Mt. Vernon Register-News

Local

May 9, 2008

Madigan, Facebook to crack down on predators

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By TESA CULLI

tesa.culli@register-news.com

SPRINGFIELD — After 123 Illinois registered sexual offenders from the MySpace Internet site were discovered to be registered on Facebook, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has reached an agreement with Facebook to make key changes to better protect children from predators and inappropriate contact.

MySpace agreed to make the changes in January, after Madigan and attorneys general from 49 other states and the District of Columbia joined forces pressuring the social networking site. At the time of the change in January, there were 1,800 registered sex offenders on MySpace.

Madigan filed a subpoena on Facebook and discovered 123 of the MySpace offenders had created profiles — and Facebook removed the profiles.

“As with MySpace, I am concerned that young people communicating through Facebook run into risks of having contact with sexual predators roaming the Internet looking to meet children, teens and others,” Madigan stated. “Many Facebook users are children who are simply too trusting and sometimes too free with the information they make available on their Facebook pages.”

In January, Mt. Vernon reached a formal agreement with the Federal Bureau of Investigations to participate in the Cyber Task Force and had been informally working with the force for the six months prior.

Three search warrants had been executed in connection with its participation. The cases involved pornographic crimes, MVPD Chief Chris Mendenall said at the time.

Mendenall said the force does investigate complaints from Facebook, but the normal complaints don’t involve sexual crimes.

“The most recent complaint we investigated was a dispute between high school kids making posts on there that were making inappropriate comments between each other,” Mendenall said.

As part of the agreement reached between the attorney general and Facebook, the networking company will provide automatic safety messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an unknown adult; restrict the ability of users to change their listed ages; act more aggressively to remove inappropriate content and groups from the site; and require third-party vendors to adhere to Facebook’s safety and privacy guidelines. The company will also maintain a list of pornographic Web sites and cut links to such sites.

Facebook will remove groups for incest, pedophilia, cyberbullying and other violations of the site’s terms of service as well as expel from the site those who violate the terms. In addition, safety tips to users will be more prominently displayed, and all users younger than 18 years old must affirm they have read the safety tips when they register.

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