Legal Commentary

Perpetuating the Myth of Sexual Predators and Social Networking

By TChris

A couple of state attorneys general are "appalled" that 90,000 registered sex offenders had MySpace pages before MySpace booted them off the site. Never mind that a task force created by the state attorneys general recently concluded that the online sexual solicitation of children isn't a significant problem (sensationalized television shows like "To Catch a Predator" notwithstanding).

The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online.

Among those who disagreed with this reality because it contradicted his practice of fear-mongering was Connecticut's AG Richard Blumenthal, who complained that the report "downplayed the predator threat." Blumenthal failed to appreciate the difference between "downplaying" a threat and recognizing that the threat isn't significant. [more ...]

Attorneys general like Mr. Blumenthal and Roy Cooper of North Carolina publicly accused the social networks of facilitating the activities of pedophiles and pushed them to adopt measures to protect their youngest users. Citing studies that showed tens of thousands of convicted sex offenders were using MySpace, they pressured the networks to purge those people from their membership databases.

Blumenthal and Cooper are the two state AG's who are "appalled" that 90,000 registered sex offenders had MySpace pages before MySpace canceled their accounts. They're following the lead of Ernest Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who draws this conclusion from the 90,000 figure:

“This clearly reinforces the fact that there are a significant number of people who seek access to kids online,” Mr. Allen said.

Hardly. All sorts of people are forced to register as sex offenders. Most aren't pedophiles. The fact that a court has ordered someone to register as a sex offender tells us nothing about whether that person is trying to solicit kids online. Scaring parents is nonetheless good for job security if you're a state AG or the president of an advocacy organization that demonizes everyone who's been ordered to register as a sex offender.

Speaking of job security, the company that made the software that helped MySpace locate the 90,000 registered sex offenders is pitching the same software to Facebook, claiming "that Facebook had become a haven for convicted offenders blocked from creating accounts on MySpace." Facebook isn't falling for it. Neither should the public, despite the scare tactics used by AG's Blumenthal and Cooper.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 04, 2009 (boomark / email).