Tom Reilly Takes on “Social Network” Sites for Teenagers that are Playgrounds for Sexual Predators, Owned by Fox Television
       For the second time in two months, Attorney General Tom Reilly is calling upon an internet-based social networking site to implement new policies to prevent minors from being victimized by sexual predators.
       In a press release yesterday, Tom Reilly demanded that one of the most popular networking sites, Xanga.com, ban any user under the age of 18 since there are not sufficient safeguards to protect children using the website from being exposed to sexually explicit content. Xanga, which boasts some 27 million users, currently has no age verification system in place. In June, Reilly confronted the networking site MySpace, owned by Fox Television, with the same concerns.
       In June 2006, representatives from AG Reilly's Office and the Massachusetts State Police participated in a "Dialogue on Social Networking Web Sites" sponsored by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington, DC. At that time, Reilly made many of the same calls for MySpace to change its Terms of Service to prohibit minors from using it.
       MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (Fox News), and has over 105 million users. It is the number one destination site on the Internet, surpassing Google and Yahoo with respect to daily traffic.
       Currently, a child of any age can post personal information about himself/herself, including pictures, which can be viewed by anyone. Pedophiles can utilize the search engine on the site to find a child by age, gender, or location. A user must specifically change his or her profile to “private” to avoid being able to be found in this manner. By default, it is public to anyone. Law enforcement recognizes that MySpace in particular has become one of the primary sites used by pedophiles to find victims online.
       Moreover, sites like MySpace and Xanga are increasingly becoming a medium for purveyors of commercial porn. It is not unusual for users to be bombarded with “friend requests” from bots that pose as local members of the opposite sex, but are really fronts for commercial sites seeking newcomers to view a fee-based webcam.
       Reilly says that his investigations had found that adults on these sites can not only view a minor’s picture, age, and other personal information, but they can also communicate with the child.