The Social

Social-networking sites and other Web services can't be held liable in a sexual assault on a minor that stemmed from a meeting online, according to a ruling in a California appeals court that consolidated a number of complaints against MySpace on behalf of teenage girls and their parents.

Reuters reported late on Wednesday that the Second District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles cited the Communications Decency Act in coming to the conclusion. Claiming negligence and product liability, the plaintiffs had alleged that MySpace had failed to put in place age verification software or to keep profiles on a "private" setting.

Other federal courts have come to similar rulings. Last year, a Texas court ruled that the family of a 14-year-old girl who was assaulted by a man she met on MySpace could not hold the social network responsible. The girl in question had lied about her age when she created a profile, claiming to be a legal adult, and the court ruled that it was her parents' job, not MySpace's, to keep her safe.

This week's ruling in Los Angeles received a thumbs-up from MySpace and parent company News Corp. It could also have repercussions across other social networks and community-based Web sites, which have been subject to scrutiny from authorities over both safety and decency standards. Craigslist, for example, has faced a crackdown on sex-related ads after both allegations of rampant prostitution and a high-profile case in which a Craigslist encounter allegedly ended in murder.

The situation can be different, if there is actual harassment conducted through the social network, rather than an offline assault. In that case, if it appears that a Web service isn't doing enough to keep members safe while using the site, it can, in some cases, be held responsible.

Facebook and MySpace are working with state attorneys general to keep registered sex offenders out of their user bases, following allegations from lawmakers that they weren't doing enough to maintain a safe environment for minors.

On Thursday, the sentencing is expected in another Los Angeles court for Lori Drew, who has been convicted of three misdemeanors after impersonating a teenage boy on MySpace and harassing a 13-year-old girl allegedly to the point of suicide.

Drew could be sentenced to up to three years in prison and forced to pay a fine of $300,000, a far lesser sentence than she originally faced.

Facebook has removed 5,585 registered sex offenders from its service since May, the Associated Press reported late Thursday.

The tally comes from a joint announcement of two state attorneys general who have made online safety a priority, North Carolina's Roy Cooper and Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal.

This follows several years of back and forth between major social networks and state authorities who have insisted the sites aren't doing enough to keep sex offenders out of their ranks. It's a significant issue, considering social networks' popularity with anyone who's hit adolescence.

Earlier this month, the News Corp.-owned social network MySpace announced that it had removed 90,000 sex offenders' profiles since 2007. Considering Facebook is now bigger than MySpace, the 5,585 seems a little low. But Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, told the AP that the social network's requirement that members use a real name rather than a nickname may have deterred sex offenders from membership in the first place.

Facebook offered a statement from Kelly later on Friday: "We have been working productively with General Blumenthal and other attorneys general to keep sex offenders off Facebook, and to assure that those who attempt use our site in violation of their parole or other restrictions are brought to justice. This is one of many measures that we continue to take to make Facebook a safer and more trusted online environment."

This post was updated at 9 a.m. PST with comment from Facebook.

In one of the more sordid accounts of online predation we've read recently, the Associated Press reported on Thursday that a Wisconsin teen used a fake Facebook profile to blackmail his classmates into giving sexual favors.

Eighteen-year-old high school student Anthony Stancl is accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves.

Stancl then told many of them that unless they engaged in some sort of sexual activity with him, he would put the photos or videos on the Internet. At least seven of them have said they were coerced into sex acts, which Stancl allegedly documented with a cell phone camera.

There were about 300 photos of underage males, some of which were as young as 15, on Stancl's computer, police in the teen's hometown of New Berlin, Wisc., told the AP. Stancl had originally come under police scrutiny in November, after he issued a bomb threat that temporarily closed New Berlin High School.

The emergence of the case comes at a time when social-networking safety is back in the spotlight. After a subpoena from the Connecticut attorney general, the News Corp.-owned networking site MySpace handed over the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders that had profiles on the site, and pressure mounted for Facebook to do something similar.

What's important to keep in mind, lest this incident set off more hysteria about the dangers of teens and Facebook profiles, is that this sort of activity could have happened over an instant-message client, another social network, or an online message board.

It's true, however, that the Internet can cloak a criminal in anonymity or a fabricated identity--in one particularly tragic case, a woman posed as a teenage boy on MySpace and allegedly harassed a 13-year-old girl to the point of suicide.

A recent report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concluded that threats to minors online are more complicated than the stereotype of a lone adult seeking out vulnerable teens: in the case of Anthony Stancl, for example, the sexual predator was one of the victims' own high-school classmates.

MySpace announced on Tuesday that it has deleted 90,000 accounts owned by registered sex offenders. It's good news for families, for MySpace, and for the state attorney general of Connecticut, who demanded last month that the News Corp.-owned social network turn over a roster of names.

It's especially good news for Sentinel, the security company that MySpace used to track down the accounts. And now Sentinel appears to be trying to take advantage of its success with MySpace into a PR campaign partly aimed at getting Facebook into signing a contract as well.

John Cardillo, the CEO of Sentinel, gave an interview to TechCrunch in which he said thousands of those who were banned from MySpace can now be found on Facebook--not yet one of Sentinel's clients.

"As the first and only social-networking site to use state-of-the-art technology to identify and remove registered sex offenders from its site, MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections," a statement from MySpace read. "As part of our long-standing partnership with law enforcement and state attorneys general, we will continue to readily provide information on these removed offenders for their investigations."

Unfairly accused? With the headline of the TechCrunch post referring to sex offenders on Facebook as "refugees," and Cardillo calling the Palo Alto-based social network a "safe haven" for them, you'd think that there was some kind of mass creation of Facebook profiles on the part of sex offenders who had seen their MySpace profiles axed. There is, however, no evidence of that. Millions of people have profiles on both social networks, so it's safe to assume that sex offenders probably do as well.

Facebook's representatives weren't thrilled by the "safe haven" allegation, to say the least.

"For a company that has a mission to keep kids safe, we find it irresponsible that they wouldn't share this with us," representative Barry Schnitt told TechCrunch in an addendum to the tech blog's original post. "Or, if not with us, how about with law enforcement? This could have been an announcement that Sentinel and Facebook removed 8,000 potential sex offenders. We still don't have the information on who they are. If you are willing to share that with us, we will investigate immediately."

Later, Schnitt told CNET News that while about 4,600 of the 8,000 names on Sentinel's list were directly tied to Facebook user IDs and have now had the corresponding accounts disabled, the rest only matched up to names. One of the names on the list, for example, was "Aaron Smith"--which has more than 500 member matches on Facebook.

Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, also described in a reaction to the story how Facebook monitors its service to protect minors. "We have not yet had to handle a case of a registered sex offender meeting a minor through Facebook," he said in a statement.

PR scuffles between Facebook and MySpace are nothing new. In this case, however, it appears that a third party, Sentinel, is using its success with one client (MySpace) to force another (Facebook) into signing up for the service as well--and is doing so by manipulating media coverage to back Facebook into a corner.

What we would prefer to see is a more pragmatic and methodical policing of social networks for ongoing threats. Shock-and-awe press tactics aren't the way to go, especially because threats on the Web are much more complicated than they may appear.

Let's all take a deep breath and remember that this is about the safety of kids everywhere, not about marketing or selling a product, or looking better in the eyes of the world than your industry competitor.

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. subsidiary that owns social sites MySpace and Photobucket, has signed on as the latest member of the Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to "identifying and promoting best practice, tools and methods in the field of online safety, that also respect free expression."

As the first social network to become a nationwide teen craze, MySpace became a frequent target for safety advocates--including state lawmakers, who ended up working with the social network to create a safety plan for kids and teens online.

Other prominent members of FOSI include AOL, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Google, Loopt, Microsoft, Ning, Verizon, and a number of international telecommunications carriers.

"FOSI has been a dedicated leader in promoting online safety and we look forward to contributing to the work they do," Fox Interactive Media Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement Friday. "Internet safety is a key priority for us as we strive to keep all teens safer online. This new membership will further strengthen our efforts and will also allow us to share our expertise with other members."

FOSI holds an annual conference about online safety: this year's will be on December 11 in Washington, D.C.

MySpace can breathe a little easier. A federal appeals court ruled last week that the News Corp.-owned social network can't be held responsible for the sexual assault of an Austin, Texas, teen by a man she met on the site.

The girl, named in the case as Julie Doe, initially filed suit along with her mother, named as Jane Doe, after she was sexually assaulted in May 2006 by 19-year-old Pete Solis, whom she met on MySpace. The lawsuit, filed in a Texas state court, targeted MySpace, parent company News Corp., and Solis. Among the allegations against MySpace were fraud, negligence, gross negligence, and negligent misrepresentation, and the Does claimed MySpace should have had technology in place to make it impossible for someone as young as Julie to create a profile in the first place.

But on Friday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Does can't target MySpace in the case, which had already been dismissed once before. "Parties complaining that they were harmed by a Web site's publication of user-generated content...may sue the third-party user who generated the content," Judge Edith Clement Brown asserted in the ruling, "but not the interactive computer service that enabled them to publish the content online.

It would have been Julie Doe's parents' job to protect her, not MySpace's, the court decided.

The Does' case might have been able to stay afloat if the assault in question had stemmed from actual harassment on MySpace rather than a real-life assault instigated by correspondence on the site. Had Julie Doe been harassed online and reported Solis' profile to MySpace, only to receive an inadequate or slow response, it'd be a very different story.

That's something that MySpace rival Facebook ran into when New York legal authorities conducted an investigation to see how the site responded to claims of harassment. Claiming that Facebook was slow to action, the office of N.Y. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo subpoenaed the social-networking site before the two eventually reached an accord.

It also probably didn't help the plaintiffs' side in Doe vs. MySpace that Doe had lied about her age to join the site, claiming she was 18 when she created a profile in 2005, despite the fact that she was actually 13. MySpace's safety regulations bar children younger than 14 from using the site, and profiles of members under 16 cannot be viewed publicly.

Court documents from the February 1, 2007, hearing before the district court show that the legal authorities saw holes in the Does' case early on: "You have a 13-year-old girl who lies, disobeys all of the instructions, later on disobeys the warning not to give personal information, obviously, (and) does not communicate with the parent. More important, the parent does not exercise the parental control over the minor. The minor gets sexually abused, and you want somebody else to pay for it?"

Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act has historically protected Internet service providers and other online communications services, like social-networking sites, from the legal issues that may arise from activity on them. In recent years, courts have increasingly found ways through the implied "immunity." Matchmaking site Roommates.com, for example, couldn't hide behind Section 230 when an appeals court decided it was violating a housing discrimination act by allowing members to filter through potential roommates by criteria like sexual orientation.

But in this case, it really doesn't look like MySpace can be held responsible. Tech-law blogger Eric Goldman agreed with the court in a blog post Monday, writing that "even though the 5th Circuit clearly got it right, and the plaintiffs never should have been brought this lawsuit against MySpace, I remain flummoxed by the number of cases I'm seeing involving teens making poor (and, in some cases, life-altering) decisions using MySpace."

In January, MySpace announced that it was working with the attorneys general of 49 states--the exception, a bit ironically, is Texas--to develop an an arsenal of safety tools on the site. Age verification technology is among the priorities, the social network has said.

This post was updated at 11:02 AM PT with comment from MySpace.

Facebook on Thursday reached a user safety agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia, much as rival MySpace.com did several months ago.

"We've agreed with 49 states and the District of Columbia to set up principles around Internet safety," Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly explained in an interview with CNET News.com. The agreement is centered on "largely features that (Facebook) has in place already, but that we've committed to continuing and to enhance over time," Kelly said.

In the deal, the social network has agreed to develop age verification technology, send warning messages when an under-18 user may be giving personal information to an unknown adult, restrict the ability for people to change their ages on the site, and keep abreast of inappropriate content and harassment on the site.

While the agreement is with U.S. state authorities, Kelly said that the tools deployed will apply to Facebook's international users as well. More than half of the site's 70 million users are outside the U.S.

The only state that did not agree to Facebook's plan was Texas, which likewise did not sign on to the plan that News Corp.'s MySpace created in conjunction with the attorneys general in January.

"Texas continues to have concerns in the area in general, but we do continue our dialogue with the state of Texas," Kelly said. "We had a long, fruitful set of discussions with them, and we plan on continuing them."

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network, which was launched in 2004 as a side project for then-Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, first began publicly dealing with state attorneys general last October. Andrew Cuomo, the New York state attorney general, subpoenaed Facebook after his office conducted an undercover investigation that he said yielded a slow response from the social network to complaints of harassment and inappropriate conduct.

Later that month, Facebook reached an accord with Cuomo's office, in which Kelly admitted that Facebook had "slipped a little bit" in its vigilance toward user privacy.

MySpace, meanwhile, agreed to an extensive social-networking safety plan in January that involved the formation of an Internet Safety Task Force on the part of the attorneys general. This followed months of subpoenas and press releases about the safety of minors on MySpace, which grew popular long before Facebook became the current poster child of social media. Kelly said that Facebook has signed on to the task force, but that MySpace is not a part of Thursday's announcement.

He added that the two partnerships with authorities are inherently different. "The MySpace agreement was very focused on a number of site changes that they needed to make, and this is focused on the deployment of technology that we've been in discussions with the attorneys general for quite some time."

As for why it took more time for Facebook to make its announcement, Kelly said, "Sometimes it just takes longer to come to an understanding of the framework."

MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam released a statement Thursday in response: "We commend the Attorneys General for their continued leadership to make the Internet safer," he wrote, "and are pleased that Facebook has followed suit to implement many of the safety standards that MySpace pioneered."

For a massive social site like Facebook (or MySpace, for that matter), negotiations with the state attorneys general inevitably go beyond child safety. Security and identity theft, such as the threat of malicious "phishing" for personal information, are also hot issues. "There is a specific provision in the agreement around phishing, and antiphishing tips, which we've already implemented," Kelly said. "We've been very focused on that as a potential issue."

And when questioned about what the authorities think of Facebook's controversial "social ads"--which some have held up as a violation of user privacy--Kelly's response was general. "We're having a variety of conversations with them at all times, and we obviously want governments to understand at all times," he said. "We always have discussions on those with the attorneys general and other government agents."

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Elliot Schrage, vice president of communications and public policy at Google, had been hired in a similar role at Facebook. Dealing with legal authorities will be a major part of Schrage's role. He called Schrage a "wonderful addition" to Facebook's staff.

"I think that we have been building a great capacity to have discussions with governments and various public bodies," Kelly said, "and we're excited to have him on the team."

Updated at 11:08 a.m. PST.

New York's lawmakers have introduced legislation to keep convicted sex offenders off the likes of Facebook and MySpace.

In a press conference on Tuesday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, State Sen. Joseph Bruno, and Assemblyman Sheldon Silver unveiled details of the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (E-Stop), a new bill to crack down on the presence of sex offenders on the Internet, specifically on sites where they could get in touch with minors. The legislation aims to restrict convicted sex offenders' Web use, banning them from social networks like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace.

Under E-Stop, registered sex offenders in New York would have to turn over online identity information, such as e-mail addresses and instant messaging screen names, to the state. Participating social-networking sites would have access to the registry so they could block access, a statement from Cuomo's office explained. In addition, sex offenders who previously had "used the Internet to commit their offense, victimized a minor or who have been determined to be a high risk for committing a new offense" would have their Internet usage restricted by the state's parole board. It would be a violation of parole for a convicted sex offender to change e-mail addresses without notifying authorities within five days.

New York has nearly 25,000 names in its sex offender registry. Cuomo's office has been extremely vocal about social-networking safety for minors, engaging in high-profile legal negotiations with Facebook last year.

Executives at Facebook and MySpace have expressed support for the proposed New York legislation. "We applaud Attorney General Cuomo's leadership, both on this legislation and on the development of precedent-setting social-networking safety principles in which MySpace and 50 state attorneys general recently joined," Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, said in a statement.

Nigam was referring to the agreement earlier this month in which law enforcement authorities joined up with MySpace representatives to announce an extensive new safety plan. "This bill complements technology we've already put in place to remove registered sex offenders from our community and is a comprehensive approach to protecting Internet users from predators," Nigam continued.

Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, also released a statement: "The E-Stop Act will enhance Facebook's existing use of technology and social rules to build a safer and more trusted environment for its users," he said. "We applaud the leadership of Attorney General Cuomo, Majority Leader Bruno, and Speaker Silver in introducing such effective legislation in the effort to protect kids online."

In the press conference, New York law enforcement authorities expressed concerns bordering on sensationalism, name-checking the hit primetime TV show To Catch a Predator as evidence that children now face far more dangers than they did a generation ago, offline as well as online. But MySpace's Nigam attempted to buoy fears and suggested that the right legal and technological checks can make social-networking sites perfectly safe.

"We often talk about the virtual world of the Internet as separate and apart from everyday life," Nigam said at the press conference. "However, as our teens spend more and more time online this has become a difference without a distinction. Rather than treating the online and offline worlds differently, our goal has been and will continue to be to make our virtual neighborhoods as safe as our real ones."

Kelly, who talked up Facebook's promotion of "a real-name culture instead of a screen-name culture" as evidence of its commitment to safety, agreed that with legislation like E-Stop, social-networking sites will be safe for minors--and then, ideally, they may stop getting targeted as hotbeds of activity for sex offenders.

"We need assistance from govt to identify those individuals," Kelly said.

The Lone Star State is the sole holdout in MySpace.com's comprehensive partnership with the rest of the country's attorneys general, and now Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has come out and explained why.

"We believe that social-networking sites, including MySpace.com, do not adequately protect young users," Abbott wrote Monday in an open letter directed to MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe. "As a result, Texas is unable to join the 'joint statement' that MySpace.com and other state attorneys general issued this week."

The reason, he said, is that he does not believe any social-networking site can be safe for minors until significant improvements in technology are achieved.

Texas maverick: Greg Abbott, the only state attorney general not to sign onto MySpace's new safety measures.

(Credit: Texas State Attorney General's Office)

"In our view, the remedial measures delineated in the joint statement constitute a starting point rather than a point of conclusion. That is, the protective steps memorialized in the joint statement improve online safety and security but still fail to adequately protect child users," Abbott continued, adding that he thinks the wording of the joint statement is too vague. "We do not believe that MySpace.com--or any social-networking site--can adequately protect minors until an age verification system is effectively developed and implemented."

Age verification technology, as Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal stressed during a press conference Monday announcing the coalition, is a point of contention, even for those law enforcement authorities that have opted to work with MySpace. The attorneys general believe that such technology is either feasible at present or will be in the very near future; representatives from MySpace, including chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam, have stated that more research and development is necessary.

But that hasn't stopped the attorneys general from every state except Texas, in addition to the District of Columbia, from agreeing to work with the News Corp.-owned MySpace. Abbott's office, at least for the time being, is the only dissenter.

"We are concerned that our signing the joint statement would be misperceived as an endorsement of the inadequate safety measures contained therein," Abbott's letter to DeWolfe continued.

"Although we believe that MySpace.com, along with other state attorneys general, is working to protect social-network users, we cannot endorse any initiative that fails to implement a reliable age verification system. Doing so would give Texas parents and their children a false sense of security."