ChristiaNet representatives said they visited 10 user profiles on a popular social networking site and found 186 pornographic images and 14 links to adult content directories.
ChristiaNet President Bill Cooper urged parents to be aware of what their children do online and to take a more active role in monitoring Internet access.
"Parents should place the home computer in an open area within the house and install monitoring software to keep tabs on what children are seeing," Cooper said. "As much as we want agencies that promote to children to act with responsibility, it's ultimately up to parents to control what their children are being exposed to."
Joan Irvine, executive director at the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection, echoed Cooper's sentiments, and urged social networking sites to incorporate the organization's Restricted To Adults label to aid parents in determining what is and is not acceptable for their children to see online.
“Parents need to carefully choose the social networking sites that their children use," Irvine told XBIZ. "For example, MySpace added new features that allow members to exclude minors from becoming their ‘friends’ or having access to their profile."
And if all adult websites posted the RTA label on their pages, she continued, parents immediately would see it was a webpage that a minor should not access.
Irvine also said she was distressed by a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study that found only 41 percent of parents with children older than 9 have installed parental control filtering.
"If social networking would incorporate the ASACP RTA label into their parameters and if all parents would monitor their children’s activities while they are on the Internet," Irvine said, "children would not be able to access adult entertainment sites."
