Internet Service Providers, not Internet Parenting Providers!

In what I hope isn't a new trend, families are suing My Space because their underage daughters had sex with adults they allegedly met online:

Four families have sued MySpace after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site. Announcing the lawsuit were the families lawyers at Barry & Loewy of Austin, Texas, and Arnold & Itkin of Houston. We posted an item on the first of these types of lawsuits when it was filed last June.

The families want millions of dollars, alleging negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation by the company, which is owned by News Corp. Said lawyer Jason Itkin: "In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users."

Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, disagrees, saying in a statement: "MySpace serves as an industry leader on Internet safety and we take proactive measures to protect our members [and] provide users with a range of tools to enable a safer online experience."

In the lawsuit filed last June, a family alleged that a 19 year old boy lied in his profile, thus gaining the girl's "trust and phone number."

The essence of the complaint (here in pdf) -- that My Space is not "safe" -- boils down to the undeniable fact that the Internet is not safe.

Doh!

Nor is the telephone! And nor are the movie theaters, the back seats of the evil automobiles, or the sleazy public streets.

My reaction to this is, what the hell are the parents doing? Assuming that some 19 year old lied to the daughter and gained her confidence, one thing obviously led to another.

If they eventually had sex, it sure as hell didn't happen online!

Web sites and blogs are little more than communication devices, analagous to mail and telephones. Lying and con games can be accomplished by any of these means. Does that make the US mail service or the telephone company responsible?

I suspect the parents allowed their daughter to use My Space, and paid no more attention to what was going on than when the kid called her on the phone. Suing My Space strikes me as rank opportunism, as well as an abrogation of parental responsibility.

The implications for blogging are obvious, and I hope these cases are thrown out of court, because they will only lead in one direction -- massive communitarian statism, in which we all become responsible for the the responsibilities of others.

I allow comments, and I have no duty to police them. If some underage girl gets into a dialogue with a older teenager who lies and gain her confidence, does that become my responsibility, or that of my ISP? Apparently, some would say yes.

FWIW, I think the lying teen should be prosecuted if he broke the law. It's just too bad the parents can't be prosecuted for poor parenting.

Why should free speech be made the victim? If age and identity verification requirements are imposed on My Space, what's to stop them from being imposed on all blogs? There are, of course, already people who want to do that. This phony "protect-the-children" meme could easily breathe new life into legislation -- roundly condemned -- which would force ISPs to "require and obtain legal names and addresses for anyone who posts online." I don't think it's paranoia to anticipate that protecting children from sex could well become the foot in the door for Chinese style censorship in the United States.

Sigh.

Being held responsible for the conduct of other people is becoming a national disease.

posted by Eric on 01.21.07 at 11:52 AM





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Honestly, that was similar to my first reaction upon hearing of this case. Why, exactly, do some people think the sun rose for the first time yesterday? My point being, pedophiles picked up children before the internet, and I don't even think we have any evidence that this kind of thing is made any more prevalent because of Myspace in particular or the internet in general.

Unfortunately, when people cry, "Think of the children," the nanny-staters usually get their way.

Jon Thompson   ·  January 22, 2007 02:04 AM


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