MySpace Sued by Families of Online Predator Victims

MySpace is facing more lawsuits, as the victims of sexual predators have filed suit against the social site and parent corporation News Corp. In total, four families from across the U.S. have joined together after their underage daughters were abused by men they met via MySpace. MySpace has responded to past allegations by putting in place educational efforts and partnerships with law enforcement. The company is also developing technologies to allow parents to have some measure of access to their child's account. From the article: "'In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users,' said Jason A. Itkin, an Arnold & Itkin lawyer. The families are seeking monetary damages 'in the millions of dollars,' Itkin said."

Comments

Shoot the messenger

[Hoi Polloi]

I hope they sue the highway department also because the bad guys used the public road system to meet these girls.

Re:Shoot the messenger

[Cornflake917]

Yeah, really the parents should be sueing themselves for being bad parents.

If you are a parent, and your child gets abused by some predator through a social networking website, you are a bad parent. If you are unaware about the dangers of MySpace to your kids, you need to get out from under that rock, and start taking responsiblity to keep track of what your kids are doing.

These lawsuits piss me off. I can't believe some parents just think the internet is some utopian place completely disonnected from the real world, filled with funny videos and websites to order their hardware from. There are bad people on the internet just like there are bad people in real life. You should be taking the same percautions for a kid who's sitting in front of a monitor, as a kid who's walking out the door of your house. I'm not even a fucking parent and I know this.

Re:Shoot the messenger

[trianglman]

They aren't necessarily bad parents, unless you think that in order to be a good parent one must monitor their child's actions 100% of the time and be worse than Big Brother. However, this lawsuit is a sign of further poor parenting in that many parents are acting like its other people's jobs to be the parent of their child. In this case they expect MySpace to be the watchful parent that the litigants aren't. Good parenting would lessen the likelihood of a lot of these online pedophiles abusing victims, but not because they monitored their children constantly; it would be because the children feel comfortable talking to their parents about what they are doing. However, not all children, no matter how good the parents, are going to share their entire lives with their parents, nor are all parents going to make that level of excellence.

Most parents now have to work 50+ hours a week (with both parents working) to keep their children in good schools and pay all of the other things that need to be paid. That they aren't able to keep up with everything their children do isn't a sign of their quality of parenting, its a human limitation. But blaming MySpace is not the answer, and this lawsuit is incredibly stupid.

Re:Shoot the messenger

[MoonBuggy]

I see what you mean, but I would tend to look at this from the "Teach a man a fish..." perspective. Rather than monitoring what the child is doing and making the decisions for them (which will simply leave them incapable of acting on their own), it seems to me that it is the job of the parent(s) to teach the child how to make the sensible decision on if it's really a good idea to meet random MySpace people at all, and if so who to meet, where to meet them and who to bring along. Once the child actually understands the point, they can decide for themselves, no monitoring needed.

Re:Shoot the messenger

[Deagol]

Most parents now have to work 50+ hours a week (with both parents working) to keep their children in good schools and pay all of the other things that need to be paid. That they aren't able to keep up with everything their children do isn't a sign of their quality of parenting, its a human limitation.

No, it's a sign of rampant consumerism. I'm raising a family of 4 on 16.75/hr @ 4hr/day (that's $17420/yr). I work from home and we home school the kids. One $40,000 1200-ft^2 house, one $16,000 truck, and a handful of low utilities. No unsecured debt, no payday loans, no over-indulgence on shiny things. We live well and eat even better (Ever eat home-raised pork? It don't get much better than that.) The boogie-man of "good schools" causing people to flee to rich 'burbs with good schools and "force" over-worked families to never see each other is the result of good marketing and media scaremongering, and the gullibility of the general population.

But blaming MySpace is not the answer, and this lawsuit is incredibly stupid.

Indeed.

Re:Shoot the messenger

[Dread_ed]

Sometimes the tough part is convincing your budding teens that you are actually advising them in an affort to help them. At that age, there is an ingrained (IMHO) belief that parents are just trying to fuck up all of our fun in life.

My wife and I have totally won over our oldest by a few simple excercises. First we have had open and frank converstaions with her about all subjects. She is informed on all the subjects that she has questions about and some that she never did question because we thought it was proper that she was prepared and not ignorant.

Second, we allow her to make many decisions that we do not agree with 100% (within limits, no need to call CPS). We preface this with discussion of why we think this is the wrong thing for her, caution her about what she needs to be careful of, and most importantly, we tell her in no uncertain terms what we think the outcome will be. This teaches her, in our opinion, responsibility for her actions and the true value of her parent's approval and counsel. The fact that we have made the right call much more often than not with our predictions is well in our favor.

The result? Now all we have to do is caution our daughter about certain actions and behaviors and she does the rest. By the rest I mean that she asks us why we think it is a bad idea and is truly interested in what we think and say. Then she thinks about what we have told her and comes to a decision.

For my wife and I it is the best possible outcome. We dont want automatons for children. People like that make good wage-slaves, but we don't want that limitation to come as a result of our upbringing.

The freedom we give her in certain areas is not only a way to create a free thinking adolescent that is independent and strong, but also a test to see where she is heading mentally and socially. It helps us to figure out where we need to apply gentle pressure and lets us get a good glimpse of what is going on inside her head.

Great idea

[Renraku]

Go ahead and sue the mall for not protecting your children.

Your ISP for transmitting the email.

Dell for supplying you with the computer.

Finally, Ikea for supplying the desk/chair that your daughter sat on to correspond with the predator. Without them, she probably wouldn't have made contact and talked to the predator.

All of this could have probably been prevented by proper education/supervision. But its easier to sue than it is to raise a kid.

Re:Great idea

[kaizenfury7]

Just out of curiousity, is there any precedence for parents being charged with parental negligence in this type of situation? This would go a long way in encouraging/coercing parents to be accountable for their children.

You failed

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed to do my job for me by protecting my child from his/her own stupidity. Now you must make me rich.

Re:You failed

[PFI_Optix]

Correction:

You failed to do my job for me by protecting my child from my own inability to monitor their activity and teach them how to make good decisions. Now you must make me rich.

shifting blame

[night_flyer]

Its not the criminal, its the gun
Its not the owner, its the pit bull
Its not the parents, its the website

Weighing the options.

[Kelson]

This story is a great example of what happens when two values come into conflict. When MySpace comes up on Slashdot, the general tone is usually one of dismissal, disregard, and disgust. Most people at Slashdot -- at least, the most vocal ones -- look down on MySpace for technical, aesthetic, social or political reasons.

But frivolous lawsuits are even more reviled, particularly those which could produce a chilling effect on free speech. (Taken to an extreme, the idea that MySpace is at fault would lead to every online site with so much as a guestbook being liable for anything that happens as a result of people posting there.)

The result: Every comment I've seen on this thread (ok, there are only about 20 of them) has been in MySpace's favor. Not what you'd expect from Slashdot, until you factor in the bigger picture.

Because it's just never *your* fault

[lorenlal]

I figured it was only a matter of time before this happened. Has AOL been sued for their chatrooms? Actually, yes they have...

One thing that upsets me is that MySpace is already taking steps to correct this.

But it doesn't matter because these parents are teaching their kids that it's okay to not take responsibility for their own actions. Do whatever you want, and if something goes bad, sue someone for letting you screw up. It's not your fault that you stuck your hand in the outlet, there was nothing stopping you.

We are now operating on the assumption that people lack the basic instinct of self preservation. It's one thing to lie or mislead. It's another to give people something with good intentions, but hold them responsible when others abuse it. It's a whole other thing when the owners are already trying to curb the abuse and are doing what I consider *due diligence.*

It's stupid, and these parents are stupid for blaming the service for their kids' screwups. I'm sorry this happened to your kids. I'm sorry that *you* didn't teach your kids that strangers can be dangerous. Own up and hold those actually responsible accountable.

Re:I know...

[psykocrime]

Still though, if you look at it from a different viewpoint...maybe that of how bars are sometimes legally responsible for the deaths in drunk driving accidents should a person leave the establishment with the bartender/employees knowing they are not fit to drive

Those cases are bullshit just like this is though. Individuals are responsible for their own actions... it's ridiculous to think that my actions (getting drunk, driving, getting in a wreck) can in any way involuntarily impose any sort of legal obligation on someone else (bartender, bar owner).

Now I'll accept that it might not be ethical for a bar to continue serving someone who is wasted, at least without checking to see if they're driving, but unethical != illegal.

Re:Hypocrisy at its finest

[Ohrion]

Slashdot has no standards, it's the standards of the individual posters that are represented. I doubt the mentioned comments were by the same people. Personally I believe that this case should be thrown out of court and the parents reprimanded severely. Asking your children what they are doing and taking an active role in as many of their experiences as possible is an important aspect of raising a child. If this had happened to one of my children, I would be devastated with grief as well as GUILT for not doing my job.

Re:They've been reading Slashdot

[Cheesey]

Well, they've been reading Slashdot. They took our advice and didn't monitor their children's internet use, because we know that monitoring is fascist.

Monitoring your young children = Good parenting.
Monitoring your grown-up children = Overparenting.
Monitoring other people's children = Fascism.

I've always wondered about this

[bmajik]

When I was younger, a neighbor kid was shot by one of the other kids in the neighborhood. This was in a horrible town in Texas, and it was an accident.

Even so, the neighbor kid's parents sued the other family and got a pretty good chunk of money. They got a new TV and a bunch of other things that white trash buy when they come into some money.

I was about 10 years old at the time. But even then, it struck me. "Is this what your son was worth to you? This is the replacement? A big TV and more shit in your shit filled house?"

I lost my mom when i was 9, but at no point did i figure that i had any entitlements coming my way from society. From God - sure. He and I were through.. but nobody owed me anything. As a coping mechanism, I asked my dad if I was going to start getting lots of extra presents. When I was younger, we had met a family where the father had passed away and the kids were showered with toys all the time. He and I both knew i was "joking" (joking as a coping mechanism).

I dont think there can be much of anything more devastating to a young girl than rape or other coerced sex acts (I'm assuming what happened here was only partly consentual..) But it's not clear that a big pile of money is going to make that better now. Where is this money going to go? To pay for the counseling the girl needs? For hymen reconstruction? Maybe it could be donated to to a battered womens shelter or something meaningful? To what extent are the parents saying "if you're going to enable the sexual assault of our daughter, that is forsale for $zzz".

It's not clear what mySpace could do better here. Block the display / transfer of pictures from those under 16 to those over 19? It would be one thing if mySpace was ONLY setup to allow sexual exploitation of minors. Putting a bus stop in a bad part of town is arguably as much of risk as the way myspace works.

We hosted a technology day for middle school and high school girls here at work recently. It was pretty cool, but i was pretty alarmed that one of the prizes was a web cam. One of the things we did was a seminar on online safety for kids/girls, but then we turned around and gave out cameras. Oops :)

Re:Playing Devil's Advocate

[fireboy1919]

Forget about whose to blame. Lets talk about law. Myspace isn't breaking it.

What gives the government the right to tell Myspace that their service must not be anonymous when most of the rest of the internet gets to be?

If we're going to have a change, it needs to be a change that everybody agrees to make - a change to the system itself; to how we connect to the internet. I don't think that's going to happen, though. The anonymous protection is sort of a double-edged sword: while it keeps predators safe, it also keeps the young anonymous unless they reveal themselves.

Which is very much what I'd like to continue. I was quite angry when the DMV forced my 18 year old sister to put a big, red "UNDER 21" sign on the bottom of her car tag. Leave anonymity alone. Taking it away does more harm than good.