Is Facebook turning into Second Life?
A few weeks ago I was asked by News Ltd reporter, Claire Connelly, to comment on whether it was cool that dead people could be tagged on the new Facebook timeline feature, I think not. It is a gross invasion of …….well of most aspects of one’s life
Then today we have the shocking story by Philip Sherwell that Facebook refuses to shut rape page run by schoolboy
Extract:
With nearly 210,000 people indicating that they “like” it, and many million of monthly visitors, the “alleyway” page is the most popular. Others include “Abducting, raping and violently murdering your friend as a joke”, “Pinning your mate down while someone HIV positive rapes him for a laugh”, “Police call it a restraining order, we call it playing hard to get” and “Turning into a chain smoking sexual predator when you drink”. Many of the regular users who “post” on the pages are young Australians and Britons- many still at school, judging from information on their own Facebook profile pages. The website allows any child aged 13 or older to open an account.
Rape is never justified
One of the big issues that faced the affiliate marketing industry way back through the late 1990’s and 2000’s was controlled placement on ads to ensure brand ads did not appear on porn sites. It seems Facebook hasn’t countered that its own ad policy may need some work on it.
Extract:
Major companies that advertise on Facebook were furious to discover that their advertisements were appearing on the “rape page” and demanded they be removed. They included Barclays, 02, John Lewis, Sony, BlackBerry, American Express, Groupon, Heinz, National Lottery, the White Company and PepsiCo. After complaints from several businesses to Facebook, the “alleyway” page was “whitelisted” last week, meaning that no adverts could be rotated on it. But advertisements continue to appear on other pages where the content was just as offensive.
The reality of these scenarios is that as Facebook has been a mass Internet eco-system in its own right, it is hosting the R rated material based on its own view of governance and ethics, not necessarily of its members, its advertisers and certainly not of government.
Second life went into a hole of despair of drugs, prostitution and murder in some cases being played out in the virtual world.
Now if that’s your thing, it’s up to you to look and engage with that stuff in accordance with the law of the land. But I also think if Facebook’s entry age is 13, and it chooses to host such pages as the Rape page quoted above, then it must put in checks in terms of age (& qualifying age online if extremely hard – save for cross matched mobile records and credit card records for proof of age, which is still not in anyway 100%) and it must put in checks to notify users of the type of content on the page.
I think the Facebook story has a long way to play out, but it may yet, get out played by a dark world of virtual nastiness that turns away its revenue (its advertisers) and its users.
Image courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/RapeIsNeverJustified
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