MySpace enlightened the world to its dirty little secret this week: Rupert Murdoch owns the site and he will use it to his political advantage. Musician Andrew Raff found out the hard way. Last week, after hearing lunatic Senator Ted Stevens description of the "Internets," he wrote a song using the Senators own words. He then posted the song to MySpace, where 2,500 people checked out the page and listened to the song.

But on Tuesday, the TedStevensFanClub account was abruptly cancelled. MySpace explained that the site had received a "credible complaint of your violation of the MySpace Terms of Services." The email discribed many forbidden activities but none fit this specific incident. Raff happens to be a law school graduate and knows he did not violate any copyright laws, composing the music himself. But MySpace does reserve the right to remove any profile for any reason. Cough, cough, political.

Murdochs News Corp. has interests in the telecommunications bill put forth by the Senate Commerce Committee that Stevens heads, which would essentially give control of the Internet and its content to the phone companies. At the same time, News Corp. can win over a few Congressional friends who are looking to regulate MySpace due to concerns about pedophiles.

In taking this action MySpace and News Corp. have only highlighted why people fear this particular telecommunications bill. What is to stop AT&T from shutting down links to a website that has opposing political beliefs? The Ted Stevens Internets speech has been a big topic on the Internets tubes all week, as well as featured on the Daily Show. The timing of the MySpace shutdown is obviously political.

As of Thursday, after much publicity MySpace reinstated Raff's account. The company says Raff's account was deleted in error. Uh huh.

Sean

STAFF

Los Angeles, CA

JUL 14, 2006 11:14 PM

Well to be fair to MySpace, policing a community growing at that rate is an impossibly difficult task and for all we know some politically motivated individuals organized a complaint campaign against the page, a low level employee made a bad call and deleted the account trying to respond to user complaints and when MySpace realized the mistake they reinstated the account.

I'm just saying, the conspiracy theory is nice, but my experience with MySpace is they are very fair, very helpful and very responsive about abuse. I am impressed with how good of a job they do policing the world's largest online community, one that has grown out of nowhere in the matter of a few years.

Murdoch ready to destroy america's future is a pretty great headline though.

meggle

Berkeley, CA

November 2002

JUL 14, 2006 11:18 PM

Mike Hayden is all over this...Rupe the dupe is piling it all in like j edgar on para-roids...the name "myspace" is even so orwellian...comedy/tragedy...same thing i guess.

ortho7117

Charlotte, NC

April 2004

JUL 14, 2006 11:53 PM

I don't care about myspace and don't keep up with it. But I've been aware for some time that Murdoch was the owner. It wasn't secret in any way. And I think it's already clear that anything Murdoch owns will be used--whenever convenient--for his own political purposes. He's the owner. Nobody claims myspace is "fair and balanced" anyway.

jonasgrumby

Portland, OR

April 2004

JUL 14, 2006 11:59 PM

Doesn't this case sort of indicate that unlimited power is something guys like Murdoch don't have at all? Someone makes a political decision, there's an outcry, the decision is reversed. The nature of the Internets makes it very unlikely that any particular voice will be snuffed out, regardless of whether somebody controls large swaths of highly-trafficked e-inter-cyber-web real estate.