Myspace Deletes Users of Vampirefreaks, Incites Controversy

Users of the website, Vampirefreaks.com, who also use, or at one point used Myspace for their social networking needs, may have woken up to a rude awakening yesterday afternoon when they logged on.

Sometime within the past 24 hours, employees of Myspace.com erased all accounts, groups, organizations and affiliating profiles which used email addresses ending in "@vampirefreaks.com," including all user profiles, the VF Magazine account, their "Cybertron" (get together and dance night taking place in New York City) account and even that of the Vampirefreaks webmaster and founder who goes by the name of "Jet."

"Clearly this is unacceptable and I refuse to support Myspace in any way after this," wrote Jet on the home page his website, which he started back in 1999 as a way of bringing people together who love industrial music and gothic culture. From there, the site's popularity has soared to meteoric proportions, currently with 1 million members to boot.

Members of the Vampirefreaks website, who maintain profiles and post in communities (called "Cults" on the site) focusing on various styles of gothic and alternative music amongst a myriad of other common interests, also have sounded off, condemning Myspace, which is headed by Tom Anderson and owned by News Corp, not only for this most recent practice, but also for the fact that while the site rakes in large sums of money from sponsors and advertisers, they rarely can keep the site running for an entire day. Many have also joined Jet in his boycott of the website in light of the incident.

Little is known, if any, as to why such measures were taken by Myspace employees to cut ties with users of the Vampirefreaks website. Some website users, however, have speculated that Anderson is closed minded and is prejudiced towards members of the Gothic subculture, which Vampirefreaks harbors a large and vibrant community of. No official word or press release from Anderson or other Myspace employee is known as to the motive behind the measure.

According to Jet, this is not the first time Myspace has taken drastic measures such as these. In the sites mere three-year existence, site employees have disabled embedded You Tube videos, which are meant to be shared. The site also, at one point, disabled posts from the photo blog website, Photobucket, until News Corp bought that site as well.

News Corp has come under fire for a laundry list of reasons. Besides numerous controversies over the Myspace site, the corporation, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, also, most notably, has taken slack for its Fox News Channel, which many people say uses its ubiquitous nature, money and power to spin its news stories in the favor of Bush and the right-wing agenda.

Vampirefreaks.com receives approximately 3 million hits on a daily basis and has tapped into several other endeavors, including dance nights, a magazine, a wildly popular gothic/industrial music compilation, and even an online store which specializes in Goth scene-inspired clothing, accessories and VPF merchandise from various vendors.