Comments on: MySpace Had 4 Times the Sex Offenders Originally Reported

By: SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 25, 2007 | Seo Alchemist

SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 25, 2007 | Seo Alchemist — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:52:24 +0000

[...] MySpace Had 4 Times the Sex Offenders Originally Reported, Techcrunch [...]

By: Dr. Larry Rosen

Dr. Larry Rosen — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 02:16:14 +0000

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.

By: PGC

PGC — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 01:20:59 +0000

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.

By: Matt Keegan

Matt Keegan — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:58:10 +0000

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.

By: Jeremy Steele

Jeremy Steele — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:07:22 +0000

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.

By: lidiving

lidiving — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:53:06 +0000

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

By: David Litsky

David Litsky — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:04:16 +0000

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?

By: patricia

patricia — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:04:45 +0000

@ 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….

By: lidiving

lidiving — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 11:54:58 +0000

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….

By: aishwarya

aishwarya — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 11:45:34 +0000

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

By: NLP

NLP — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:19:42 +0000

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.

By: ejv

ejv — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:11:10 +0000

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.

By: iMarketingGuru (SEO Wiki)

iMarketingGuru (SEO Wiki) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:10:16 +0000

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.

By: Jools

Jools — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 07:52:40 +0000

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

By: Hotel Booking Pro

Hotel Booking Pro — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 06:34:32 +0000

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.

By: Ian Bell

Ian Bell — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 05:48:21 +0000

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?

By: Tan The Man

Tan The Man — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 05:25:31 +0000

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.

By: patricia

patricia — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 05:15:52 +0000

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.

By: iMarketingGuru (SEO Wiki)

iMarketingGuru (SEO Wiki) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 05:12:48 +0000

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.

By: Casey

Casey — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 05:05:46 +0000

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

By: Jeremy Steele

Jeremy Steele — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 03:34:04 +0000

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

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

By: Fake Mark Zuckerberg

Fake Mark Zuckerberg — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 03:24:15 +0000

mrkzuckerberg@yahoo.com

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

By: Andy Fox

Andy Fox — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 03:08:35 +0000

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!

By: Adrian Keys

Adrian Keys — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:51:43 +0000

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.

By: Brandon Watson

Brandon Watson — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:49:04 +0000

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.