Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced today that Facebook has agreed to make changes to better protect children from predators and inappropriate content and to participate in a task force on implementation of age and identity verification software.
The agreement was reached with 49 states and the District of Columbia that are members of a coalition co-chaired by Blumenthal and Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina.
Since 2006, Blumenthal and Cooper have led negotiations with MySpace and Facebook as co-chairs of a working group of state attorneys general seeking to make social networking safer. The multistate group’s Executive Committee also includes Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Today’s Facebook agreement is similar to one that MySpace reached in January with 49 states and the District of Columbia. MySpace agreed to more than 60 specific safety measures and to head a task force, which Facebook has joined, to explore and develop age and identity identification tools for social networking sites.
“This agreement marks another milestone step for social networking safety -- protecting kids from online predators and pornography,” Blumenthal said. “We are raising the safety bar, first for MySpace and now Facebook, and soon for other sites as we fight for an industry gold standard. Facebook and MySpace are showing how to aim higher and keep kids safer. Our ultimate goal is age and identity verification technology -- safeguards against child molesters and inappropriate material. Checking ages and identities is vital to better shielding underage users from predators and pornography.
“Our powerful national multistate coalition will continue fighting to stop predators and pornography on these sites. The sites must recognize their responsibility. This agreement is open-ended -- envisioning advances in technology that enable even stronger safety steps.
• Require companies offering services -- called “widgets” or
applications -- to implement and enforce Facebook’s safety and
privacy guidelines;
• Review and scrutinize requests by a user to change his or her
age. Requests to change profile ages will be logged, and
Facebook will grant only a single request to change an age above
or below 18.
• Maintain and continuously update a list of pornographic websites and regularly sever any links to such sites;
• Increase efforts to remove groups for incest, pedophilia,
cyberbullying and other violations of the site’s terms of services and expel from the site individual violators of those terms,
• Aggressively remove inappropriate images and content;
• More prominently display safety tips;
• Require users under 18 to affirm they have read Facebook’s
safety tips when they sign up;
• Regularly review models for abuse reporting and perform a test
using the New Jersey Attorney General’s abuse reporting icon.
• Restricting searches by over-18 users so they cannot seek under- 18 users, along with other significant limits on searches;
• Limiting certain ads for age-restricted products -- such as alcohol and tobacco -- to users old enough to purchase such items;
• Identifying and removing profiles of all registered sex offenders;
• Sending automatic warning messages when a child is in danger
of providing personal information to an unknown adult;
• Providing extensive privacy controls allowing the user to block
access to their profile, restrict information available to users not their friends and prevent another user from contacting them;
• Providing parents with tools to remove their underage child’s
profile from the site.
Some of these measures have already been implemented by Facebook and are formalized by this agreement.
