With shades of the old Asimov short story A Perfect Fit, MySpace has removed the profiles of 29,000 sex offenders from its social networking site. TechCrunch points out the task took a while to complete because sex offender databases in the US are poorly coordinated. Horizon of Stars suggests that perpetual analytics would be a more efficient solution for the future than a single, massive database. No-one seems to question whether people who have already been punished for a crime by the courts should suffer the additional punishment of exclusion from what is increasingly obviously the primary communications platform of the early C21st, or indeed whether MySpace management is the appropriate judicial authority to levy that punishment. It is obvious that children should be protected from predators. It is less obvious (to me) that this should give News Corp executives carte blanche to withhold a vital public service from potentially rehabilitated offenders.
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