be held accountable.”
He said a decision about whether to file a lawsuit will be made by district lawyers.
MySpace belongs to News Corp, after Rupert Murdoch’s company purchased MySpace parent company Intermix over the summer. The web site is very popular with its younger audience, particularly music fans.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
