Myspace “Concerned” About Kids’ Safety Online
I just had to reprint this FANTASTIC article from Mashable!
I just love it when blogs from other industries go all TWOP on our asses. 
Do you like organizations with long titles? Do you enjoy it when people say things like “for the children”? Are you thrilled by token gestures? If you said yes to any of these questions, you’ll absolutely love the latest announcement from MySpace. They made it in conjunction with what must be the newly minted “Attorneys General in the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking,” a group representing 49 states and the District of Columbia. The group and MySpace came together to announce a plan to create some standards that they’ll later announce that plan to combat unsafe conditions for children on social networks.
Or, in English, it’s a press release about a press release we’ll see in the future.
They did provide some broad details on how they plan on making MySpace safer for kids, though, like having a button you can push if a picture is unsafe or inappropriate (oh wait, don’t we already have that?). They’ll also announcing that they’ll be cooperating with Law Enforcement (oh wait, don’t we report on that cooperation every week here at Mashable?)
The most interesting bit that they announced is that they’ll all be sitting around and trying to come up with a way to create age verification for kids that’s more effective than simply asking the question: “Hey, how old are you?” There were other announcements, but most of them are equally ineffective ideas (like a social network whitelist/blacklist, where parents must submit their children’s names and emails to a list before they’ll be allowed access).
I understand that MySpace and other social networks have to play ball in the PR world, but one wonders what it’ll take to actually cause folks in law enforcement and government to get real about the dangers of social networks, and admit the fact that the dangers aren’t really more prominent online than in the real world.
Tags: online safety, attorney general, myspace
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