WebProNews

Facebook has announced an agreement with 49 U.S. state attorneys general and the District of Columbia to take significant steps to protect children on the social networking site.

The move comes after a similar agreement was reached with MySpace in January. The Facebook agreement is aimed at better protecting children from online predators and inappropriate content.

The new safety measures include providing automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of sharing personal information with an unknown adult, restricting the ability of users to change their listed ages, and acting more aggressively to remove inappropriate content and groups from the site.

Companies offering Facebook users widgets will have to follow Facebook's safety and privacy guidelines. Facebook will maintain a list of pornographic Web sites and regularly remove any links to those sites. It will remove groups for incest, pedophilia, cyber bullying and other violations of its terms of service and will expel members who violate the terms.

Facebook will also join the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which was formed after the January agreement with MySpace, to develop age and identity verification tools. The task force will report back to the attorneys general quarterly and issue a report with findings and recommendations at the end of 2008.