I’ve written in the past about the impossible demands people have been making of social networking sites, forcing them to somehow make sure that sex offenders and paedophiles can’t contact children on them, and I’ve always said I wasn’t sure how anyone could ever expect to enforce something like that.

Well, it looks like Faceparty has found a way:

In the last 2 months, Faceparty has been deleting a lot of profiles from the website. This has been due either to new legal requirements, violations of our terms of service, the non purchase of your account by the new company who is running Faceparty.com, or any of the following reasons. Information on refunds is also on this page. Please read this page in its entirety.

Over 36 years old?

New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list. This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme. Having discussed the use of our website with the home office and the police, and further some pretty serious crimes caused by older users, we were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which - we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

Um. Well, I think some people would think they’re wrong for doing that. This part of Faceparty’s announcement is interesting, too:

Unfortunately some of the creators of accounts who were deleted, of an older age group, have been creating new accounts with a younger age (which means that government legislation classifies them as a sex offender by lying about their age on the Internet, even though most who have done this may have done so with good intent and purely to be a part of a site they love and without any intent to manipulate younger users)

Really? Is that actually the law? Anyone know?

I’m baffled. Read their whole justification here.