Bebo fails to tackle porn, bullying

A GOVERNMENT agency has criticised networking site Bebo for its continued failure to implement a registration process which would root out pornography and bullying on a site used by hundreds of thousands of Irish children.

In April of this year, the National Centre for Technology in Education issued 10 recommendations to Bebo on how they could make their website safer for children to use.

Chief among them was an appropriate registration process whereby the identity of the registered user is confirmed. However, to date, according to NCTE director, Jerome Morrissey, that has still not been done.

In the meantime, another unsavoury practice has emerged on the networking sites, with marketing teams targeting online street teams and paying them to ‘hype up’ their brands on the sites.

“That is sinister,” said Mr Morrissey.

“The users are prompted or rewarded for talking on their blogs about certain products,” he said. He added that this “subliminal advertising” could be for marketing harmful products.

The news comes as a British consumer watchdog magazine Computing Which? revealed it found widespread pornography, bullying and inappropriate advertising on the sites.

Among numerous unsavoury examples on Bebo, MySpace and other sites, Computing Which? magazine found a boy asking his friends to vote on whether a girl they knew had AIDS.

It also said some website profiles featured “provocative and intimate” pictures of the teenage users themselves.

“Social networking sites are more than a passing fad,” the magazine report said.

“The biggest of them all, MySpace, boasts a staggering 60 million members worldwide. Bebo is taking British and Irish teenagers by storm claiming to have more than two million visitors alone, with more than half of those aged between 13 and 18.”

It confirmed Mr Morrissey’s findings that registration needs to be more transparent. “Perhaps most disturbingly of all, there is no way of telling whether the ‘teenagers’ inhabiting these sites are really the 15-year-olds they claim to be, or adults with sinister intent,” the report said.

The magazine registered itself as a 14-year-old with MySpace without any problems though it said it would be slightly harder to register with Bebo as members are categorised by their school and children must receive an invite from a fellow pupil before they are allowed to join a school.

Bebo has taken an active role in policing its site by appointing an internationally renowned expert on child safety, Cork woman, Dr Rachel O’Connell, as their new chief of security. However, according to Computing Which?, there are still problems with pornography.

“MySpace removed one pornographic site within a couple of hours while two of the profiles we reported on Bebo were still online nearly a day later,” it said.

“Bebo promises to remove offensive profiles within 24 hours of them being reported and said that it was implementing technology that examines photos for disproportionate flesh tones.”