New York sex offenders purged from Facebook and MySpace

NEW YORK (AP) — New laws passed in 25 states are making it easier for social networking giants Facebook and MySpace to purge their membership lists of convicted rapists, gropers and child molesters.

More than 3,500 offenders registered in New York have been kicked off the two popular Web sites in the months since the state implemented a law requiring sex- crime convicts to register their e-mail addresses, as well as their dwellings, attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday.

Both MySpace and Facebook have long had policies banning sex offenders, and have routinely used state registries in the past to block tens of thousands of convicts from joining.

But the task of identifying convicts among millions of users has been both tricky and labor intensive, and the companies said Tuesday that New York’s new law and others like it are streamlining the process.

“Our program was very successful, but we wanted to add an extra layer of protection,” said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer of MySpace and its parent company, News Corp.

Over the past two years, half the states have passed sex-offender e-mail registration laws similar to the one now in place in New York.

Congress has also passed a law creating a national sex-offender e-mail registry, although it has not yet been implemented. The details of the system are still being developed by the U.S. Justice Department.

The registries are intended to solve a series of obstacles to efforts by social networking sites to keep offenders from enrolling.