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July 24, 2007

MySpace Had 4 Times the Sex Offenders Originally Reported

Nick Gonzalez

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MySpace.com has found and deleted profiles of 29,000 convicted sex offenders, more than four times the initial 7,000 profiles they claimed in May. The numbers were discovered after MySpace turned over info detailing the offenders they had removed from the service. MySpace turned over the records after states filed a formal legal request.

Carrying out such a large scale cross checking for the offenders was complicated because records on the US’s over 600,000 sex offenders are stored in various state databases.

Earlier last year MySpace had made moves to protect children from sex offenders. Chief amongst the new changes were removing adult related content (dating ads) from profiles of children under 16, enabling private profiles, and requiring members over 18 to enter the full names or email addresses of users under 16 years of age in order to contact them. There has been no word on how effective the new initiatives have been. However, users can still lie about their age to get around some of the restrictions.

Being one of the largest and highest profile sites, MySpace continues to draw the bulk of the criticism as they make the tough choices about balancing safety with the openness that helps the site grow.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. frum yid

    July 24th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

    Wow! that means that 5% of all sex offenders had a myspace profile. This is of course if each one didn’t have more than one profile.

    I wonder if facebook has these kind of problems. Facebook seems to be less anonymous and hence less appealing for sex offenders.

  2. gettit

    July 24th, 2007 at 4:20 pm

    It would suck trying not to over-police and ask for too much personal information while trying to maintain a decent reputation. I do not envy the guys working on it, but it’s just reality.

  3. Andrew

    July 24th, 2007 at 5:03 pm

    frum…I think thats no longer the case, you can pretty much make a high school profile w/o any checks. Actually if you think about it Facebook is a better tool for sex offenders: because they can find underage kids who they know live 5 miles away, and get all of their info(phone #, address, etc depending on how dumb they are)…instead of myspace which allows for more anonymity for users

  4. ChandraB

    July 24th, 2007 at 5:20 pm

    How would you like to be the VP of Marketing at MySpace and have to deal with the mainstream press on this topic? No Thanks.

    I’m sure sex offenders will recreate a new identity and be in business again. I’m not what you can do to get around this….it’s difficult to verify identity of members (esp. those under 18)…Not a problem I’d like to deal with, but might be an opportunity for some startup.

  5. Natalie

    July 24th, 2007 at 5:59 pm

    Not only are companies like MySpace implementing new tools and policies, Congress is also considering how it might get involved through legislation. In fact, the Senate Commerce Committe held a hearing on the issue of Internet safety earlier today (I posted some notes at: http://techpolicysummit.blogs......-inte.html). This particular hearing had more to do with the idea of mandating Internet safety education in public schools, but Congress has been considering legislative proposals that would directly impact ISPs and other online communities (not just MySpace).
    Chandra’s comment is spot on as well; there are a number of startups and other companies looking at how to use technology to improve verification issues. It’s a complicated issue though, with much debate about what to do, and who should be doing it.

  6. Shawn

    July 24th, 2007 at 6:25 pm

    Big suprise! Just browsing for 5 minutes you can tell that place is full of pervs.

  7. Wayne

    July 24th, 2007 at 6:42 pm

    Amen to that Shawn.Got rid of my account, it was useless.Go over to stumbleupon for some friends. You might just like it there.

  8. Adarsh

    July 24th, 2007 at 6:48 pm

    If they found 29,000 - can you imagine how many more are there with fake names and id’s. Kids should just use facebook and learn to use their privacy settings better.

  9. David Mackey

    July 24th, 2007 at 6:51 pm

    These individuals must have been using their real names? If so, doesn’t seem likely that many of them weren’t using MySpace for this purpose (wouldn’t you want to cloak your identity if you were)?

  10. Jeremy Steele

    July 24th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    A lot of people on the Internet are just sick pervs. Go on YouTube and look at a video that has some girl under 15 in it, a lot of the commenters are all “Oh look at that fine piece of…” and crap. It’s sick.

  11. Brandon Watson

    July 24th, 2007 at 7:49 pm

    Good job on MySpace for at least doing something. Too bad they have to rely on honest but dumb criminals to use their registered emails to create accounts. We have taken the approach of identifying aberrant behavior in the text communications to identify problems for parents. Online safety is a space that has had very little innovation in the last decade.

  12. Adrian Keys

    July 24th, 2007 at 7:51 pm

    It’s almost as if MySpace has become the face of this problem on the Web. ChandraB…totally agreed. Would not wish it on my worst enemy.

  13. Andy Fox

    July 24th, 2007 at 8:08 pm

    This is a dumb article… They have 180M users, i’m sure they have X number of pretty much anything you can think of. Enough with the sensationalist articles.

    I wonder how many child molesters and murders have a yahoo or google id?

    Online safety is less something companies should be worrying about and more something parents and the meek or gullible should worry about. Because, no matter what it will always come down to them.

    Please find a real story!

  14. Fake Mark Zuckerberg

    July 24th, 2007 at 8:24 pm

    mrkzuckerberg@yahoo.com

    Let them come to Facebook. I will welcome them wholeheartedly.

  15. Jeremy Steele

    July 24th, 2007 at 8:34 pm

    “Let them come to Facebook. I will welcome them wholeheartedly.”

    LOL, gonna beat ‘em over the head with a shovel, eh? :D

  16. Casey

    July 24th, 2007 at 10:05 pm

    I agree with Andy. This is pretty dumb. Myspace is the largest internet site, they are going to have a lot of everything.

  17. iMarketingGuru (SEO Wiki)

    July 24th, 2007 at 10:12 pm

    I highly doubt that is Mark Zuckerberg, also, careful on the e-mail issue. — anyways, I now believe even more that over 40% of the MySpace profiles are either spam, inactive or fake people who really shouldn’t be on MySpace. This whole issue of over 29,000 profiles being sex predators still is likely low in comparison to what is happening for real on MySpace. I also believe that anyone can use any fake names they want, who’s to say that their MySpace profiles aren’t just listed under fake names? MySpace is totally ridiculous and I still don’t understand why Facebook opens up more/allows customization by the users of their profiles. If Facebook were to add in the same things as MySpace/just would give Myspace functionality, Facebook would receive far more traffic than it does currently. MySpace will continue to grow, but their numbers need to be filtered.

  18. patricia

    July 24th, 2007 at 10:15 pm

    Weirdos and freaks on the internet? What a surprise! Wait, they’re on MySpace? You’re kidding me.

    :)

    I think it’s funny that our congress is considering legislation on ISPs and social networks when the offline technology to help find missing kids and child predators per state is so fragmented and disconnected. I do think it’d be ideal to put some heat on ISPs for things like child porn sites and creepy stuff like that, but most of that stuff is housed outside of the U.S anyhow.

  19. Tan The Man

    July 24th, 2007 at 10:25 pm

    This story should be more of a dig on the fragmented sex offender database than the proliferation of sex offenders on Myspace.

    Patricia - the problem with giving more power to ISPs for things like child porn gives them more leverage against net neutrality.

  20. Ian Bell

    July 24th, 2007 at 10:48 pm

    29,000 sex offenders is CRAZY. Shows how sick people are. How do you think they are tracking these people and finding them? Think FaceBook has as many sex offenders?

  21. Hotel Booking Pro

    July 24th, 2007 at 11:34 pm

    Yeah true, Sex sells. Though I am not obssessed with sex but the moment I posted sex articles my traffic skyrocketed from 60-70 visitors per day to 600 visitor per day. Imagine 100% difference.

    But most blog directory won’t accept my blog listings because of adult content. It’s not porn just - Just information about sex venues and prostitution.

    But anyway I don’t really care if they don’t accept my blog listing on their directory because they hardly generate any traffic for me. Only waiting for suckers like you and me to generate link back to them for them to get popularity links on google page rank.

  22. Jools

    July 25th, 2007 at 12:52 am

    It may be that this article is dumb and that parents should look educate their kids to surf safely, but posts and articles like this may raise parents awareness plus perhaps make way for social networking sites to make an effort - either to work for getting rid of offenders or educating (under-age) users. It may be a law of nature that the Internet is filled with perverts but it don’t see that the consequence of that should be that the owners of sites w user generated content should just ignore whats going on on their site.
    Sorry for my english - not my native language - but i hope i got my point across anyway

  23. iMarketingGuru (SEO Wiki)

    July 25th, 2007 at 1:10 am

    Facebook is not as anonymous, this makes it not an issue when it comes to fears of predators being on Facebook. There are definitely a few predators on Facebook but definitely not in the thousands, they wouldn’t be able to saturate the friend networks of others in order to gain trust.

  24. ejv

    July 25th, 2007 at 1:11 am

    MySpace is a cesspool. We’ve had issues where stolen images have been used to create phony profiles on MySpace. In turn those phony profiles were used to harass, intimidate and embarrass the real owners of those images. It emails to their Corporate Communications people threatening bad PR to get their support people to remove said images and delete those phony profiles. But as long as MySpace and other sites are under pressure to grow, these sites will continue to accept profiles without a user even having a valid email address.

  25. NLP

    July 25th, 2007 at 2:19 am

    Wow! There are 600,000 registered sex offenders in the US?! Blimey. That is 0.2% of the entire US population!! What an amazing number. Think about it, these are only the registered ones…

    Given that MySpace only found 30,000 in some 180 million profiles (ca. 0.017%) this would mean MySpace is either some 10x cleaner than the rest of the US or it means that sex offenders don’t have Internet access or it means that there are still some 300,000 offenders whom they haven’t identified, yet.

  26. aishwarya

    July 25th, 2007 at 4:45 am

    They are sure to go back to myspace to spam it again.It continues to happen both in orkut and myspace.

  27. lidiving

    July 25th, 2007 at 4:54 am

    Does this really surprise anyone???? If you were a sex offender where would you go. My Space with all the teen girls showing skin would be my guess….

  28. patricia

    July 25th, 2007 at 7:04 am

    @ ejv, that’s a good point. I think it’s gotten out of hand how everybody expects all sites to have huge numbers. In the traditional media world, it’d never be this way with circulation - I can’t see how it is possible with every social network site, especially in niches. But, the industry mindset will hopefully evolve….

  29. David Litsky

    July 25th, 2007 at 8:04 am

    This should put the focus back on parents knowing what their kids are doing. With all the tools out there, who is teaching the parents how to watch their kids dodge traffic on the information superhighway?

  30. lidiving

    July 25th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    How about sites like My Space banning users under 18 years old to post on the site. That would never happen though since 80% of its users are under 18 years old. These sites are a treasure trove for pedophiles and sex offenders. Why is this news such a surprise to people????? Parents need to police their kids better as well.
    http://members.tripod.com/acls2001

  31. Jeremy Steele

    July 25th, 2007 at 10:07 am

    You could never totally ban users under 18 anyway, they could simply lie about their age, and I doubt MySpace is in a position to request copies of your birth certificate upon registration.

  32. Matt Keegan

    July 25th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

    That’s terrible! I guess we should be calling MySpace, Pervert Place. I would like to see social networks do a better job at screening their members. If they did, then the creeps would find it harder to stay online.

  33. PGC

    July 25th, 2007 at 6:20 pm

    In the wake of this MySpace news, it’s important that parents realize that having their kids abstain from social networking is not the answer; the key is educating themselves on the industry and learning about how their children can experience this integral part of their future in a positive and secure environment. For example, imbee.com (my client), is the first-parented approved social network for tweens to address safety right up front. They authenticate its members, offer a built in parental dash board, keep its kids personal information private and only allows kids to publish to their approved circle of friends. None of the other social networks, including MySpace, were ever intended to support members under the age of 13. In other words, tweens who aspire to be like teens have other social networking outlets available to enable them to learn to be good Internet citizens before graduating to sites that cater to older audiences.

  34. Dr. Larry Rosen

    July 25th, 2007 at 7:16 pm

    Unbelievable! The moral panic screamers just won’t give up and face the facts.

    In June 2007 MySpace had over 70 MILLION unique visitors. OK, so they removed 29 THOUSAND sex offender profiles. That is 4/100ths of a percent!!! In addition, from my studies of well over 2500 MySpacers, nearly all told me that when faced with a “solicitation” they act appropriately and block the person or report him to Tom. When asked if these episodes are upsetting the vast majority say it does not upset them at all.

    I am appalled that people keep focusing on MySpace as a hotbed of sexual predators soliciting teens. It is not. It is all an issue of good parenting. Please visit my website at http://www.csudh.edu/psych/lrosen.htm for my research and information on my upcoming book Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation.

    Thank you for allowing me to post this comment.

    LR

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