What Facebook Could Learn from MySpace

Advocates are urging Facebook to make its social networking site safer by taking a page from MySpace's security measures

by Paula Lehman

For the record, Richard Wistocki is not a 14-year-old girl. He's a 41-year-old detective with the Naperville (Ill.) Police Department's Computer Crimes Unit, but he poses as a female teen, using the name "Sierra," on social networking site Facebook. What he's found there, Wistocki says, suggests Facebook isn't doing all it can to ensure it protects minors from harm.

Case in point: On Facebook, "Sierra" is able to make friends with users of any age and receives invitations to join such groups as "I'm Sexually Inappropriate with My Friends," Wistocki says. The virtual teen is able to participate in the group's online activities, such as message sharing, and pore over images—some of them pornographic—posted by its members.

Growing Pains

Wistocki's underage alter-ego on competing network MySpace, by contrast, cannot search adults' profiles, and any efforts to communicate with adult members are blocked. "Facebook does not have the monitoring that MySpace has," says Wistocki, who's also a member of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force run by the Justice Dept. "It's not controlled or as law-enforcement friendly."

Wistocki is one of a growing number of advocates who urge Facebook to make its site safer for kids, arguing that when it comes to safety, Facebook would do well to take a page from News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace. On Sept. 24, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo informed Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg of an ongoing investigation of the site's safety and security measures. Among the findings: Investigators posing as underage users had been solicited by strangers and had access to pornographic content.

The heightened safety risk, experts say, is tied to the surge in growth since September, 2006, when Facebook flung open its doors (BusinessWeek.com, 9/12/06) to all users, morphing from a site tailored mostly to college kids and high school students, and more recently, when the company gave outside developers more leeway in creating tools available to Facebook users. Facebook has 34 million unique visitors, 5 million of them under 18, according to comScore Media Metrix (SCOR). Cuomo's office, in a statement, outlined concerns that "in Facebook's efforts to grow, the company may be giving a lower priority to the safety and welfare of its users, and in particular, underage users."

Wiggle Room

Hand-wringing over kids' online safety is nothing new for MySpace, itself the target of allegations of predatory behavior by adults toward minors. The difference, child advocates say, is that MySpace has aggressively begun tightening protections. Under Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace has developed various safety teams (BusinessWeek.com, 1/24/07) with responsibilities including image review and handling complaints filed by users about inappropriate content or behavior. "In the past year, MySpace has become more proactive in seeking solutions to protect its users, whereas Facebook, which started as a safer environment, seems to have loosened some of their policies and practices," says Donna Rice Hughes, president and chairman of Enough Is Enough, a nonprofit organization that focuses on online safety. "They've gone in the opposite direction."

Hughes points out that MySpace does not allow profiles of 14- and 15-year-olds to be searched on the site, a practice that started last year. Facebook allows all members' profiles to be searched, both on the site and on Google (GOOG), except when the users opt out.