NEW YORK, NY – In the face of growing public and governmental condemnation of the potential for sexual predators to lure underage victims using MySpace, the popular social-networking site owned by News Corp. has reached an agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia to install additional safety features to protect its users.The new plan was unveiled Monday by a coalition of law-enforcement agencies and MySpace representatives. The site has pledged to employ better technology to screen for age and verify users’ identities, cooperate with law enforcement nationwide, better educate parents and schools about the dangers inherent online, and help to generate a set of “best practices” all social-networking sites can use to combat harmful materials and behaviors.

“Today’s announcement is a landmark step forward in providing new protections for teenage members of social-networking sites such as MySpace,” MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said during a press conference.

A new Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking also was established as part of the deal. It will be led by attorneys general Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and will include Nigam and the attorneys general of 47 other states and the District. The group already has released a “Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking,” which it hopes will be adopted by all social-networking sites and Internet service providers.

No explanation was given for Texas’ refusal to participate, but in an open letter to MySpace co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Chris DeWolfe, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott later on Monday said his office does not consider the proposed safety measures to be strong enough.

“We believe that social-networking sites, including MySpace.com, do not adequately protect young users,” Abbott wrote. “In our view, the remedial measures delineated in the joint statement constitute a starting point rather than a point of conclusion. That is, the protective steps memorialized in the joint statement improve online safety and security but still fail to adequately protect child users. We do not believe that MySpace.com — or any social-networking site — can adequately protect minors until an age-verification system is effectively developed and implemented.”

Abbott’s office has been investigating MySpace “for allowing minors easy access to pornography [and] inappropriate material” since February 2006, according to a press release on its official website.

The agreement with the rest of the country caps a two-year process during which some states considered litigation against the nearly four-year-old site, according to Cooper. He and the other coalition members called upon other social-networking sites — notably Facebook, which in October signed its own agreement with New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo about allowing access to sex offenders — to join the fraternity.

“We are calling on Facebook and other social-networking sites today to adopt these principles, to put these safety practices in effect, and to join the task force,” Cooper said during the press conference. “We think it’s critical that this be industry wide.”