In Omaha Nebraska, Attorney General Jon Bruning is proposing a few legislative changes to increase public safety, and this includes cracking down on the presence of sex offenders using online social networking sites, according to MSN. Bruning wants them banned from sites like MySpace and Facebook all together, making their use of such social networks a crime.
This would be pretty difficult to enforce from a legislative standpoint, especially without the cooperation of social networks themselves. The state of Indiana has already banned sex offenders from using social networks, but enforcement is still an issue. And after a slew of threatened and imposed legal action on MySpace, networks (especially MySpace) have found ways in which to work with sate and federal authorities regarding sex offenders that have accounts online.
It’s been well over a year since MySpace helped track down several sex offenders using its service, but it looks like such measures won’t suffice for Bruning. While sex offenders’ use of online social networks can be considered a matter of public safety, the anonymity of such networks means that any legislative changes regarding a complete ban would likely require enforced changes to the networks themselves.
New prerequisites for registration would be in order, along with a level of tracking and other forms of enforcement. Not to mention, these requirements will need to be standardized to some degree across all cooperating networks. Is this a viable option for either legislation or social networks? It doesn’t seem likely it at this point, or the near future.
Similar initiatives have been started for requiring identification verification, especially for sites that are for people that are of a certain age, like 18 or 21 years old. Perhaps a good direction for Bruning to go in is team up with third party services that provide trust scores for individual users across a number of social networks.
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