It’s well known that social networks such as Facebook and MySpace can be a haven to sex offenders, with their high proportion of youngsters and a free sharing of information. However, that doesn’t really excuse a move by the British based Faceparty to delete the accounts of anyone over the age of 36.

Earlier this month, a new law was passed in the UK which included provisions for the Secretary of State to require sex offenders to register their email addresses along with other information. Social networks would then have to check email addresses on a Government list against those being used by its members. But this isn’t yet law and would need ministerial approval before becoming a legal requirement.

However, this hasn’t stopped Faceparty from not only jumping the gun but also taking the guidelines and turning them in to an excuse to ban everyone over the age of 36 from being a member on the site.

Over the past two months Faceparty has been deleting a lot of accounts, and all from people over the age of 36. In a blog post on the site explaining why, the site argues that because it has never insisted on validated email addresses, it must instead delete accounts outright with no prior notice or warning.

The post argues:

“We were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which – we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.”

This has lead to speculation that the network is trying to use the proposed legislation to create a younger user base, but the site denies the charges of ageism outright:

“Despite malicious rumours spread by a few people on the website, it is not true that we have deleted members due to “ageism” nor older members who have cool tools (we can check members against the sex offenders list if they have purchased cool tools).

This is a shockingly bad decision by Faceparty as whatever the reasons you cannot ever justify tarring everyone with the same brush, particularly when that brush is an accusation of being a potential sex offender.

And why 36? That age or any other for that matter is not mentioned anywhere in the new guidelines and seems to have been picked at random by a monkey.

What’s more, the guidelines that are being used as an excuse by Faceparty are unworkable anyway and stink of the British government just trying to be seen to be acting, however bad the plan may be. As anyone who is active online will know, email addresses are ultra easy to come by, and so registering one isn’t really going to make the blindest bit of difference. This is sheer madness all round.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 7:17 pm under Internet, Opinion, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
Stumble It!