Yahoo! chat rooms are being closed to anyone under 18. That’s an announcement made today under an agreement between Yahoo! and the New York State attorney general’s office.

According to a statement by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, “Yahoo! has removed and barred user-created chat rooms with names like “Teen Girls for Older Fat Men,” adding that the rooms encourage inappropriate activities.

Both the state of New York and the state of Nebraska started investigations earlier this year after reports of children having unrestricted access to adult chat rooms, making children easy prey for adults of a certain persuasion. Mr. Spitzer’s office told of an investigator who posed as a 14-year old girl in the Yahoo! Chat area, and received 35 sexually explicit messages within 25 minutes.

[tags]chat room, 18 or over[/tags]