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A story about the dangers of social media and the lasting effect it could have, especially for the young people who post on it. 

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CARSON DALY: Awesome. Thank you very much, Dylan. Now to a story about the dangers of social media and the lasting effect it could have, especially for the young people who post on it.

ERICA HILL: Yeah, a group of teens on Long Island shocked. A lot of people this week with the Twitter account where they apparently posted pictures of themselves, drinking and just behaving out of control. Kristen Dahlgren has the fallout now and more on why so many teens seem to be doing this anyway.

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: Yeah, good morning guys and it`s not just their parents who were looking at these. The pictures and the story have gone viral and what may have seemed like a good idea at the time could now cause problems for years to come. We blurred the images, but some you may still find a little disturbing.

(Begin VT)

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: These are the tweets from at LI Party Stories. Teens behaving badly, passed out, puking, not exactly what you want future employers to see.

DR. ROBI LUDWIG (Psychologist): The teenage brain is not fully developed yet. So they`re very impulse driven. Everything is about the now. So they don`t tend to think in terms of cause and effect.

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: The Twitter account has now been disabled, but it wasn`t hard for us to find the pictures through re-tweets and web posts, they`re still online and that`s the point.

MAN #1: You can`t delete stuff of the internet, once it`s there, it`s there forever.

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: It`s a reality not all teens seem to understand. Good and bad they are living their lives on the internet.

DR. ROBI LUDWIG: Everyone is in a pattern of documenting what they do and it`s almost like, if you don`t document it, it doesn`t exist.

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: The Long Island teens aren`t alone in their online infamy. Last year a group of students in San Diego were suspended after posting this twerking video. And remember these images? Former NFL player Brian Holloway says he caught three hundred teens having a party in his house when they took to social media to share the photos.

BRIAN HOLLOWAY: There is some-- really some dangerous stuff that was going on up here.

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: In that case it was the home`s owner and police who saw. But others are looking, too, like potential employers or colleges. According to a 2012 study by Kaplan, twenty-seven percent of college admissions officers routinely do Google searches on applicants. Twenty-six percent check Facebook and thirty-five percent have found posts and pictures that reflected poorly on those candidates, posting pictures like these now out there for eternity.

(End VT)

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: Now you might think reaction to the scandal would be embarrassment. But a lot of teens were the ones re-tweeting apparently proud of all the publicity. This is something I talk to my step kids about all the time.

CARSON DALY: They`re such a smart generation, but it`s such a dumb thing to do. They don`t think about the future.

ERICA HILL: There`s no commonsense and I-- and I get that like-- like Robi said in your piece, it`s hard for them to wrap at seventeen, it`s hard for you to wrap your head around it, but when-- people are talking about it literally every day how do you not get it at this point?

KRISTEN DAHLGREN: And we were all young and dumb, but with the internet now, it`s out there. You can`t take it back.

CARSON DALY: Right. It will stay forever. That`s something they got to remember.

ERICA HILL: And they`re proud of it. That`s the sad part in a lot of cases as you mentioned with the re-tweets.

CARSON DALY: All right, Kristen Dahlgren, thank you very much.

Works Cited

CARSON, DALY, et al. "A Story about the Dangers of Social Media and the Lasting Effect It Could Have, Especially for the Young People Who Post on It." Today Show (NBC), n.d. EBSCOhost, saintleo.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=32U1406931866TOS&site=ehost-live&scope=site.