(Bloomberg) -- MySpace Inc. has identified 90,000 convicted sex offenders on its social-networking site, 40,000 more than acknowledged earlier, according to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal [pictured].
The information was turned over in response to a subpoena, Blumenthal said today in a statement. Facebook Inc., which runs another social-networking site, hasn’t yet responded to a similar subpoena, he said. Recent reports indicate substantial numbers of convicted offenders with Facebook profiles, he added.
MySpace.com, a unit of News Corp., and Facebook.com both signed multistate agreements last year to adopt safety standards to better protect children online. The sites had come under attack by regulators for not doing enough to police their sites to shield minors from predators.
“These convicted, registered sex offenders creating profiles under their own names unmasks MySpace’s monstrously inadequate countermeasures,” Blumenthal, co-leader of the state coalition focused on Internet social-networking safety, said in a statement. “MySpace must purge these dangerous offenders now -- and rid them for good.”
Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer at Beverly Hills, California-based MySpace, said in an e-mailed statement that the offenders had been removed from the site. “MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections,” he said.
Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, said it monitors its site and users for suspicious activity.
“We have been working proactively with states’ attorneys general to run their lists of registered sex offenders against our user base,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly said in an e-mailed statement. “If we find that someone on a sex offender registry is a likely match to a user on Facebook, we notify law enforcement and disable the account.”
Facebook is the world’s largest social-networking site with 221.8 million unique visitors in December, followed by MySpace with 124.9 million, according to ComScore Inc. of Reston, Virginia.
