Advertisers flee the chat section of Yahoo after a Houston TV station reports on child sex solicitations occurring there.
One of the most popular features of the Yahoo portal has been its chat area. Chat brings a lot of traffic to the site, and Yahoo advertisers have followed them online, placing their ads alongside the chat boxes.
Then, reporters from Houston television station KPRC posed as a 13-year old girl in a Yahoo chat room. The reporters arranged sex meetings, and a number of men showed up at the bogus location in response. Even more attempted to display child pornography.
As advertisers like Pepsi, Georgia-Pacific, State Farm Insurance, Countryside Mortgage, and T-Mobile yanked their advertising from the chat section of Yahoo, the Sunnyvale based portal company shut down all user created chat rooms.
“We were completely unaware that our ads were associated with these chat rooms in any way,” said Dave DeCecco, a spokesperrson for Pepsi-Cola. “As soon as we were aware we worked with Yahoo! to immediately remove them.”
Yahoo then further disabled the ability for users to create new chat rooms. “We are working on improvements to the service to enhance the user experience and compliance with our terms of service,” said spokesperson Mary Osako.
Reporters found all the child solicitations occurring in chat rooms listed in the education area of Yahoo’s user created chat. KPRC originally ran the results of their story on May 31.
Yahoo executives declined to answer the reporters’ 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.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
