FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – MySpace.com, the huge social networking Web site popular with teens, has agreed to add protections for its underage users and carefully monitor content to help prevent sexual predators from misusing it.

The agreement announced Monday, two years in the making, was reached with attorneys general in the District of Columbia and all states except Texas. Statistics from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children show 77 million youngsters use the Internet daily, and one out of every seven between 10 and 17 years old are sexually solicited online.

“We must take every opportunity to make the Internet a safer place for children,” Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said in a statement. He encouraged other networking sites, such as Facebook, to take similar steps.

MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., agreed to make the default setting “private” for profiles of 16- and 17-year-olds, and to create a closed high school section for users under 18. Both steps would make underage children more difficult to be contacted online by strangers.

Parents will also be able to submit their children’s e-mail addresses to a MySpace registry to prevent their kids, or others, from using those addresses to create profiles, under the new protections announced Monday.

The company said it would strengthen software to identify underage users, and respond within 72 hours to complaints about inappropriate content. It is setting up a task force to look at online identity verification issues, and will issue a full report and recommendations to the attorneys general at the end of the year.

Officials have become increasingly concerned about adult predators who, often pretending to be kids, prowl social networking sites looking for young victims.

A 46-year-old Florida man with multiple felony and sex offense arrests, posing as someone half his age, last October was charged with convincing a 15-year-old girl he met on MySpace to sneak out of her house and meet him. She later was found unharmed, and the man, William Joe Mitchell, was arrested in Virginia.

Nancy Cotterman, a manager at the Broward County (Fla.) Sexual Assault Treatment Center, said the MySpace safeguards were a good beginning. Children consistently tell center workers they have been solicited online or know someone who has, she said.

“Kids are going to use the technology to communicate with each other and they don’t have the resources or necessarily the education to prevent their exposure, so it behooves the owner of the technology to keep it safe,” Cotterman said.

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(South Florida Sun-Sentinel staff writer Andrew Tran contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2008 South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

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AP-NY-01-14-08 1739EST