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Posted by
detn8r
on
06-23-2005, 09:18 AM
Several well-known companies have pulled ads from a popular online chat room service after an investigation by Houston television station KPRC revealed to them what their money was funding.
Yahoo! is facing a $10 million lawsuit that accuses it of cashing in on some disturbing chat rooms. The stations' investigation showed what's really going on in those rooms. The companies are paying huge fees for their ads to appear on Yahoo!. But many are now canceling those ads because of the report. The discovery has prompted fast action in corporate America and a strong reaction at the nation's capital. "Yes, more legislation is required. The law has not kept up with this type of criminal activity," U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, told the station. Among the thousands of chat room titles, where people can look for common interests like music or movies, there are other rooms with some disturbing titles, such as:
"Children are the largest victimized group in this country, and we need corporations to do the right thing," Child Rescue Network, Inc. spokesman Charles Clickman told the station. Before entering the chat room titled "5 To 13-Year-Old Kiddies Who Love Sex" or "Girls 5 To 13 For Older Men," guests were required to click on a Star Wars-themed ad from Diet Pepsi. Inside the chat rooms, not only were men trying to meet children or even take them away from home to run away, the station found countless adult men using Web cameras to send children in the room lewd pictures or display live nude images of themselves. However, the nation's top law enforcement officers said it is all legal. "Short of changes in the law in Congress, we may be limited about what we can do in this area," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said. Gonzales told the station he can't use the laws now on the books to shut down Yahoo!'s child sex site. But back in 2002, the station broke the story when federal officials shut down a Web site called "Candyman" with those existing laws.
The "Candyman" site was geared only toward trading child sex pictures and stories, just like the Yahoo! rooms. "By doing what they're doing here with the advertising, this is endangering children and that's serious. I'm offended as a parent and I'm offended as a child advocate," Clickman said. Sponsors around the country are reacting to what the investigation found. The station called Pepsi for comment and the company quickly pulled its ads. A statement from Pepsi said, "We were completely unaware that our advertisements were associated with these chat rooms in any way." Countrywide Mortgage pulled its ad for refinancing because of the investigation. The company said, "We took measures to ensure that a situation like this could not occur again." State Farm Insurance also pulled its ads, not only from the chat room but also from all Yahoo! sites. The company said, "We will be suspending our online advertising with Yahoo! until it provides us a detailed explanation of how this situation was allowed to happen in violation of our contract, and until we receive sufficient assurance that our advertising will never again appear on inappropriate sites." The same goes for Georgia-Pacific, maker of Brawny paper towels. Its ads were pulled, and a spokeswoman said Yahoo! admitted it did not adhere to the advertising contract with Brawny. The Troubleshooters found Brawny ads in a Yahoo! chat room called "6 To 11 Year Old Girls Into Older Men." Another big sponsor, T-Mobile, did not respond to the station's request for comment. "Yahoo! is aware of the situation now. They are put on public notice by (KPRC) and other people about what is taking place, and they need to come up with a solution to the problem unless they want the government to get involved and hold them liable, either civilly or even criminally, for these types of activities," Poe said. Online ads just pushed Yahoo!'s income to more than double what it was a year ago -- up to $205 million. Yahoo! executives declined to answer the stations' questions but issued a statement saying, "Yahoo! strongly supports law enforcements' efforts to combat illegal activity on the Internet and works cooperatively with law enforcement to aid in their investigations." The statement also said Yahoo!'s terms of service do not allow illegal activities, but those same child sex chat rooms are being hosted by Yahoo!. The lawsuit against Yahoo! accuses the company of capitalizing on child pornography when it hosted the Candyman site, and with the other sites like the ones the station found still in action. The lawsuit by the family of one child porn victim said Yahoo! could have removed the sites, but instead chose to make money on them. Source: NBCSandiego Last edited by detn8r : 06-23-2005 at 09:30 AM. 
says
06-23-2005, 09:27 AM Although this news article is almost a month old now, it clearly states that Yahoo! is in some major problems with not only loosing major advertisement, but with companies finally doing something about the porn bot and pedophile filled Yahoo! user created chat rooms.
This is not the first outbreak by a media company against Yahoo! user created chat rooms either. Back on March 20th, I posted an article on The lure of the Internet Cyber molesters brought to you by Yahoo! user created chat rooms. This article was published by my local news paper, Toronto Sun. Yahoo! at the time had done nothing even though this article was read by millions. Now, Yahoo! users cannot access nor publish user created rooms. Upon trying, they will be prompted with "The ability to publish user-created chat rooms in the public Yahoo! Chat directory is currently unavailable. We are working on improvements to this service to enhance the user experience and compliance with our Terms of Service." Is Yahoo! fixing their problems? Wondering if the rooms will be available by Friday? --- I don't think so kids. Last edited by detn8r : 06-23-2005 at 09:32 AM.
says
06-23-2005, 11:35 AM Great article -- thanks for posting. It points out a problem with the Wild Wild Web. If you give people the ability to do whatever they want, they're going to do some things that you won't like.
Yahoo has allowed user-created chat rooms for a long time, and their policy appears to have been mostly "hands-off" -- whatever you do is your own business, not ours. That policy suggests that Yahoo is not responsible for the words of the people who use their system (which I would have to agree with). The problem comes when there is illegal activity occuring in plain view, and nothing is apparently done to stop it. Legal issues on the Internet are complicated by the global nature of the net. What's legal in one country might be illegal in another. Yahoo's inaction on this issue could be interpreted by some as implied support. Not support for heinous acts against children, of course, but support for open and free speech, even where that speech goes places where people are offended or worse. And then there are the advertisements. Yahoo is in business to make money. They put ads on their site, including pages that host chat rooms -- even user-created chat rooms. Naturally an advertiser will be concerned when their company's ads appear on a chat room discussing sex with children or God-knows what else. I think the responsible thing to do is to watch user-created chat rooms, and allow other users to post abuse reports when they run across a room that delves into questionable territory. And ads that appear in user-created channels should not be permitted, or at least limited to internal Yahoo promotions. For now, they havent' eliminated user-created chat rooms -- they've just removed them from the pulbic directory. This is a very good start, but it's a bit like sweeping the dust under the carpet.
says
06-25-2005, 08:07 PM Wow. I'm amazed that the advertisers were "completely unaware that our advertisements were associated with these chat rooms in any way". Are they saying that they simply pay to have ads without looking into the service and where their ads will be? Either that or they are saying that to appear innocent in the situation.
About the chat rooms; I really just don't think Yahoo! can monitor all of the chat rooms that people create/delete day in and day out. Perhaps hiring chat monitors like AOL does would help fix the problem? Of course maybe Yahoo! didn't want to do that since it would slow down their profit. Another thing they should do in my opinion is simply disallow certain words in creating a chat room name. I mean, the name of the chat room is the heart and soul of it. Words like "young", or terms like "younger for older" ect. could be banned. And yes, we know people would then try to make the words like "y0ung", "young3r f0r 0ld3r". Well, Yahoo! could ban those as well. I think that doing this would be better than simply disallowing the creation of user rooms. I will say that Yahoo! is in the right direction. Their new Yahoo! Messenger (6 & 7) has had great upgrades, and they are definitly getting better at customer service. Who knows, maybe Yahoo! will finally get up to par with AOL in monitoring chatrooms.
says
06-25-2005, 10:59 PM I think I might have mentioned this when Det posted that first article.But European Yahoo! rooms are monitored and people have to choose a
"special" name to chat ithat is NOT their user ID. I knoe a lot of people who stopped chatting in the rooms as much because it was too much of a pain. Others just simply used JAVA and got around it. This discovery is GOOD and SAD at the same time. It's good that Yahoo! is finally doing something about it. It's sad that it took a "discovery" for it to come to light. Kids need to be protected as much as possible. Not completely blind to it...but not have it at their finger tips. I find it hard to believe that certain companies just "didn't" know...some of their employees had to have seen these rooms and noticed that their companies are being advertised and figured "hmmm...I bet these are on the ICKY rooms too." I don't know...people need to get their heads out of their behinds and be more alert about what's going on. Yet I'm rambling at the moment...soI'll end it here.
says
06-27-2005, 08:45 AM Hey ppl! Sign the "Bring USER CREATED chat room petition" at http://www.petitiononline.com
To: Yahoo Inc. ! Bring Back USER CREATED CHAT ROOMS! The currently open Yahoo! chat rooms are full of irate Yahoo! chatters, demanding to know what has happened to their rooms. Many groups maintained chat rooms within Yahoo, and with the closing of the user created chat rooms, users are migrating to the remaining Yahoo! operated chat rooms. Chat rooms quickly became filled with "ad bots" and users have complained about being constantly messaged with advertisements. Other complaints include the inability to find friends from the users regular chat rooms, and unwanted messages of a sexual nature. http://www.petitiononline.com — L.u.c.c.h.a™
says
06-27-2005, 09:31 AM Why do some seem so ignorant? Does no one understand the reason WHY Yahoo! closed the rooms? Do you believe that Yahoo! is not going to bring them back? DO YOU HONESTLY think that a internet petition is going to worry Yahoo! when they are facing a $10,000,000 lawsuit against those very people who are signing that petition? Is there a petition against that petition? I'd sign that one. People, please take your fingers out of your asses and PLEASE wake up and smell the java.
says
06-30-2005, 03:34 AM A way people are getting around the user room shut down is hanging out in certain yahoo regular rooms by interest. For example people who have a foot fetish are hanging around in yahoo fetishes:39 room. This way people have a way to meet others of similar intererest but yahoo isn't accountable for the rooms content.
More listings on this website: www.yahlist.net no evil spyware or porn bot stuff just an honest website Last edited by married1wanna : 09-30-2005 at 09:37 PM.
says
06-30-2005, 07:14 AM I see a whole lot of blame being thrown on Yahoo! here but... what about the parents of these children? Where were the parents when their kids were surfing these rooms? Where are the parents when their kids make adult profiles and go into adult chatrooms? Come on people, yeah Yahoo! should have taken precautions but lets put some of the responsibility where it should be, on the parents who allow their children to roam the internet freely as a babysitter so they don't have to take time out of their "busy" schedule to be bothered with them.Anyone who is a parent and has surfed the web and the chatrooms knows what is out there . I truly believe some of these parents are going after Yahoo! to help sooth their own GUILTY conscience for not knowing what their kids were up to. First and foremost its the parents responsibility to protect their children,there are ways to set up computers so that children cannot get into certain areas of the net.It's pretty sad that although Yahoo! could have done better they need to take the full blame for something that is partly caused due to poor parenting.
says
06-30-2005, 08:43 AM Well here's another side...What about the SICKO adults who are doing all of this? Why should they get rooms to live out the SICK, DISGUSTING fantasies with children? I think what Yahoo! have done is appropriate so they can look at the situation and decide where best to go from here. Maybe it means FEWER user chat rooms and one has to sign up with Yahoo! and pay a fee to have a user chatroom. And said chatroom will be monitored and if anything illegal happens, bye bye chatroom and bye bye $$ you paid for it. It's sad when bad people ruin it for everyone else, but personally I'd rather have children more protected than the ability to create my own chatroom...call me selfish if you will.
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