The following article appeared in the Sunday World on July 9th, 2006 when Bebo and social network sites were in its infancy.

As a 23-year-old freelance broadcaster, I decided to put Bebo to the test and took on a new identity. My name was Joshua and I was 12 years old, or so my Hotmail and Bebo accounts said.

I started by creating a Hotmail account with a fake address and date of birth.

Simple really, it only took a couple of minutes, then I went onto Bebo.com and made an account for myself, oh wait...didnt I say I was 12, but Bebo allegedly allows only those 13 years and older to join.

By simply scrolling down on a sidebar I could choose my year of birth. Teenagers aren't stupid; its not difficult to fake your age to gain access to the site.

To hide my identity and look like I'm the age I am, I place an image from the Simpsons as my personal photo box. My hobbies are skateboarding and swimming. I like hip hop music and my flash box contains an Eminem Video.

Preying

Once inside Bebo I need to start making some friends and am spoilt for choice as Bebo allows me to select what school I go to. I could select a school not just from Ireland, but from the UK, Australia or America. I choose to stick to Ireland.

I thought my plan of gaining new friends would end here but what transpired was the complete opposite. I could log into ANY school in Ireland; join as a student without any questions, see some profiles of young boys and girls, ask the to be my friend and leave.

Within ten minutes I had joined and left over a dozen schools in the Dublin area.

Then my sinister and disturbing "game" began, as I found out how many kids accepted my invitation to become their friend. I was alarmed as my fake hotmail account received confirmation from five new Bebo friends: Cormac, 13, Luke, 14, James, 13, Cathy, 14, and Paul, 15, all from different schools. Not one of these children asked who I was.

I knew what they looked like; their hobbies, what school they went to, who their friends were and in one case I had the childs email address.

I could have easily been a 45-year-old sex offender gleefully procuring details of five children aged under fifteen. Being their friend I could now view any photo they had on their profile.

I knew what time they would be leaving school and using the information gained from Bebo it would only take a little persuasion that I had been sent by their parents to collect them.

Having permanently shut down my fake account, I contacted Bebo's CEO Michael Birch. Michael was willing to chat about Child Protection issues. He understands that their is a problem and hopes the appointment of a new child saferty officer into Bebo will combat the problem. There are over 25 million accounts on Bebo and only 15 moderators.

He said my IP address could have been tracked if I was preying on kids, but I could be surfing Bebo from a cyber-café. It's not an illegal site and it would look perfectly normal to the public.

When I asked him whether shutting the site down was an option Michael Birch replied that if it was shut down, there will always be another social networking site. He is not interested in making the site strictly for adults or using a subscription service in order to exclude children but hopes to work with schools in Ireland to combat problems of cyber-bullying and sick-minded individuals preying on kids.

Birch did make a very valid point; even if he made Bebo a subscription-only site, it would only be a matter of time before someone launched an alternative for kids. Surely, he argued, it's better to police an existing site than to lauch a whole new one with no child protection whatsoever.

Graphic

My experience gave me a whole new perspective to these social networking sites. Parents who think the sites are safe and child-friendly are unaware their children are giving out personal details to strangers.

Teenagers are discussing which off-licenses sell drink without checking I.D, boys candidly discuss firl they have "scored" and girls discuss boys in equally graphic detail.

Teacher's unions are suggesting Bebo should be blocked from school networks. Michael Birtch wants to work with schools, and teenagers just want to have as many friends as possible on their pages, no matter who they are. There are underlying dangers for users of Bebo and the similar MySpace site that need to seriously be addressed.

In Britain in 2003, Luke Sadowski, a 19-year-old trainee teacher, was jailed for 18 months for seeking to procure sex on the internet with a nine-year-old girl. But there never was a nine-year-old girl. Sadowski had been the victim of an elaborate sting organised by the FBI. Sentencing the young man, Judge Gerald Gordon launched a fierce attack on the internet which he called "a feeding-ground for fantasy which could lead to a serious offence".

Assault

If it hadn't been for the internet in this case, Sadowski would never have been arrested in the first place. Several alarming incidents involving internet chat rooms have been reported in America. One student in the US was charged for a death threat he made against his high school maths teacher and he had details and times he was going to kill the teacher on his MySpace account. In Tacoma, also in the US, four students aged between twelve and fourteen were arrested after plotting on Myspace to kill teachers and burn down the school. Police raided the home of the teenagers and found bomb recipes and guns hidden in their homes. In Minnesota, one 8th grade student is facing charges after he created an account on MySpace and depicted his English teacher as a child molester.

Now internet service providers, schools and colleges in Ireland are upping the ante on Bebo and MySpace. The Department of Education is investigating a cyber-bullying attack in a south Dublin school where a pupil has been suspended for setting up a Bebo account inciting hatred toward another student and rallying fellow students to physically assault the victim. Another school has suspended puplils who posted pictures of themselves drinking on a school trip. This latest case comes at a time where Bebo has just assigned a new child protection officer.

This moves smacks of too little, too late, as schools and colleges jope to ban the social networking site from their systems from September.