Under pressure from parents and lawmakers to come up with better ways to protect young people from online exploitation , MySpace and Facebook have come up with a set of new measures they will be implementing. If you examine many of these new ‘rules’ closely you will wonder why they did not close those loopholes earlier. While the new rules provide some degree of comfort, on closer look you will realize how silly they really are when it comes to the realities of the online world.

Here are some of the new ‘rules’ recently enacted into legislation in the United States.

  • Keep tobacco and alcohol ads from users too young to purchase those products.
  • Ensure that companies offering services on its site comply with its safety and privacy guidelines.
  • Remove groups whose comments or images suggest they involve incest, pedophilia, bullying, or other inappropriate content.
  • Review and test how users report abuses
  • Restrict searches so users over 18 can’t look for users under 18.
  • Automatically warn children when they’re about to provide personal information to a strange adult.
  • Allow users to block access to their profiles, restrict who can see their information and prevent people from contacting them.
  • Allow parents to remove their children’s profiles from the site.
  • Send warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an adult.
  • Review users’ profiles when they ask to change their age, ensuring the update is legitimate and not intended to let adults masquerade as children.
  • Limit users’ abilities to change their ages on their profiles. Facebook will log these requests, and if the change is above or below age 18 it will be allowed once.
  • Ban convicted sex offenders from using the service and make it harder for older users to search online for subscribers who are under age 18.
  • Provide automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an unknown adult.
  • Require users under 18 to affirm they have read Facebook’s safety tips when they sign up.
  • Act more aggressively to remove inappropriate content and groups from the site.
  • Maintain a list of pornographic websites and regularly sever any links to such sites. The company will remove groups for incest, pedophilia, cyberbullying and other violations of the site’s terms of services, as well as expel from the site individual violators of those terms.
  • Prevent Underage Users: Facebook will enforce “age locking” for existing and new profiles. If members are under 18, or if they want to change their age to indicate they are under 18, the profile must be reviewed by a customer service representative. The site also will grant only a single request to change a member’s age above or below the 18-year-old threshold.
  • Protect Younger Users from Inappropriate Content: Among other actions, Facebook will use technology to block and remove inappropriate images; delete accounts for upload child pornography and refer them to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children; and maintain a list of pornographic sites on an ongoing basis and sever active links to those sites.
  • Protecting Younger Users from Inappropriate Contact: Facebook will identify and remove profiles of registered sex offenders; allow users under 18 to block over-18 users from contacting or viewing them; limit users over 18 from searching users under 18; remove posting of contact information; and prohibit unregistered users from viewing search results in mature groups and forums.
  • Providing Safety Tools for all Members: Both the MySpace and Facebook agreements include providing privacy controls for users; allow users to conceal their “online now” status; promote safety tips on the
    site, and require under-18 users to affirmatively consent to reviewing the safety tips.