This is seriously distressing: Myspace was recently required by several states to find out how many registered sex offenders have Myspace accounts and the number they found was four times their original data. It’s–wait for it–29,000. Initially, Myspace already had a database registered sex offenders whose profiles they had removed, but it only included 7,000 people. Several states’ attorney generals were suspicious of this, and required that Myspace employees do a little more digging. However, I think it came as a surprise to everyone that there were more than FOUR TIMES the number originally known.

While I personally do have a bias (I LOVE Facebook and spend hours a week playing on it), I get seriously creeped out by Myspace. I had a profile when I was younger and would always get random creepy people asking to be my friend, and virtually every girl I know has had some guy message her saying something gross or asking for pictures of her naked. GHQ has a Myspace account and we frequently get friend requests from older guys who have misogynistic hip-hop music and pictures of women in thong bikinis on their page… and after registering how creepy that is, then I’m like, Did you READ our profile? Haha…

I think that, given how connected and online Generation Y is, we need a social networking site that we can own. Myspace allows you to make your profile private and has special “regulations” for the fourteen and under crowd, but that seems like an inadaquate effort. Facebook is certainly not fool-proof: I remember reading about a girl being stalked and killed because someone could easily detect her whereabouts from perusing her Facebook profile.

(Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to an article, because when you google “Facebook + stalking + girl,” you receive PAGES of hits about the more leisurely–and legal–side of Facebook stalking (i.e. checking up on an ex by visiting his or her profile 10X/day)).

Webshots is definitely no friend to young women: every single time one of my friends posts a picture of us barefoot (at the pool or at the beach or something), we get some seriously disgusting strangers commenting on the photos. I like Flip.com, a new scrapbooking/social networking site for young women, but I think it would be a bigger testament to our society (and the way we view young women!) if Myspace and Facebook could clean up their acts and make their web-sites a safe space for young women.