MySpace ditches 90,000 sex offenders

MySpace has canceled the accounts of 90,000 registered sex offenders. That’s around 40,000 more than the site had estimated last year.

This isn’t a one-off cull: the account closures have come over the past three years following its creation of a database for comparing sex offender registers with its membership list using names and other identifying information.

The figure became public as a response to a subpoena from the attorneys general of Connecticut and North Carolina. They are using the figures to push for tighter controls to stop sex offenders taking advantage of social networking sites.

While the 90,000 figure is only a tiny percentage of the 130 million registered users of MySpace, it’s a pretty significant proportion of the total number of sex offenders in the US; MySpace’s Hemanshu Nigam says there are 700,000 in the country.

Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say every registered sex offender who joins a social networking site is planning to use it to approach children. But with the ongoing pressure from politicians, sites such as MySpace aren’t taking any chances.

The announcement has prompted a slanging match between MySpace and leading rival Facebook. John Cardillo of Sentinel, which produces the technology behind the MySpace database, has outright called Facebook a safe haven for sex offenders who’ve been blocked by MySpace.

Cardillo says he ran the database against Facebook and found 8,487 of the offenders had accounts there, though he only matches 4,679 to a specific user ID. Facebook has disabled those accounts pending investigation, but says that there’s no certainty these are definite matches as Cardillo will only have been able to access user names and thumbnail images rather than the full data for each user.

The row comes shortly after a report stemming from previous disputes between MySpace and government officials said children faced greater dangers from cyberbullying than from sexual predators online.

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