Word: facebooked
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...Facebook officials in the U.S. and Europe say they don't know whether this harassment problem extends beyond Britain, the only place where such cases have been made public. "We believe this is really a case of first impression," says Tim Sparapani, Facebook's director of public policy in Washington. "We've searched far and wide within the company and, among the collective memories of staff, we think this has no precedent." (See "Gift Giving on Facebook Gets Real...
...effort to solve the problem, British Justice Secretary Jack Straw recently called on Facebook to shut down the profile pages of more than 30 prisoners who were known to have used the site to target their victims. "The abuse of social-networking sites by prisoners is offensive to public morality and decency," he said. "Updating their profiles within prison is an offense under prison rules, and using them to abuse victims is deplorable." Facebook obliged with the request to remove the pages on Feb. 11, and company officials met with representatives from the Justice Ministry and victims' advocates this week...
...sheer number of people using social-networking sites makes it difficult to monitor misuse, both for law-enforcement officials and site administrators. Sparapani estimates that Facebook users spend 18 billion minutes on the site each day. "We have 400 million active users and a tiny, tiny staff. We need to find novel ways to handle that kind of crushing amount of activity. It's the burden of being so immensely popular," he says. Richard Allan, the Dublin-based director of policy for Facebook Europe, says an open dialogue between social-networking sites and police is key to stopping abuse...
...abusers after they torment victims isn't enough. Gary Trowsdale, founder of a group called Families Utd, a British advocacy group for relatives of young murder victims, says people should automatically lose their cyberliberties in addition to their civil liberties if they're found guilty of a crime. Although Facebook bans sex offenders from using the site, it has no specific policy for people convicted of other crimes. "Until they serve their time, they should lose the ability to have their profile on any of these social-networking sites," Trowsdale says. "Their information should be given to Facebook and Twitter...
...time being, Facebook will continue to rely on its system of user-based abuse reporting, although Sparapani says the company is fully prepared to cooperate with law-enforcement officials when specific harassment cases come up. "We let users police the site, then we take action based on their reports and we review the reports," he says. "We triage based on the seriousness of the incident...