MySpace

A judge in Texas has recently dismissed a 30 million dollar civil suit against News Corp. the parent company of MySpace.com. The suit was brought about by the family of a 13 year old girl who claims she was sexually assaulted by a 19 year old man she met on MySpace. They were sueing MySpace alleging that it was their fault, because the website has no measures to protect the children who use the social networking site.

The judge dismissed the case citing that MySpace and News Corp. are protected under the Communications Decency Act, and that forcing the site to verify the age of it's users would be nearly impossible and force the site to practically shut down.

MySpace has over 100 million registered users. Even if there were some sort of way to enact safety measures to protect the site's users especially the young ones. There still needs to be responsibility on the parents part. The fact that they would allow their young daughter to join MySpace, and then to not even monitor her activity seems negligent. Everybody knows the Internet is not a safe place, and even the most secure of sites has it's flaws. Educating America's youth about the dangers of the web needs to be at the forefront of society. The parents of this 13 year old girl dropped the ball, and they are lucky their daughter was not seriously harmed.

The criminal trial for the 19 year old young man has yet to begin, but I believe the judge in the matter of the civil suit against MySpace was correct in his judgment, and hopefully this is a lesson to parents out there, because it is up to them to protect their children about the Internet, and not some website