MySpace Will Help Ward Off Predators
By Mario F. Cattabiani, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan. 15–The social networking giant MySpace has reached agreement with authorities in 49 states on changing its Web site to help ward off sexual predators, officials said yesterday.
“Today’s agreement makes it harder for adults to sexually solicit children online,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett said.
In an interview, Corbett called the agreement a “blueprint to come up with how we make the Internet safer. This is just the beginning, not the end result.”
Corbett, with his counterparts in New Jersey, North Carolina, Connecticut, Ohio and New York, announced the agreement yesterday in Manhattan.
New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram called the agreement, which includes the development of age-verification software, significant.
“The Internet can be a dangerous place for children and young adults, with sexual predators surfing social-networking sites in search of potential victims and cyber bullies sending threatening and anonymous messages,” said Milgram.
The agreement comes after nearly two years of discussions between the nation’s attorneys general and MySpace, owned by News Corp.
Corbett said that discussions were initially difficult, but that seven or eight months ago MySpace began working with the attorneys general “to reach mutual ground.”
Underpinning the discussions, Corbett said, were issues such as First Amendment rights.
Authorities across the country have been wrestling with how to combat the growing use of the Internet by online predators, and they have sought greater controls at networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
Corbett said his office had seen the number of arrested predators who use MySpace nearly double over the last year. In 2007, a special unit of the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office set up to go after child predators made 54 arrests. Of those arrested, 31 had MySpace accounts.
The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office has worked with MySpace to remove 268 sex offenders who had MySpace profiles, according to Milgram.
In addition, the New Jersey Parole Board voted unanimously in November to prohibit 4,400 sex offenders from establishing profiles on networking sites.
MySpace, under the agreement, will add several protections and participate in a working group to develop technologies, including a way to verify the ages of users. Other social-networking sites will be invited to participate.
“We thank the attorneys general for a thoughtful and constructive conversation on Internet safety,” MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a written statement. “This is an industrywide challenge, and we must all work together to create a safer Internet.”
He said the agreement includes measures “to provide a safer online experience for teens, and we look forward to sharing our ongoing safety innovations with other companies.”
Among other measures, MySpace agreed to:
–Allow parents to submit children’s e-mail addresses to MySpace to prevent anyone from misusing the addresses to set up profiles.
–Make the default security setting “private” for 16- and 17-year-old users.
–Respond within 72 hours to complaints about inappropriate content and devote more staff and resources to classify photographs and discussion groups.
–Strengthen software to find underage users.
–Create a high school section for users under 18 years old.
MySpace is the largest social-networking site in the United States, with more than 100 million users.
MySpace and Facebook, the second-biggest social-networking site with 47 million users, have come under attack by regulators for not doing enough to police their sites to shield minors from predators.
Statistics from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show 77 million youngsters use the Internet daily, and one out of every seven children between 10 and 17 years old are sexually solicited online.
Yesterday, after the the MySpace agreement was announced, New York prosecutors brought charges against a New York City couple who allegedly used the site to lure two girls who were under 15 to their home. Authorities say the couple plied the pair with alcohol, engaged in group sex with them, and took them to a strip club where the girls had to dance on stage.
A 15-year-old girl from Texas was allegedly lured to a meeting, drugged and assaulted in 2006 by an adult MySpace user. And a 13-year-old girl in Missouri hanged herself in 2006 after receiving mean messages on MySpace from a person she thought was another teen; it later turned out that the messages were a hoax.
This article contains information from the Associated Press and Bloomberg News.
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