Seeking to allay concerned parents and skittish advertisers, MySpace parent News Corp has joined with The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Advertising Council to distribute public service ads about online safety.
News Corp (NWS) will make the ads produced by NCMEC and the Ad Council available throughout the various online, cable, satellite, and broadcast options it controls. The PSAs direct parents, guardians, and teens to visit www.cybertipline.com to learn about safe and responsible use of the Internet, as well as how to report threats.
“We will be leveraging the full power of News Corp’s broad distribution channels to get their message out and remain deeply committed to promoting online safety,” said Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation.
The PSAs themselves do not mention MySpace or other Internet sites; instead they take a general approach with the “Don’t Believe The Type” campaign and focus on educating teen viewers on safe online practices.
News Corp and its Fox Interactive Media division that controls MySpace have much to gain from the initiative. MySpace has found itself associated with suspects in several crimes, and advertisers have pulled campaigns from the site after learning their ads appeared in some of the racier sites hosted there.
MySpace moved to combat some of the more offensive sites by zapping some 200,000 profiles from the service. Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn told attendees at the Bank of America Media, Telecommunications and Entertainment Conference in New York he believed in the past two months MySpace has become a safer place.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
