MySpace.com’s Image Problem

There is no need to go to your state sex offenders list anymore, it is much easier just to head MySpace.com and send those same offenders a myspace e-mail message according to this article by Jenn Shreve and courtesy of Wired.com.

Wired News ran the names of randomly selected registered sex offenders in San Francisco and neighboring Sonoma County through MySpace’s user search engine, and turned up no fewer than five men whose self-reported names, photographs, ages, astrological signs, locations and (in two instances) heights matched those of profiles on the state’s online sex offender registry.

The report gets even more disturbing by stating:

All but one of the offenders Wired News found on MySpace appear to have been convicted of engaging in some kind of sexual activity with a minor. The other, one of the two probable matches, is listed as having raped, penetrated with a foreign object, and engaged in oral sex with an unconscious person. On MySpace, he’s a Christian with a girlfriend and nearly 400 friends.

The article offers no solutions to the problem stating:

Would kicking registered sex offenders off a website be illegal? If a case was ever brought, it would be up to a judge to decide whether the action was in violation of Megan’s Law — the statute under which California’s list is produced and distributed, according to Bedrosian. In any event, such a crackdown would amount to little more than a public relations move, because it would only expel sex offenders who, in keeping with MySpace’s terms, provide their real name, location and other personal information. Users can easily register and start using MySpace with a completely fake name, address, age and even e-mail address, and one suspects that many people who wish to use the site for ill purposes do just that.

It goes on to compare these problems with ebay.com:

In many ways, MySpace finds itself in the same situation as eBay in the late 1990s, when it had grown well beyond its own capacity to police itself, and fraud was rampant due to the resulting security loopholes. EBay walked a fine line between punishing bad behavior and alienating its users, many of whom were drifting off to new competitors. And if MySpace took the extreme step of forbidding registered sex offenders from using its site, what’s to stop them from setting up camp at Xanga or Friendster or MyYearbook? Even in the impossible event that all the existing social networking sites became verifiably pervert-free, new sites and new applications would just spring up in their place, bringing about a whole new spate of security problems.

Let’s look at the big picture here, the last time I heard no one ever got killed by an angry Ebay customer. I have to disagree with Wired News assessment that this is comparable to Ebay fraud problems. In the case of Ebay the worst that could happen to you is being out a few hundred dollars or receiving broken dishes in the mail. Myspace.com has a serious issue on its hands with the daily bad press it receives over vicious crimes committed by its users. Here are just a few of the sites working to shed light on this pattern of bad behavior:

myspaceWatch.com -monitors the MySpace activities of your teenager, as well as up to four others, for $6 a month.
MyCrimeSpace - forum dedicated to daily myspace.com related crimes
The Dead Kids of MySpace - a sad list of young people taken from us by myspace predators

If going to any of those sites doesn’t make you either cry or throw your hands up in disgust I would be very surprised. I personally do not accept that MySpace cannot do more to curb these abuses on its site. This type of activity gives all of social networking online a bad name. From an economic standpoint MySpace.com will have to come to terms with this before a time comes when the authorities will insist upon doing it for them.

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