Thousands of sex offenders use Myspace

Child predators are lurking on social networking Web sites and Myspace.com is only one of them, Attorney General Roy Cooper said this morning during a house committee meeting.

In 15-minute speech to a judiciary committee, Cooper championed the Senate bill he crafted that is intended to protect children from child predators on social networking Web sites.

Cooper made a deliberate effort to mention Facebook.com and Xanga.com, two social networking Web sites not nearly as popular as Myspace.

Critics such as Emily Hackett, who leads an internet trade group in Washington, said Cooper is targeting Myspace despite his repeated references to other Web sites.

"In a way, this bill represents a company (Myspace)," Hackett said during a recess.

The bill does not specifically mention Myspace.com or any Web site.

But today, Cooper's office said MySpace.com has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on the popular social networking Web site -- more than four times the number cited by the company two months ago.

Cooper is one of several attorneys general who recently demanded MySpace provide data on how many registered sex offenders were using the site, along with information about where they live.

After initially withholding the information, citing federal privacy laws, MySpace began sharing the information in May after the states filed formal legal requests for the data.

At the time, MySpace said it had already used a database it helped create to remove about 7,000 profiles of sex offenders, out of a total of about 180 million profiles on the site.

Two MySpace spokeswomen did not immediately return calls seeking comment today.

Cooper is pushing for legislation that would require children to receive parental permission before creating social networking profiles, and require the Web sites to create procedures under which the parents' identity and age could be verified.

Cooper has been an outspoken critic of social networking sites such as Myspace.com and Facebook.com, which he says can be used by child predators to identify their victims. His office has used media reports to compile a list of more than 100 criminal incidents involving adults who used MySpace to prey or try to prey on children.

Cooper has cited two local cases cases: a former sheriff's deputy was sentenced to 15 years in prison last year for molesting a 15-year-old Cary boy he met on MySpace; and a Boiling Springs Lake police officer was charged last year with raping a 14-year-old girl he met on MySpace.