Facebook threatens to sue Daily Mail

Saturday 13 March 2010 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Tags: Facebook, Internet, Networking, Privacy, SNS, Search, Security. Social

Facebook, the world's most popular social networking site (SNS) with 400 million users worldwide, has threatened to sue the UK's Daily Mail newspaper over an article that claimed that the site makes it easy for paedophiles to seduce under-18s.

An article in Wednesday's early edition, put together by Daily Mail journalist Laura Topham, featured a piece written by criminologist Mark Williams-Thomas that ran under the headline: "I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you." The article recounted how Williams-Thomas, a former police detective, posed as a minor on Facebook and, reportedly, attracted paedophiles immediately. The story was published in both the newsstand and on-line versions of the paper.

The item began, "Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me. I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I'd never before communicated."

Unfortunately for the Daily Mail, Williams-Thomas wasn't using Facebook at all and - worse - the criminologist claims that the journalist was told to amend the copy before publication and did not. Williams-Thomas subsequently explained:

"At 19.48 hours on Tuesday 9th March, I sent amended copy to the interviewing journalist at the Daily Mail in which I had made small but significant changes to the copy she had sent to me which I read at 19.21, including removing the word Facebook and replacing it with 'well known social networking site'. I made it very clear to the journalist and her alone that the changes I had made were necessary before publication. It is clear that the changes were not made... At no stage prior to publication did I have any communication with any editors at the Daily Mail."

Williams-Thomas went on to clarify in his Twitter feeds that he was not using Facebook at all but rather another, unspecified SNS:

"Just to clarify the Daily Mail article experiment that I carried out and is written about relates to another well known SNS but not Facebook."

The Daily Mail amended its later edition and also changed its on-line copy. Its printed apology in Thursday's paper - described by the website Global Dashboard as "mealy-mouthed" - read as follows:

"In an earlier version of this article, we wrongly stated that the criminologist had conducted an experiment into social networking sites by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set the record straight."

But setting the record straight may not be sufficient for Facebook. According to guardian.co.uk, the company has threatened to sue the Daily Mail for damages. A UK spokeswoman for Facebook said the firm was considering legal action due to the "brand damage that has been done", going on to say:

"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."

Facebook's spokeswoman also stated:

"The people at Facebook in the US were reading this and knew at once that it couldn't have been our platform. We have made Facebook much more favourable to the safety of minors - minors under 18 cannot receive messages from somebody over 18."

She was referring to the fact that the site's privacy settings mean that under-18s cannot receive messages from anyone unless they are a friend or they share a school network.

Charles Arthur, journalist on the news site guardian.co.uk, reported that when the Daily Mail amended its on-line version of the story, it failed at first to change the page title, used by Internet search engines to index content, and the URL, which also plays a part in search-engine indexing.

Facebook staff allegedly claim that their repeated attempts to add a comment to the on-line article, as readers are able to do, were blocked by the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail's journalism has added further tension to a difficult week for Facebook's PR department. On Monday, convicted rapist Peter Chapman was sentenced for the murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall, whom he befriended on Facebook, by posing as an attractive teenage boy, before raping and killing her at an arranged meeting.

The fact is that parents and guardians need to recognise that they are ultimately responsible for the welfare of their children and must communicate the dangers with them. Although porn is a serious danger on line, technology has not advanced sufficiently that murder or rape can take place in cyberspace. The physical threat is no different to that in the pre-Internet era, before Facebook was even a glimmer in Mark Zuckerberg's eye: minors meeting strangers in an unaccompanied setting is extremely dangerous.

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