Having spent $580m on the networking site (and ego boost for bored teenagers) MySpace last year, Rupert Murdoch is starting to make his presence felt. According to the Guardian, he’s removed 200,000 “objectionable” user profiles from the site. This is nothing new for the Dirty Digger; despite using topless teenage girls to sell newspapers, he’s not above a bit of censorship from time to time.
What exactly constitutes “objectionable” in this case? If the culprits were guilty of using MySpace as a platform for race hatred or other illegal activities, their removal would be perfectly justified, but I doubt this is the case. Murdoch wants to make easy money out of his millions of unwitting new customers, but can’t risk a backlash from those parents who won’t make the effort to supervise their kids properly (and fail to realise that the little darlings have heard/seen/said/done it all before).
It’s unlikely, given his track record, that Murdoch will want to leave MySpace open to the sort of creativity and free-thinking that certain liberals seem to think is appropriate to the Internet, so make the most of the networking opportunities while you can.