MySpace Boots 90,000 Sex Offenders

Internal numbers show an astounding number of sex offenders populating the social networking site - and that's only the ones using their real names.

MySpace can not only claim to be the world’s second-largest social networking site with 130 million users worldwide, it now holds a much more dubious distinction as well: former online playground for 90,000 sex offenders. The site quietly slipped the statistics to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper earlier this week after axing the profiles in question to comply with its own policy of barring such former criminals from using the service.

“Almost 100,000 convicted sex offenders mixing with children on MySpace – shown by our subpoena – is absolutely appalling and totally unacceptable,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “For every one of them, there may be hundreds of others using false names and ages. These convicted registered sex offenders creating profiles under their own names unmasks MySpace’s monstrously inadequate counter-measures.”

Previously, MySpace had estimated that it would sweep out 50,000 such profiles, vastly misjudging the number of sex offenders who called the site home.

Both states publicly chastised the site for not taking enough measures to keep predators out, though it uses technology called Sentinel Safe, which it implemented in 2006, to identify and remove predators who use their own names.