Social network MySpace has reached an agreement with most of the country’s state attorneys general on creating a new set of guidelines for protecting young members in its community.
The agreement, announced Monday with the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking, commits MySpace to “explore” 60 new features or design changes aimed at stopping online child predators. It comes about nine months after the social network bowed to a subpoena by state authorities for data relating to registered sex offenders known to have used the community site.
As part of its negotiation with attorneys general in 49 states and the District of Columbia—Texas remaining apart—MySpace has agreed to delete the profile pages of registered sex offenders and to review every image, video and social group offered on the network for age-appropriateness. MySpace also promises to respond within three days to complaints about inappropriate content.
The social net will make the profiles of 14- and 15-year-old members private to prevent those members from being contacted by unknown adults. It will also make “privacy” the default setting for 16- and 17-year-old members’ profiles.
MySpace said it will also let parents submit their children’s e-mail addresses so the social network can prevent third parties from using their names to set up profile pages.
Part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. empire since its purchase by Fox Interactive Media, MySpace ran afoul of law enforcement officials during the last year for letting adults set up profiles posing as adolescents to lure other young people to their sites. In July 2007 North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper announced that his state had identified more than 29,000 registered sex offenders among MySpace’s member lists.
That figure was four times the one reported by MySpace last May as the result of a voluntary audit by Sentinel Tech Holdings in December 2006.
The agreement between MySpace and the working group “Should set the standard for social networking sites across the globe that have been quick to grow but slow to recognize their responsibility for keeping kids safe,” Cooper said Monday.
For the future, MySpace and the AG working group agreed to organize an industry-wide task force to develop better tools for, among other things, age and identity verification of members. The minimum member age for joining MySpace is currently 14, but few technology safeguards exist to prevent a 12-year-old from signing on as older and joining the community.
MySpace isn’t alone in facing increased scrutiny for what law enforcement sees as flawed child protection measures. In September 2007 Facebook received a subpoena from New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo after investigators who joined the social network posing as teens found pornographic content and online sexual advances “within days.” Cuomo’s office charged that other officers posing as the teens’ concerned parents did not receive swift responses from Facebook.
In an agreement reached last October after the subpoena, Facebook promised to beef up its procedures for handling complaints about porn or harassment and to let Cuomo’s office or an independent agency monitor those processes.
Monday’s announcement of MySpace’s new safety guidelines seemed to allude to the child-protection issues at other Web 2.0 community sites. According to the release, “The attorneys general called on other social networking sites and Internet providers with community features to adopt the principles and bring their sites up to par with MySpace in terms of safety.”
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