Start taking notes, Facebook. MySpace just made social networking a whole lot safer.
The company announced Tuesday that it removed over 90,000 registered sex offenders from its site to help improve the safety of young users.
Using a program called Sentinel Safe, which provided MySpace with pertinent information about sex offenders, the data was compared with MySpace members' profiles to find matches.
The efforts to curtail the chances of an encounter between a sex offender and a child were spearheaded by the attorney generals of North Carolina and Connecticut, who strongly encouraged the change.
The Editorial Board applauds MySpace for taking a proactive approach to making social networking safer for innocent youngsters. While the substantial account removal is certainly a step in the right direction, more efforts can be made to ensure an unsafe encounter between a child and an offender does not occur.
We encourage Facebook to follow suit - regardless of its claim that a registered sex offender has never met a minor through the site. If over 90,000 offenders were found on MySpace, we can't imagine how many of these undesirables are now lurking on Facebook, a site that boasts over 150 million users.
Now if only MySpace could do something about those half-naked creeps who take pictures of themselves in the mirror with their camera phones.
