Will Disney’s website revamp to provide more social networking options for it’s readers work? Techdirt doesn’t think so.
There are a ton of parental controls. Chat rooms are limited (at times even to pre-selected phrases, apparently). And, users will be unable to add anything "from the outside world" to their profiles. This probably sounds good to parents, but what’s left is a social network that only parents will like. Kids will go elsewhere. Just as will happen as YouTube, MySpace and others are pressured to put limits on what content can go on their sites, it simply opens up tremendous opportunities for new sites to spring up that don’t limit what people do. In fact, it’s already happening, with plenty of new sites more than happy to attract users pissed off at limitations found on other social networking sites.
The twin genesis sayings of the internet, ‘Information Wants To Be Free’ and ‘The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’, would tend to support Techdirt’s argument.