New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said today that 13 additional social networking sites, including those owned by Google, Yahoo and AOL, have agreed to remove sex offenders from their sites.

The move follows Cuomo’s announcement from last week that Facebook and MySpace had removed more than 3,500 registered sex offenders from their sites.

As of today, 15 major social networking sites have agreed to use New York’s e-STOP law, which requires sex offenders to register their online information with the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. That information is then passed along to social networking sites which then remove the sex offenders.

Andrew Cuomo

"It is no secret that sexual predators abuse social networking Web sites to find and manipulate victims and to insinuate themselves into their victims’ lives," said Attorney General Cuomo.

. "e-STOP allows social networking Web sites to identify these sex predators and help prevent them from harming again.

"The country’s most popular social networking sites have taken an important step in making the Internet safer by using e-STOP to purge sex offenders from their sites. That some companies are continuing to ignore the e-STOP database is not only inexcusable, it is potentially dangerous."

Attorney General Cuomo said he applauds Google (Orkut.com), Yahoo! (Flickr.com), AOL (Bebo.com), BlackPlanet.com, Classmates.com, Flixster.com, Fotolog.com, hi5.com, MyLife.com, Stickam.com, Multiply.com, Tagged.com and Imeem.com for their use of the e-STOP data and their demonstrated commitment to safety online.

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