Yahoo! recently publicized it was closing their chat rooms. They had determined adults were using them to luring children into meeting through those private chat rooms. This news impacted advertisers, and it could provide insight into how companies can manage their online presence.
While this misuse of the internet is a story in and of itself, it is one which I will only briefly cover here. Yahoo has claimed that they do not monitor their chatrooms, but speaking as an experienced Yahoo chat room user I can say they most certainly do not stand back from the rooms. In fact, they have made it so that common everyday curse words are edited out of chat conversations.
What I do want to bring to light is the real reason the service was closed and the seemingly irresponsible stance that Yahoo has taken, as well as a few other Fortune 500 companies which I will share with you. Then I will share the most important aspect of this announcement, the lack of protection over corporate brands that these companies have allowed to occur.
Yahoo has known of the adult nature of their chat rooms and to say otherwise is a blatant lie. A simple look at the types of names that users created would set off an alarm for most people of common sense. Chat rooms, like "Girls 13 and under for older guys," "Girls 13 and up for much older men," "Older men for younger women," "married but looking," "gay oldermen for young boys," "moms for sons," etc. The list of sexual persuasions is longer than I can cover here, but suffice it to say that bestiality and rape were also covered. In fact, nothing seemed to outré.
I also should make it clear that the themes of the chat rooms are not limited to Yahoo, but are (or were) on MSN, AOL, and IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Now let me ask a question: why do we so willingly hold parents responsible for their children's actions (by fining them for truancy, violence, and having unlocked guns in the home), and yet we allow companies like Yahoo and Google to neither answer fully the charges put before them or allow them to claim ignorance?
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