KEY POINTS:
SAN FRANCISCO - 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 published on Sunday 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 social networking profiles limit site access to selected viewers, while 17 per cent 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 per cent) than older girls (46 per cent) to use social networking sites to make new friends. Twenty-nine per cent of older boys use these sites to flirt but only 13 per cent of older girls say they do so. Just 12 per cent 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 online profiles on social networking sites, with 70 per cent having done so compared with 57 per cent of boys the same age.
The data, based on phone interviews with 935 young people in October and November of 2006, shows that 55 per cent of all US youths with online connections use social networking sites like News Corp's MySpace, Facebook or Xanga.
Ninety-one per cent of all teens using social networking sites say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently while 82 per cent use them to stay in contact with friends they rarely see in person, Pew said.
The survey showed the heavy dominance of MySpace among teenagers relative to other sites.
Eighty-five per cent of those who said they have an online profile mainly use MySpace, while 7 per cent keep a Facebook profile and 1 per cent on Xanga. Smaller numbers have profiles on places like Yahoo, Piczo, Gaia Online and Tagged.com.
Sixty-four per cent of both sexes aged 15 to 17 have a profile, while 45 per cent of young people aged 12 to 14 said they did. Older girls are the most committed, with 70 per cent saying they have created a social networking profile of themselves.
Very few participants in the survey (5 per cent) admitted to being simply lurkers -- people who view other social network sites but don't maintain a profile of their own.
The survey's statistical margin of error was 3.7 per cent.
- REUTERS
