Bad Love

NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Nebraska Attorney General have reached an agreement with Yahoo! regarding its chat rooms. From now on, Yahoo! says it will remove any user-created chat rooms that promote sex between adults and minors, and it will require all chat room users to be 18 or older. It's not really possible to keep underage kids from saying they are 18 to use chat rooms (and come on, is there anyone over 18 using chat rooms these days who isn't trying to have illicit sex?) but at least they're trying.

You might wonder how Yahoo! will be able to tell which user-created chat rooms promote sex between adults and minors. Well, some of the sample chat rooms that the Attorneys General took issue with have names like "girls 13 & up for much older men," "8-12 yo girls for older men," and my personal favorite, "teen girls for older fat men." Many of these were located within the "Schools and Education" and "Teen" chat categories.

In their investigation of these chat room, an undercover investigator posed as a 14-year-old and got 35 personal messages of a sexual nature over a single 25-minute period.