Argument Critque

    In “MySpace and Sex Offenders: What’s the Problem?” Bob Sullivan seems to argue that MySpace has taken insufficient measures for dealing with sex offenders. The essay illustrates a dispute between MySpace officials and a number of attorneys general, which points out more than a few flaws in MySpace’s steps in dealing with the problem.
    In response to a report detailing the presence of sex offenders on Myspace, the social networking company started to work with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to identify the lurking criminals. When MySpace started deleting offenders’ profiles, it came under fire for not announcing that it was doing so, and then for not releasing the profiles’ data apparently due to a misunderstanding. Sullivan then continues to explain how most attorneys were more concerned with how fast MySpace was acting on the problem, to which officials at MySpace responded by pointing out the lack of a national sex offender registry. In the final paragraphs, Sullivan raises questions about the step’s effectiveness in keeping predators off MySpace and appears to call for more drastic measures.
    Although MySpace has taken some steps to keep sex offenders off the site and others have suggested other steps to be taken, I doubt that it would ever be possible to keep all predators out of MySpace. When all the users can be anonymous and lie about themselves, sex offenders prove a serious problem for any social networking site. While Sullivan claims that, “[T]he prescence of 7,000 registered offenders on [MySpace] -- and the time span required to remove them -- raises inevitable questions about MySpace’s ability to keep its neighborhood safe” (119), he fails to consider (possibly because Facebook did not exist yet) that all social networking sites, including Facebook, have the same problem. In spite of this, Facebook still has hundreds of millions of users, so the suggested alternative to keep people safe: a “mandatory age verification to keep kids off the site altogether” (119) seems ridiculous. Thus, these social networking sites can do little to protect users besides setting the initial settings to the highest privacy. The responsibility then falls on the parents who let children use the sites to educate them not to give personal information to total strangers and such.

Sullivan, Bob. “MySpace and Sex Offenders: What’s the Problem?” New York Times Magazine 4 April. 1999: 144. Rpt. in Elements of Argument: A Text and Reader. Annette T. Rottenberg and Donna Haisty Winchell. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 116-119. Print.