MySpace provided two state attorneys general the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders it had banned from its site in response to a subpoena.The figure is 40,000 more than the amount previously acknowledged by MySpace, according to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who along with Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina are among officials pressing social networking sites to adopt more stringent safety measures.
“Almost 100,000 convicted sex offenders mixing with children on MySpace — shown by our subpoena — is absolutely appalling and totally unacceptable,” Mr. Blumenthal said in a statement. “For every one of them, there may be hundreds of others using false names and ages.”
Last year, MySpace, owned by News Corporation, and Facebook.com agreed to set security standards after the Web sites were criticized for not doing enough to protect minors from sexual predators lurking on social networking sites.
Facebook, a privately held company based in Palo Alto, Calif., said the company was still working with Mr. Blumenthal to respond to a similar subpoena.
The disclosure renews the debate of whether social networking sites are a haven for sex offenders. “This is just the tip of the iceberg on MySpace,” said John A. Phillips, chief executive of Aristotle, a company that supplies identity and age verification technologies for companies like the New York State Lottery, breweries and film studios. “These are just the convicted sex offenders” who used their real names.
MySpace’s disclosure follows a report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a panel created by 49 attorneys general, that said the issue is overblown. It concluded the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, was far more serious than sexual solicitation of minors by adults online.
Mr. Phillips, who served as a member of that task force, has been critical of the report. Ernest Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said the figure was “disturbing” but that there is no way to know how large the presence of online predators really is.
“We don’t know if that’s 80 percent of the population targeting kids on the Internet or 1 percent,” Mr. Allen said.
He commended MySpace for removing convicted sex offenders from its site. “This clearly reinforces the fact that there are a significant number of people who seek access to kids online,” Mr. Allen said.
Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for MySpace, said the company had spent the last two years purging problem members from its site.
“The reality is there are 700,000-plus sex offenders living in the streets of America,” Mr. Nigam said. “What we did was build cutting-edge technology to figure out where they might be living on the Internet and remove them from our site.”
MySpace reported that its community grows 10 percent year over year but has also reported a 36 percent drop in the number of registered sex offenders trying to create profiles.
John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, the company that makes the software MySpace uses to find the sex offenders, said that Facebook had become a haven for convicted offenders blocked from creating accounts on MySpace. Mr. Cardillo, who has approached Facebook about using his technology, said he could find 8,000 offenders on Facebook.
Barry Schnitt, a spokesman for Facebook, said that Mr. Cardillo’s figures were inflated. He also said the company actively monitors its Web site and users for suspicious activities.
“When you search for people on Facebook, you don’t get much information — a name and a thumbnail,” Mr. Schnitt said.
9 comments:
dang... O_O
No kidding! Watch out peoples!
The numbers in this report are terrifying--I can't believe how many estimated sex offenders are out there. And that's only a guess--there could be so many more. It still disturbs me that there are people that think that way. To throw in a little psychology--have they studied the brains of these people and seen if they are victims of brain abnormalities or have histories of lack of parental involvement as youngsters? That would be interesting.
Alex,
Historically, the vast majority of child molesters report being molested when they were young. A vicious cycle for sure.
Of course that only represents a sub set of "sex offenders".
There has been some research actually on sex offenders and they do find trends in irregular brain activity. This activity, however, is not so irregular that just from talking to the person you could detect something was wrong. No doubt, often sex offenders are not obvious. They can be wolves in sheep's clothing!
There are DSM classifications for pedophilia, but it has various requirements for diagnosis. Disorders of sexual behaviors are pretty interesting...but weird for sure!
Humans are sexual creatures and our brains are wired for it! Any part of human nature is susceptible to dysfunction, illness, and disease. Thus, various forms of sexual dysfunctions are a common occurrence!
Lastly, Freud has a lot to say on this matter, but that will have to wait. I should post an article on Freud’s case study Dora…?
Oh goodness, at first I mistook the address to Alex as the author of your last comment, Mr. Caro, so I was astounded that she had researched it so thoroughly and even come up with a Freud case study, but then I saw the error in my thinking and I was a little relieved.
This sure does make me glad that I meet the people I add on myspace and facebook before requesting or approving them, though I do think I would realize if I was friends with a sheep, even if it was just a wolf wearing the costume because the profile picture would probably be of a wooly farm animal.
En serio though, I at least would like to see the Dora case study.
That's terrible that these people were molested as children. But I suppose it makes sense.
And that is very interesting, I never really looked at sexual disorders like that. We are wired for sex, and I never really realized that that aspect of us is that which becomes dysfunctional and causes us to do these things and develop these disorders.
I would love to see the Dora study. I can only imagine the things Freud would have to say about abnormal sexual behavior!
Yet another reason I don't use MySpace.
I do, but I am not a sex offender.
Thanks for choosing to follow my blog, Alexander! You are one of the true Americans, the true heroes.
So, Caro should I just stop by tomorrow during IB Sem, yell at you, smile, and then leave? :]
PLEASE do!
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