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Saturday July 31, 2010

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Online attacks spark Facebook fears

Posted by: Ben Wise | 26 February, 2010 - 3:13 PM
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The integration of social networking into the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world is dramatically changing communication.

While there are positive ways to use websites such as Facebook, like 3AW listeners prompting Denis Walter to busk at Flinders Street and raise over $5,000 for Youth Beyond Blue, there seems to be an increasing number of bad cases.

This week alone, at least two horrible stories about misuse of Facebook - which arguably builds a genuine case for the social networking site to be monitored far more stringently - have had national focus here and made headlines overseas.

-    The terrible story from Bundaberg about the murder of eight-year-old Trinity Bates was bad enough in itself but when it emerged people had trashed a Facebook tribute page set up to remember her with pornographic images and hideous written messages it really highlighted one of the worst faces of the internet.

-    In addition to Trinity's sad story, the stabbing death of teenager Elliott Fletcher at his Queensland school was then followed by his Facebook memorial page being attacked by what Joe Tucci from the Childhood Foundation is calling 'emotional terrorists'.

In response to these cases, Facebook spokesperson Debbie Frost told The Punch this week it was almost impossible to deal with this type of offensive behaviour.

"This is an absolutely tragic case ... I have worked here two years and have never seen anything like this," she said.

Well, my message for Debbie would be the truth is that if Facebook decided to take the step to pre-moderate all content postings they could stop it.

Of course, this will not happen. People would likely lose interest with Facebook pretty quickly if they had to wait for moderators to publish their content and this could ruin Facebook's massive yearly earnings.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly worth $2 billion.

For what it's worth, a study of Facebook's official terms reveal little more than what we in Australia would call a 'handball' back to the user in terms of responsibility.

"We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we can not guarantee it," says the statement on the terms page under the sub-heading of 'Safety'.

It then asks the user to 'not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence'.

In fact, every point under the sub-heading of safety starts with the word 'you'.

So what is the answer? Kevin Rudd supported calls by Independent Senator Nick Xenophon's idea for an online ombudsman for cases like that of Trinity Bates' Facebook page - but would this really work?

Of course, there is the argument that 'if people don't like it they can just look away'. But Facebook is something over 400 million people worldwide use, and you or I could be having our reputations wrongfully tarnished right now.

'Staying away' from Facebook and similar social networking sites doesn't stop someone with a grudge setting up a public, permanent message board or group aimed specifically at attacking the non-user's reputation.

If you don't see what is being posted about you, you can't complain. If you can't complain – the attack will continue unabated.

Consider this hypothetical: What's stopping an employer looking up a potential employee's name on Facebook and finding a bunch of crazed rants which ultimately costs the job-seeker any chance of getting the gig? Nothing really, is the sad answer.

Where to from here?

Blog comments Your Say

  • Unfortunately there does not appear to be a practical "solution". If only 1% of the 400 million on facebook post something each day, probably a reasonable assumption, that is still 4 million posts to look at - if moderators looked at 1000 posts a day, this would still require a staff of 4,000 doing nothing else. And seeing that almost everything they looked at would be completely innocuous, it would be very largely a wasted effort.

    Probably the best that could be hoped for is for Facebook and similar organisations to employ better tracking of users so that perpetrators can be caught more easily -- but as pointed out in the article, this is mostly going to be shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

    The bottom line is that if you do not want public exposure and risk, stay off these sites - although, again, this is not absolute protection.

    JDNSW Saturday 27 February, 2010 - 7:05 AM

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