Facebook tosses five thousand sex offenders
According to a joint announcement by two state attorneys general yesterday, Facebook has removed 5,585 registered sex offenders from it’s rolls since May of last year.
Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, both of whom have made online child safety an ongoing priority, are asking other states to do a better job of protecting children on the Internet. Internet social networking sites and state law enforcement authorities have argued for years about whether enough was being done to weed sex offenders from their membership lists. Given the number of children that flock to sites such as MySpace and Facebook, there is a lot of concern around this issue.
Blumenthal had the following to say: “The message in this number is Facebook has an equal stake in solving this problem of protecting children. They have an equal stake in the predator problem and its solution.” Earlier this month, rival networking site MySpace announced it had removed 90,000 sex offenders in a two-year period.
Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, says a focus on members using their real names and identities helps discourage sex offenders, and even more is being planned to prevent them from registering. Blumenthal and Cooper spent a great deal of time working with MySpace and Facebook last year to help the two huge social networking sites (and adolescent magnets) to rid themselves of sexual predators, according to an article on CNET.
Though the total number removed from Facebook seems a little low when compared to the 90,000 removed from MySpace, there is no denying that both sites are making progress in protecting children from online sexual predators. These efforts cannot bear fruit too soon. Once these offenders have been prosecuted and convicted in the public arena, there is no excuse for social networking sites not to make the effort necessary to remove them from site membership. There is no sense in removing offenders from non-virtual situations then letting them transition into the virtual world of social networking.
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