As we have stated in the past, MySpace is deeply committed to providing a safe and secure environment for all of our more than 63 million members. Consequently MySpace is engaged with a wide range of online safety stakeholders including parents, educators, law enforcement and safety groups, such as the Child Safety Network and WiredSafety.org, all of which are providing us with input on safety and security issues.
Many of the concerns raised by Attorney General Blumenthal and others are endemic to the Internet in general. With this in mind, MySpace will continue to take a leadership role in providing a safe community for both its adult and younger users and will continue to engage with the Internet's most popular and heavily trafficked sites for which these issues are equally significant.
We will continue to work directly with Attorney General Blumenthal to evaluate the feasibility of his most recent recommendations.
Additional MySpace Safety Specifics
Since its inception, MySpace has developed a series of initiatives designed to protect our users against inappropriate conduct and content, including specific measures to protect our younger users. These initiatives include:
- Limiting use of the site to users who are at least 14 years of age and providing special protections to users who are under 16 so that their personal information cannot be accessed by persons they do not know.
- Dedicating a third of our workforce to policing and monitoring our site on a 24 hour, seven day-a-week basis to make sure our age requirements are met, and that inappropriate images are not posted to the site. The accounts of users who violate these policies are closed.
- To date, we have deleted more than 250,000 under age profiles.
- Reviewing every image hosted by our site - more than 1.5 million every day - using our dedicated customer care team as well as algorithms and search engines to identify and purge inappropriate material. Our users often link to images hosted on other sites and we are working with two of the largest image hosting companies to ensure that they are monitoring the photos posted to their sites and adhering to our best practices.
- Providing mechanisms so our users can report inappropriate content to us. Once we are alerted, we take prompt action that ranges from involving law enforcement officials to deleting a user from the system.
- Working with hundreds of law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels to address potential issues quickly and effectively.
- Partnering with WiredSafety.org, the world’s largest online safety and help group to improve the safety of our site. MySpace posts a link to a set of safety tips prepared by WiredSafety on every page of our site.