The topic of How do social networking sites and online communities create a false sense of trust between users arose to me while watching To Catch a Predator. The predators completely trust the person they are conversing with and believe to be a young girl. This trust is built over chatting online and using social networking sites. When this topic came to me I thought if there are all these "predators" being caught because they trust in someone that they met online, how many predators catch helpless teenagers or adults for that matter?

When doing research on this topic so many articles came up on teenagers meeting someone they met online, in real life and it ended up being a predator. A lot of articles came up of fake Facebook pages generating trust between users only to find out that the other person was not who the claimed to be. The most abundant information about a false sense of trust being created was the false sense of trusted created on dating websites between users. This was an important topic for me to research because I am very cautious with accepting friend-requests and things of that nature online, but I know so many of my friends who are not. I wanted to see cases of the consequences of people who are too trusting online, or who have false senses of trust with those that they encounter.

My research revealed three general ways that false senses of trust are developed when using social networking sites or participating in online communities. Most of the false sense of trust are developed between a sexual predator with a fake profile and a younger person who believes the profile is true. The majority of the cases had to do with online dating services, a woman was raped when she went to meet her date. She trusted the site and the match, but all she had to do was search her match and she would have discovered he was a sexual offender. The last major false sense of trust comes from "Big Brother" people accept friend-requests from people they do not know and they happen to be policemen or military people. These findings shocked me the most, because I would not initially think that the police or military people would be creating fake personas to influence communities. I am glad I researched this topic because it gave me a lot of insight on how to conduct myself online using social networking sites and to not trust anybody and everybody unless I personally know them and have had face-to-face encounters with them.