UK: Facebook threatens to sue British tabloid
Mar 11
Britain’s Daily Mail faces possible legal action from Facebook over a story which suggested that teenage girls who signed up to the website could receive obscene messages from older men “within minutes”.
The Guardian reports that Facebook fears permanent damage to its reputation due to the piece, which details how a criminologist posing as a 14-year-old girl on a social-networking site was immediately contacted by “a middle-aged man [who] wanted to perform a sex act in front of me”. The Daily Mail has since been forced to apologise both online and in print, saying that the article was not referring to Facebook.
The article’s author Mark Williams-Thomas, also stated on his Twitter feed that he did not use Facebook for the experiment, and that the Daily Mail‘s association of the piece with the popular social networking site was an error on the part of editors. The account was not written by Williams-Thomas, but rather was adapted from an interview with him conducted by a Daily Mail journalist.
But the Mail‘s apology came long before it had scrubbed out the online connections between the article and Facebook. At 10am GMT on Thursday (9pm AEDT) – a day after the article was first published – the title of the article’s web page still read “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you”, while the URL also contained a mention of Facebook. Those mentions were removed shortly afterward, with the word “Facebook” changed to “online” in each case.
A Facebook spokesperson said that it was still treating the matter with great seriousness, given its potential impact upon people’s perceptions of the site.
“If you were a Middle England reader and your child was on Facebook, this sort of thing would have a very serious effect on what you thought of us,” she said.
She added that it would be impossible for Williams-Thomas’ experiment to have taken place on Facebook, which she said prevents minors from receiving messages from members over the age of 18 who are unknown to them.
The Daily Mail is no stranger to controversy, and was criticised late last year over a “homophobic” column published on its website following the death of the singer Stephen Gately.
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Cyril Washbrook March 11th 2010