LOS ANGELES, Calif.—The Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection has added a recommendation to its Best Practices for those posting links on social marketing sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
ASACP’s Best Practices were developed to help businesses to maximize their ability to stop online child pornography and help parents to protect their children from unknowingly viewing age-inappropriate content on the internet.
"The adult entertainment industry is always an early adapter of technology. So, it’s no surprise that as Twitter’s popularity continues to grow, more of the industry will participate in this free social networking and micro-blogging service. We feel it’s important to make sure everyone is doing what is possible to protect children on Twitter,” said ASACP CEO Joan Irvine. “On Facebook and MySpace you can have some control over the age requirement for someone to friend you; however, many people have no idea of the age of people following them on Twitter. This in turn means that posting a link to adult entertainment could unintentionally lead a child to age-inappropriate content. Granted there are no perfect solutions, but ASACP’s Best Practices are the best tools available to protect children and your company. We encourage everyone, whether they are an ASACP member or not, to review them regularly at the ASACP Best Practices page.”
The page states:
"ASACP Twitter / Social Networking Marketing Best Practice: If you direct people to your site from Twitter, Facebook or other online social networks, ensure that all of your adult content pages are labeled with the Restricted to Adults - RTA website label. This way, parental filters will be able to block access to your adult content and prevent children from being exposed to age inappropriate material."
"We want to make sure the industry can continue to benefit from the usefulness of Twitter, without experiencing a backlash from concerned parents, lawmakers or the service itself," Irvine said. "For example, it was because of the industry that MySpace grew so quickly. But look what happened: because of outside pressure, MySpace disallowed direct links from adult entertainers’ pages while they could have just as easily required that all such sites be labeled with RTA and incorporate a filtering tool for children under 18. How much wasted marketing effort and lost revenue did this cost the industry, especially the individual stars?"
Irvine noted that in two years, more than 2.2 million sites have labeled with RTA and there are over five billion hits daily to pages labeled with RTA. She added that the major parental control software (Net Nanny, SurfSafely), operating systems (Microsoft and Apple), internet browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari), search engines (AOL) and mobile carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint) recognize RTA.
"Now, it’s up to parents to do their part to monitor their children and install one of the many parental filtering systems," said Irvine.
More information is available at ASACP.org.
