28 April
2006 Chatmag News.
Enter a Yahoo!
chat room, any chat room. Now, take out the advertising bots, news media
looking for ratings, law enforcement seeking predators, and renegade vigilante
groups bent on "chat cleansing", and what is left is three or four actual
chatters.
Yahoo! closed
the user created chat rooms on their service in July of 2005, leaving the
Yahoo! chat rooms intact. This move was precipitated by a news story
aired on KPRC-TV in Houston, Texas which showed Yahoo's! major advertisers
what their money was funding. At that time, a great number of pedophile
chat rooms existed within Yahoo's! user created chat area.
Yahoo! presently
maintains a chat system, with no provision to create new user rooms.
Pedophiles, and the people that track them down, have migrated to the remaining
Yahoo! chat rooms. Also, several renegade vigilante groups, most
notably Perverted Justice, continue to operate in the chat rooms.
Perverted Justice recently teamed up with Dateline NBC to produce a series
regarding online predators. Dateline NBC is now under fire for paying
Perverted Justice a fee in excess of $100,000.00, incurring a great deal
of criticism from media ethics experts.
Many law enforcement
agencies also operate undercover in Yahoo! chat, in a concentrated effort
to capture those that prey on underage children. Children under 18
frequent the Adult chat rooms, in violation of Yahoo's! Terms of Service,
and predators follow, in hopes of enticing children into either online
"cyber" chats, or offline meetings. Competent law enforcement officers
pose as underage children in order to apprehend online predators.
For the most part,
the average Yahoo! chat room user is a newbie to Internet chat, and the
Internet in general. To be bombarded by advertising 'bots is not
a warm welcome to one of the largest usage's of the Internet, and to Yahoo!
And, not understanding the consequences of their cyber chats, some chatters
occasionally engage in explicit conversations with persons either underage,
or posing as underage. These chats do have real world consequences, and
chatters who engage in such conversations find themselves either under
arrest, or in the clutches of one of several vigilante groups.
There are thousands
of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks, and hundreds of thousands of chat
channels available in a wide variety of chat topics. With Yahoo!
chat being a veritable wasteland, most Yahoo! chatters migrate out to other
chat areas, leaving Yahoo!, the advertising 'bots, and the rest behind.
Yahoo! had a good
business model, to create a sticky section by opening chat rooms. The Internet
was created as a communication medium, and Internet chat is integral to
the overall makeup of the Internet. Yahoo! needs to learn to actually operate
chat, rather than allow others to ruin the Internet chat experience. Within
IRC chat, with both channel operators and IRCops, most IRC networks do
not experience the problems Yahoo! has had with their uncontrolled chat
rooms.
--Chatmag News
Staff--
External Links:
Updated 30 April
2006
Chatmag's
Yahoo! Chat Discussion Forum.
Chatmag
News. Yahoo! Closes User Created Chat Rooms.
Chatmag
News. Vigilante Web Site Perverted-Justice.com harming legitimate
law enforcement efforts to stop online predators.
KPRC-TV
Investigation Shows Big Business Funding Sex Chat Rooms.
