The beginning or 2008 saw a decline in social networking site, Facebooks, user base from 8.9 million to 8.5 million. This is good news for competitors MySpace and Bebo. However, all have come under criticism for lack of enforcement when it comes to the age of their users and the risk this is putting children at.
Most sites set a minimum age of 13 but do little to actively enforce this ruling and this form of socialising is becoming ever popular among 8 to 11 year olds. With 19% of all UK youngsters having a profile on at least one site, this presents a problem for parents who are concerned about their child’s safety and it also presents the ideal playground for paedophiles.
Facebook, Myspace and Bebo all claim to remove the profiles of users found to be underage but there is no obvious way of verifying their ages. Recommendations suggest setting children’s pages to private or default and only making them visible to the people the user lists as friends. Currently, children are able to set their own profile to be viewed by anyone of any age and this is done by 41% of them. Many parents are also ignorant of how to check up on this.
Ofcom recommend to the social networking sites that they make their privacy settings much more obvious to aid parents in keeping their children safe but in reality, they have no jurisdiction over them to enforce it.
In a move that should help keep our children safe in this new age of internet social networking, the Home Office are pushing for all known sex offenders e-mail addresses to be passed to social networking sites to prevent them from being able to contact children. Those who do not give police their address, or give a false one, could face up to five years imprisonment.
It is hoped the new rules will force websites to either monitor the usage from these email addresses or at best to ban them completely. This would currently apply to 30,000 sex offenders. That’s 30,000 people with one less way to get to our children and this should be a highly effective measure – if enforced.
Facebook and Myspace are based in California so the UK government has no way of insisting they use these measures but surely it would be the responsible thing to do? In recent surveys, it was found that a third or users aged between 9 and 19 had received messages with a sexual content from other members of the site. Parents can do their best to keep an eye on their child’s internet activities and other recommendations include making it harder for adults to access children’s profiles as well as links on the sites to the police and NSPCC.
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