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Most of Facebook's 400 million members use the social-networking site to reconnect with long-lost pals and keep in touch with friends and family. But dozens of prisoners in Britain have found a more sinister and predatory use for Facebook: after being locked up for offenses such as murder and assault, inmates are taunting and terrorizing their victims through status updates and group wall posts...
...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...
...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 by the relevant justice authorities...
...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...