On networking sites, girls seek friends; boys flirt

More than half of US teenagers use social networking sites like MySpace, but girls go online to reaffirm existing friendships, while boys are more often there to flirt, a survey has found. The national survey of youth aged 12 to 17 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows two-thirds of teens who have created networking profiles limit site access to selected viewers, while 17% use their sites to flirt.

The study shows teenagers are aware of the risks of revealing too much data about themselves and are taking steps to protect their privacy - a concern that has made the sites controversial with parents, school officials and politicians. "These sites are places where you can express yourself not so much to the world, but really to a core group of friends," said Mary Madden, a co-author of the Pew study. "They are a stable place where friends can find you."

Older boys aged 15 to 17 are more likely (60%) than older girls to use networking sites (46%) to make new friends. 29% of older boys use these sites to flirt but only 13% of older girls say they do so. Just 12% of younger girls say they flirt on such sites.

In focus groups Pew conducted among teenagers ahead of the phone survey, girls said they feared the "creepy 40-year-old man coming after them" but no participant reported incidents of adult strangers actually contacting them, Madden said.

Among the gender differences noted in the survey, older girls aged 15 to 17 said they were more likely to have created pro-files on social networking sites, with 70% having done so compared with 57% of boys the same age. The data based, on phone interviews with 935 young people in October and November of 2006, shows that 55% of all US youths with online connections use social networking sites like News Corp.'s MySpace, Facebook or Xanga.