Facebook has formed a new Safety Advisory Board to make the site more secure for minors, following a growing number of threats from sex offenders on what is now the world's largest social network.

As it has ballooned to more than 350m users, Facebook has attracted a growing number of registered sex offenders.

Earlier this year several thousand likely matches were identified on Facebook, prompting the company to suspend or remove the accounts.

“They couldn't any longer hide the face that they were running into the same situation that every other site was,” said John Cardillo, a former New York City police officer who now runs Sentinel, a company that helps social networks identify sex offenders. Facebook is not a client of Sentinel.

Last May, Facebook struck a deal with the attorney generals of 49 states that included an agreement to find and delete the profiles of all registered sex offenders.

As part of this effort, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced that more than 3,500 registered sex offenders had been identified and removed from Facebook and MySpace as part of a new effort to police online predators.

Mr Cuomo's office said that 2,782 registered New York sex offenders were found on Facebook, while 1,796 were found on MySpace.

“Social networking websites have become the private hunting grounds for sexual predators and they often use the safety and anonymity of the internet to groom their next victims,” said John Walsh, co-founder of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and host of “America's Most Wanted”, in a statement last week.

Facebook's new safety advisory board will consist of representatives from five leading internet safety organisations from North America and Europe – Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute.

Facebook said it planned to meet the board regularly to review existing safety measures and design new ways to make the site more secure. The first task for the board will be to help develop a new safety resource with educational content for parents, teachers and teenagers.

“The only way to keep kids safe online is for everyone who wants to protect them to work together,” said Elliot Schrage, vice-president of public policy at Facebook. “The formation of a board to advise specifically on safety issues is a positive, innovative and collaborative step towards creating a more robust safety environment.”

But as Facebook continues to grow – adding more than 50m users a quarter – Mr Cardillo said Facebook would have to be proactive in its efforts to keep predators off the site. “The web is a microcosm of the real world,” said Mr Cardillo. “There are sex offenders in the real world and there are sex offenders on Facebook.”