Myspace bans registered sex offenders

[Hannah]

29,000 known sex offenders on MySpace. So claims the office of North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. MySpace says the number isn't accurate, and says it's taking its own steps to keep the baddies off its site.
"We partnered with Sentinel Tech to build technology to remove registered sex offenders from our site, says MySpace's Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam in a statement today. "Through this innovative technology, we're pleased that we've successfully identified and deleted these registered sex offenders and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead."
That's not good enough for Attorney General Cooper, who is preparing to introduce legislation that would ban sex offenders from social networking sites like MySpace, and require minors to get parental permission as a condition of joining such sites. To my knowledge, this would be the first law of its kind in any state, that is, if it somehow makes it into the books.
There are quite a few interesting moral/legal questions around this issue, and I can see both sides. But my gut reaction is that we shouldn't start passing laws banning certain kinds of people from online public spaces like MySpace without some really, really good cause.
Are there really scores of cases where MySpace acted as the main instrument used by a predator to meet then harm a kid? Cooper can point to only one case: Last year, North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation arrested a police officer for the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl he lured using MySpace. (A police officer! A state employee!) OK, fair enough, but if we put a law in the books based on just one or two actual offenses (and the worry that there will be more), we'll end up with a law in search of a crime.
That law might have some bad unintended consequences.
Any person who is a registered sex offender has (hopefully) done the time and paid the fines, but should they lose their First Amendment right of self expression too? Social networking sites are meeting places, but they're also places for self expression.
What would MySpace's obligations be, exactly? Could MySpace be sued by the parents of a child who met a known sex offender on the site and was later harmed? MySpace already ejects anyone who is found to be misrepresenting him- or herself on the site. Would MySpace be legally required to find all known sex offenders (using either their real or an assumed name) on its site and banish them?
I'm saying let's get real about online spaces. The North Carolina Attorney General wants to apply a law to an online community that couldn't reasonably be applied to a meeting place in the real world. If a child meets a dangerous person at an arcade and, God forbid, later comes to harm, will we ban sex offenders from arcades? Can the child's parents reasonably sue the arcade? What about public parks? Why would we demonize a MySpace as being a playground for child molesters (as Attorney General Cooper calls it) more so than we would a public playground in the real world?
One of the reasons MySpace has risen to such popularity with kids is that it's almost completely devoid of adult supervision. Some guy named Tom runs the joint--that's all members know. If the influence of authority starts seeping in, if the site starts feeling like it's being "policed", it might be the beginning of the end for MySpace.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing for the rights of sex offenders here. I'm arguing against the idea that the Internet can be legislated into a completely safe place. It can't.
Do you have kids on MySpace? What do you think?

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004990.html