Blunt Tools and Online Sex-Predators

By Roderick Jones

There has always been something of an ongoing debate in the Counter-Terrorism community about whether extremist online networks should be closed down. On the one hand closing them down would make some activities harder to achieve but on the other they provide a valuable insight into extremist thinking. Closing virtual networks down probably isn’t wholly possible given the ability to re-create your own communities using new identities or platforms. Furthermore, simply shutting a virtual network down would push it elsewhere and is a blunt way of dealing with a complex problem. However, this lesson or debate has not filtered into domestic concerns relating to online sex-predators.

There are of course of variety of sex-offender lists throughout the US and in some other western countries. Therefore, it is possible to exclude individuals from virtual communities, such as Facebook or MySpace based on this data and importantly add further information to this such as Instant Message profiles. This would therefore, work in a similar fashion to the airline watch-list maintained by the DHS, which famously and probably unfairly is best known for excluding US Senator Ted Kennedy from flying. In short a system, which compares a list of known sex-predators against the names on any virtual network is a pretty low-tech instrument with which to control a complex problem. Similarly, it does nothing to combat anonymous use of any system nor does it prevent anti-social elements from operating in other virtual spaces. In short a blunt and potentially ineffective tool. However, this is exactly what a company called Sentinel Tech offers to MySpace and has started a furor with Facebook because Facebook won’t use their services to ban sex-offenders (original story on TechCrunch). The populist tone struck by this company, MySpace and the Connecticut AG is in itself the first reason to be skeptical of this approach. But its seeming lack of sophistication in a world of extensive online behavioral knowledge is quite shocking. Surely it would be better to judge online behavior on what actually is being done online rather than matching names, emails or other online profiles, (which could have no relation to reality and is USA centric) to a sex-offenders register. This issue of controlling anti-social behavior in online networks is not new – the response remains old (How to prevent anti-social behavior in online social networks).

Sex-offenders create the hysteria but there of course other anti-social groups active across a variety of online platforms. There is little evidence to suggest banning them goes any way to curtailing their activities. In fact, the opposite may be true certainly one of the most effective campaigns against anti-social elements in a virtual space was the collective activity against the French National Front when it opened an office in Second Life. In that vein Facebook already has a ‘get child molesters off Facebook’ group.

Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, has also questioned why there isn’t a national sex offender database. A very good question, and maybe one which the forthcoming economic stimulus plan could invest in. This could be used by all social networks to do preliminary filtering and act as a center for sharing expertise with other government agencies. The MySpace approach powered by Sentinel and supported by the Connecticut AG is not only blunt but also likely ineffective – in short the worst of all worlds and Facebook is correct to push back against this hue and cry.