Social Network Bans Older Users

A British social networking site has banned users over the age of 36 in an effort to keep kids safe from sex offenders. Uh, yeah.

Apparently, Faceparty believes that being any older than 36 means you pose a serious risk of trying to molest teens. I’m not sure why 36 is the magic number — I guess someone 35 is unlikely to have an interest in pre-teens, whereas someone 37 is inclined to start cybersexing up all the middle schoolers. Here’s how the site’s administrators explain it:

“We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which. We can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.”

The law in question is the UK’s Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which could eventually require sex offenders to register their email addresses with the government. The law does not, however, say anything about imposing an age limit on social networking sites or any other kind of internet services.

By Faceparty’s logic, we probably also ought to prevent anyone older than 19 from going into convenience stores, because they might rob them. I understand that only a minority of older patrons are robbers, but we can’t possibly tell which.

Nice one, Faceparty. Nice.