Chat Rooms and Sleaze? You're Kidding Me!

Apparently, chat rooms are not the bastion of righteousness that they once were. In this story from InternetWeek.com:

"In trying to provide privacy to its chat-room users, Yahoo has run up against the sleaziest humankind. The entertainment portal this week shut down all its user-created chat rooms, after it was reported that some of them were used to promote sex with minors."

Yahoo has a hands-off approach to its sponsored chat rooms, only taking action if there are complaints, and that's how it should be. These chatrooms were created for people to, you know, talk, not for predatory hosebags to come in and make a mess of things.

So how should this be dealt with? Should the companies that pay for ads in these chatrooms be responsible for monitoring content? Should the search engines or directories that ultimately host these rooms play at Big Brother? Talk about it in the forums.

Related:

• Yahoo 101: Search better on Yahoo with Yahoo 101.
• Yahoo Reference: Find out what Yahoo has to offer in the Reference Section.
• Yahoo Special Properties: Find out what Yahoo has to offer, there's a lot more to it than most people realize.