Parents concerned over MySpace arrests

03-03-2006

by Ciara O'Brien

It may be becoming increasingly popular with young people, but MySpace.com is currently raising its fair share of alarm bells among parents.

The website has been dragged into a sex scandal involving underage children. In the US, two men were arrested in Connecticut, accused of illegal sexual contact with underage girls they had met through the site.

The news has caused panic among parents in the US, who fear their children may be targeted by paedophiles lurking around MySpace.com, which acts as a social network for many teenagers.

MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which took over IntermixMedia -- MySpace's parent company -- last year in a deal worth some USD580 million. The site gives users a free online space, allowing them to customise their profiles, post photos and share images etc.

However, MySpace was quick to distance itself from the investigation, pointing out that it has measures in place to prevent abuse, including banning children under 14 from using the site, restricting access to profiles of those under 16, and limiting contacts to only those added to the child's approved buddy list.

According to reports, MySpace also uses software that will seek out those that may have lied about their age, identifying and flagging terms that could be used by those under 14. The site has already deleted some 200,000 profiles from the site, after MySpace suspected they had lied about their age. In total, MySpace has an estimated 60 million members.

The firm has reacted quickly, promising to introduce new software that will keep an eye on how its members use the website, in a bid to prevent criminal activity.

This is just one of the sites that younger web users are being attracted to. Parents have been urged in the past to be vigilant about their child's internet activities, keeping close watch on what they are doing online and who they are talking to.

In Ireland, children's charity Barnardos recently warned parents to be aware that there are a minority of paedophiles publishing material in Ireland. The warning came as the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland reported a marked increase in both the severity and amount of online child pornography content being reported to its hotline.