MySpace New Zealand has launched new cyber bullying safety tips and announced a partnership with Girlfriend Magazine to promote a new online ‘Code of Conduct’ to combat cyber bullying.

Designed to educate and promote awareness about cyber bullying, these initiatives complement the online social destination’s broader internet safety education program.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force's Research’s Advisory Board, based in the US, recently produced an extensive report which highlighted that more parental intervention and guidance is needed, as cyber bullying usually happens between persons already known to each other and that technology alone is unlikely to solve the problem of bullying.

The phenomenon of bullying is not unique to the online world, it has existed for decades in the physical world, however on MySpace there are a series of steps users, and their parents can take against bullying.

Top MySpace Cyber Bullying Safety Tips

MySpace encourages users to take the following steps against cyber bullying:

• The technology on MySpace allows users to block other users, they simply need to click "Block User" to prevent a known bully from contacting them. It also allows users to conceal their ‘Online Now’ status, so users can be on MySpace but it doesn’t have to be known to the wider community.

• Protecting your privacy is a great way to prevent cyber bullying as it reduces the avenues by which malicious people can contact you. MySpace profiles can either be public or private spaces in their entirety or users can select some parts of their profile to be public and parts to be private. To secure your privacy, select “Customize Profile” from the Profile dropdown menu  and set the Privacy level for each Module individually (Comments, Friends, Blog, etc.) or select it for all Profile Modules in one go. Please note, all under 16 year olds automatically have their profile set to private, so only their designated friends can be within their network.

• At MySpace, we encourage users to use wider identifiers, for instance, such as their suburb as opposed to their street number/name when entering public details into their MySpace profile, this will make it harder for school yard bullies to track people down online. If users have a public profile they need to view their profile as a window to the world, and refrain from posting any information or images they wouldn't want the world to see.

• Reporting a cyber bullying incident on MySpace has been made easy, simply click on the “Contact MySpace” link which is advertised at the bottom of every MySpace.com page.  Users should select the topic “Report Abuse” and the sub-topic “Cyber bullying” from the drop down menus and follow the prompts to report an incident.

This initiative involves the launch of a new ‘Code of Conduct’  to target cyber bullying. For more information go to www.myspace.com/girlfriendmagazine.