Teacher Smackdown

After seeing stories of teachers bragging on Facebook that they had sex with their students, MySpace’s announcement yesterday was good to hear. MySpace said that they will be working with state attorney generals who request the identities of MySpace members who are known child sex offenders.

Since parole conditions for sex offenders ordinarily say that they cannot be in contact with children, it’s important that predators are removed off MySpace and similar social networking sites that attract kids.

According to the New York Times:

Hemanshu Nigam MySpace’s chief security officer, said in an interview that the site had already taken down the profiles of thousands of sex offenders since the beginning of May when it began running its own database check.

“We’re hoping that we can work out the proper legal channel so we can provide this information to the attorneys general,” Mr. Nigam said. “The attorneys general have a particular goal, which is to try to do something against online predators, and we do too, which is to try to keep them off our site.”

Mr. Nigam said that the company had aggressively tried to crack down on sex offenders. Late last year, the company hired Sentinel Tech, a company in New York, to design a system to compare its 175 million member records with public sex offender records.

Way to go MySpace. Facebook are you listening?

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social networking, internet predators, Facebook, MySpace, online sex offenders, child abuse, sexual abuse