Daily Mail apologises to Facebook over false child sex claims
Facebook details of 100 million users published on net
Thursday, 11, Mar 2010 05:51
By Matthew Champion.
The Daily Mail has apologised to Facebook after falsely claiming that a writer posing as a 14-year-old girl was propositioned by older men "within seconds" of creating an account on the social networking site.
The tabloid had claimed in an article published in print and online that an undercover reporter had been approached online by a middle-aged man within 90 seconds of logging on trying to perform a sex act in front of them.
Facebook workers in the US were sceptical of the claim, however, as users of the site know it is impossible to conduct random chats with people via the site.
"This couldn't happen on our platform, that's not how Facebook works," a spokesperson said.
"You cannot search people by age and everybody on the platform knows that you don't get alerted when people of a certain age join."
The original Mail article had appeared under the headline: "I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you."
The article, written by child protection expert Mark Williams-Thomas, said: "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."
Mr Williams-Thomas has since disassociated himself from the report, saying he intentionally never specified which social networking site he had been using, accusing the Mail of editing the piece to include references to Facebook, which has 400 million users worldwide.
The Mail published an apology online yesterday and on page four of the paper today.
"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," the Mail apology said.
"In fact he had used a different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set the record straight."
But after it failed to correct the HTML or URL title of the web version of the story, which by noon on Thursday still read: "I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you", Facebook could yet launch legal action.