Thousands of NY Sex Offenders Booted From Facebook, MySpace

By Eliot Van Buskirk

New York State attorney general Andrew Cuomo backed the e-STOP law under which sex offenders' social networking accounts were terminated.

Facebook and MySpace have terminated the accounts of 3,533 convicted sex offenders in the state of New York after they submitted their account information to the state under 2008’s Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) law, the New York Daily News reports.

The law requires the state’s 30,000 convicted sex offenders to file their home, e-mail and social networking addresses with the state. Out of that pool, only about 27 percent revealed e-mail addresses or social-networking usernames to authorities, and only 10 percent divulged a Facebook or MySpace username.

The remaining 22,000 or so registered sex offenders who did not supply online identity information are either in prison or homeless, lack computer access or simply chose not to respond, an unidentified state Division of Criminal Justice Services representative told the New York Daily News.

The e-STOP system only works if criminals volunteer their social networking identities, as they are required to do within 10 days of creating a new account under penalty of new felony charges. Proponents of the law have declared it a success.

“Before e-STOP, sexual predators freely lurked in social networking sites trolling for innocent victims,” said executive director of Parents for Megan’s Law and the Crime Victims Center Laura Ahearn to the Daily News. “With e-STOP, Attorney General Cuomo has sent a clear message that there is a new sheriff in the cyberworld protecting our most vulnerable.”

New York State supplied the account names to Facebook and MySpace over the past two months as part of the first stage of the e-STOP sweep. The next step is to check whether any of the offenders violated the terms of their early release from prison by setting up a profile on the sites.

Incidentally, sex offenders — like many others — appear to favor Facebook over MySpace. Out of the 3,533 offenders whose accounts were terminated, 79 percent were on Facebook and 51 percent were on MySpace. Many had accounts on both networks, while 21 percent used MySpace exclusively and 49 percent used Facebook exclusively.

(Update: the final paragraph of this article originally failed to distinguish between the number of social networking accounts and the number of account holders; those percentages have since been corrected.)