July 25th, 2007
MySpace finds 29,000 sex offenders on the site
Ever since MySpace relented to law enforcement to provide information on registered sex offenders who have posted profiles, everyone has wanted to know: How many perverts are busily chatting away to fellow MySpace users? The answer, it turns out, is shockingly high.
MySpace.com has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on the popular social networking Web site - more than four times the number cited by the company two months ago, reports the San Jose Mercury News.
My Space, which is owned by the media conglomerate News Corp., provided the data to law enforcement Tuesday. The information included how many registered sex offenders were using the site and where they live.
My Space, which has about 180 million posted profiles, had removed 7,000 profiles of sex offenders, before being legally pressured to hand over more information.
The attorney general of North Carolina is supporting legislation that would require children to receive parental permission before creating social networking profiles, and require the Web sites to enact procedures for verifying the parents’ identity and age.
The news should actually be seen as good news, author Anastasia Goodstein writes on the Huffington Post.
This is every parent’s worst fear about the service — that it is teeming with predators looking to make contact with the kids and teens who have profiles. The good news is that MySpace has been working with law enforcement to discover these sex offenders and is deleting them. Of course, that’s assuming these adults in the registry are all actually predators. The other piece of good news is that most teens on the site view any contact from an adult stranger that is sexual in nature as spam.
