MySpace Axes 29,000 Sex Offender Profiles

Yesterday, MySpace announced that it had “detected and deleted” 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its social networking site. With over 100 million users, the solicitation of minors by adults has become a major problem on Myspace. The social network has been under a lot of pressure to relieve the problem and implement measures that would make solicitation more difficult in the future.

With many Myspace users as young as 14 years old, and nearly as many who are middle-aged or older, it is no wonder why this site has suffered the blunt of the blame for online child solicitation. Other social networks, such as Facebook, which has a primarily college student audience, have not been open to the general public long enough to have such a wide audience whose ages vary so greatly. Some expect that other networks will experience the same problems given time.

Back in May, the site touted that it had identified and deleted at least 7,000 profiles of people who were believed to be sex offenders. “We're pleased that we've successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead.” stated Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer.

This initiative by Myspace officials began last December, when the site struck a deal with Sentinel Tech Holdings, an online identity verification company. The software used, known as Sentinel Safe, cross-references the profiles of Myspace members against the information contained in the public databases of registered sex offenders. Any matches are then flagged for deletion by site administrators.

Connecticut Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, has demanded that the social networks do more to protect its users who are minors by providing such data as sex offender profiles. He stated that, “the exploding epidemic of sex offender profiles on MySpace screams for action.” Some of his proposed initiatives include some sort of verification of members' age and parental consent for minors.

It is very interesting to see how Myspace has already reacted to the pressure it has received. The site has previously denied the requests of state attorney generals to obtain such data, but then changed its mind on the situation. Is this just a publicity stunt though? Or, is the site really concerned?

Whatever the case may be, this is just the first of several steps that Myspace is going to have to make in order to ensure the safest possible interaction between users on its vast social network. I am waiting to see what their next move will be.