Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a bill into law which makes it illegal for registered sex offenders (RSO’s) from creating accounts on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. While the law sounds plausible at first glance, such legislation often suffers from the law of unintended consequences, punishing a wide multitude of people never intended to get caught-up in the sweep.
Consider MySpace’s efforts to scan its entire user base of 480 million user accounts for RSO’s:
- What criteria should be used to make a positive match on a RSO? Name match? DOB? If the person looks like a known RSO?
- Should the legal definition of RSO be used? If so, you will need to include teenagers who have (gasp) had sex with each other.
- Like any human process, errors will be made. What is an acceptable false-negative rate? 1%? 10%? How is a social network to measure such a metric?
Cashmore nicely sums-up the outcome of such well-intentioned, but often flawed initiatives:
…punishing rapists and sex offenders may feel satisfying, but this isn’t what the bill does:it’ll likely affect those who committed far lesser crimes, prove unenforceable, and may even be unconstitutional.
via Sex Offenders Banned from Social Media Sites.
