HS investigates: Few obstacles to sex trade on "moderated" chat sites

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By Pauliina Grönholm and Riikka Talli
     
      Helsingin Sanomat has found that seekers of commercial sex services can make their desires known quite freely on Internet chat-rooms with little - if any - interference from the moderators.
      During a one-week period HS tested the effectiveness of the self-proclaimed self-supervision of the most popular Finnish discussion forums and real-time chat-rooms on the Internet.
      The test focused on the most popular "ordinary" basic pages favoured by young people  - which claim to monitor the propriety of the discussions.
     
Helsingin Sanomat left more than 50 paid messages seeking sex under headings such as "Will pay for sex", and "Money for bedroom company".
      In addition, two journalists took part daily in real-time chat sessions, constantly offering money for sex.
      The forums operate like notice boards: those who log on can answer posted messages, and the discussion formed by consecutive answers remains on line as a chain of messages.
      Chats, meanwhile, are real-time discussions, where the messages scroll down the screen. The messages do not remain on line for a long time. In chat-rooms, participants can either post their messages for all to see, or send personal messages to individual users.
     
Requests for paid sex were usually allowed to stay up on message boards for several days - even a week - even though the administrators said that any postings suggesting that procurement was going on would be removed.
      In chat-rooms messages offering underage children money for sex were almost invariably allowed to stay up for several hours without interference from the moderators.
      Buying sex services from those who are below legal age is a crime in Finland.
      On the message boards of the commercial radio station Kiss FM, nearly all messages offering to pay for sex were allowed to stay on line for a week. Some of the participants in the discussion put up messages expressing outrage.
      "Hey, isn’t this kind of search for company going beyond the law? How can those kinds of messages even be allowed?" asked one writer using the name Princez in the Own Body discussion forum of the Kiss FM web site.
      On the message boards of the television network MTV3 the fate of the messages depended largely on which forum was involved: the older the participants, the faster the messages concerning commercial sex were removed.
      For instance, two "money for sex" messages on the forum dedicated to the US series Sex in the City were removed within hours, while a similar message on the forum for the Finnish teen-oriented soap Salatut elämät ("Secret Lives") was allowed to stay up for a whole week.
      The trend was similar on other message boards as well: the older the users, the more readily the moderators were notified of inappropriate material.
      However, some message boards appeared to completely lack any active monitoring of content.
      Of the message boards, content control was most effective in the Aikuischat ("Adult Chat") of the Internet portal Jippii. Three messages soliciting sex for money were posted there during a week, and all were removed within an hour.
     
Of the real time chat-rooms, the control system works best at Suomi24, where those who posted messages offering money for sex were removed almost every time.
      However, even on Suomi24 the moderators were not able to monitor private discussions held between participants.
      In the youth-oriented chat-room run by Kiss FM, and the EnergyChat run by Jippii, there was no monitoring at all: seekers of sex for money were left undisturbed all week.
      EnergyChat has 200,000 visitors a month, and the moderators say that the age of the users is on both sides of 15.
      There was also no control of the content of the chat-room of the radio network NRJ, even though the front page of the service said that there is, and had a link to the Finnish Save the Children organisation, which acts on reports from the public on inappropriate Internet content.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 21.4.2004

More on this subject:
 FACTFILE: How the study was conducted
 Monitoring content of discussion forums in hands of volunteers
 BACKGROUND: Who is responsible?

PAULIINA GRÖNHOLM AND RIIKKA VENÄLÄINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
pauliina.gronholm@hs.fi, riikka.venalainen@hs.fi