If someone lies about their age on MySpace, and as a consequence is sexually assaulted, who’s to blame? In a win for common sense, a federal Judge in Texas has decided that the blame does not rest with MySpace, and in fact the judge suggested that the parents shoulder some of the blame. 

The parents of a 13-year-old girl, who said she was 18 on her MySpace profile, sued MySpace for $30 million, after the girl was sexually assaulted in a Texas car park. The parents alleged that MySpace wasn’t doing enough to protect its members.

“If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace,” Judge Sam Sparks, of US District Court in Austin, wrote in his ruling, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

The decision appears to extends the same free-speech protection enjoyed by Internet service providers to social networking sites.

Sparks said that MySpace could not be responsible for what members wrote on their profiles, anymore than Yahoo could be held responsible for what people wrote on Yahoo message boards. He also said that if MySpace was punished for the failure of its safety systems, other Internet firms would stop trying to protect their users.

MySpace said in a statement that it ”has always been concerned about what happened to (the victim), because we take the safety and security of our community very seriously. However, a lawsuit against MySpace was not the appropriate way to redress any harm to her.”

A 19 year old man has been charged with the sexual assault of the girl by authorities in Travis County.

While the sexual assault of a 13 year old girl is a terrible thing, this court case confirms that parents need to take responsibility for what their children are doing online; they can’t just blame social networking companies for the awful situations their kids find themselves in.

Though I do have to wonder, whether in this case, the parents had a different motivation, some $13 million, perhaps?

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 11:30 am under Uncategorized.

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