Just about few hours ago, Myspace.com released a new plan on age restriction. Prior to the 14 year old sue myspace.com for 30 million dollar thing, the site prohibits anyone from 13 or under to have a myspace web page. The new plan is "MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old's friends' list unless they already know either the youth's e-mail address or full name."(AP) Bascially, I can't request my friend who is 15 years old age unless I know her email address or her real name.
My question to Tom and News Corp. who bought myspace.com for 580 Million dollars, what make you think this new restriction plan is going to work?
For me, I don't think it's going to work. Anybody including myself can sign up on myspace.com and lie about my age. Remember, myspace.com is free. Anyone can have a myspace. What is the best way to crack down a pedophile from messing around with your kids?
The only thing I can come up is to make it private like one of those online dating site like match.com and eharmony.com. Bascially, subscribers have to pay to have a myspace. This way, it cracks down huge number of adults with bad intention from having one. So far, I have not heard any subscriber from eharmony or any sites that required fee for membership to have problems with any kind of sexual assult/ online pedophile. Maybe myspace needs to do something like this. However, it's all about money. If myspace decided to do what I suggested above, I'm pretty sure that everybody is going to stop using myspace and use something else that similar to it.
The point is this, the myspace restriction plan is not going to work. Anybody can lie about anything about him/herself on a social networking site. Anyone can ask my 14-15 year old friendsto give me their name and email address. Plus, who here uses myspace.com and lie about their age? just about everybody I know. So..I don't know...It's not going to work anyways..Tom, why bother come up with it?
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