Steve Ensley, president of American Family Online—a Christian-oriented, software-filtering company—has challenged the findings of a recent University of New Hampshire study, which summarizes that a relatively low number of teens have been exposed to pornography on the Internet.
Ensley sites the website MySpace.com as a conduit for teens to view pornographic material, as reported in OneNewsNow. This material includes "images of naked people" or "people having sex"—something abundant on MySpace, Ensley claimed. Ensley commented that 40,000-plus unmonitored new videos are uploaded on MySpace each day. Inappropriate images also are placed on MySpace teen blogs.
While MySpace is yet unable to control all content that children see, it is getting closer to it. The site is updating its website to help parents control their children's behavior while on MySpace. According to Reuters, MySpace will offer free parental-notification software. Zephyr software helps parents find the name, age, and location of their children who have profiles on MySpace. This is helpful, according to the company, as children currently are able to mask their real name, age, and location and go online unsupervised.
In addition, MySpace removes all adult or pornographic videos once it is alerted to it. Rick Louis, manager of communications and government affairs for Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection, said, "MySpace is far and away the biggest and most popular of the social-networking sites. They have taken on the role of leading in this kind of situation with precautions.
"[MySpace is] also subject to the most pressure from outside forces like the government to the same thing," Louis continued. "So, between those, it is not surprising to see them being this proactive."
AFO's research indicates the percentage of children in the same age range as the University of New Hampshire study who have visited MySpace in the past 30 days is close to 85 percent. However, AFO fails to mention the percentage of these children who were exposed to pornography while visiting the site.
