Pervert Busters Response to the NYT Online Predator Article

Jan. 17, 2009 - PRLog -- The New York Times released an article yesterday that stated that online threats to children are overblown. We beg to differ here at Pervert Busters.

I am going to argue the points in the article here. All quotes are from the New York Times article.

Quote:
The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

Why did they only look at large social networking sites? They are as well moderated as can be on the internet. Go into some of the vast numbers of poorly moderated chat rooms. I invite any one on that task force to spend an afternoon in the trenches with one of our decoys. You cannot leave a chat room without catching at least one pervert. Most of the time, you have several.

Quote:
The 278-page report, released Tuesday, was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, experts in childhood safety and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook.

Why have they not named the academics and experts? The executives of the companies named WANT children (and adults) to use their services. While I do believe that most of them want a safer environment, would a bad report possibly hurt their bottom line? Are these people online daily, like we are, in the chat rooms, on myspace and facebook? Or are they in their ivory towers, thinking that every person on the internet is exactly who they say they are?

Quote:
The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online.

What scientific data? The best data we have is from those of us that spend time online. You cannot read reports and look at scientific data and know what is really going on out there due to the vast amount of unreported predator activity. If this were not a problem, the United States would not have started the ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) task force. Once again, I invite them to spend a day with one of our decoys. Scientific data does not account for the day to day dealings of this type on the internet.

Another problem with the article is the lack of definition for these ‘online dangers’ are we talking about someone who travels to meet with minors or someone who would be happy merely having webcam sexual activity with a minor, I suspect the study only dealt with the former even though the latter is still a serious problem.

In conclusion, I think that the New York Times article needs to be more in depth. Give us some real information. Are we only talking about social networking sites, or the internet in general? What scientific evidence was used? Who funded the study? Who were the "experts"?

Show me some real facts, and I might believe you.

You can read the full New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com
and our response here: http://www.pervertbusters.com

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As a group of adults, we are tired of the weirdos, perverts and creeps that try to contact kids and teens online. We have set up a grassroots effort to post their chat IDs, email addresses, aliases, pictures and any other information we can find about them. Our hopes are to make the internet a safer place by allowing these usernames and addresses to be searchable on the net.

Pervert-Busters.com was created by TymeOut and Cabela, two women from different sides of the country hoping to make a difference. We originally started our war against internet perverts with a blog listing the pervert's chatlogs, pictures, and aliases. However, realizing that the blog was not sufficient in databasing the records and was not available to search engines due to the Content Warning we placed on the blog (on account of the explicit nature of the chatlogs), we decided the best option was to create a website to file our records.