It’s been a tough seven days for Facebook in the UK. Last week the social network was splashed on the front page of most newspapers after “Facebook killer” Peter Chapman murdered a 17-year-old girl he met through the site.
The Daily Mail in particular went to town on the story, even risking legal action with a piece by an “expert” claiming that within 90 seconds of logging into Facebook, “a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me”. The Mail had to apologise when it emerged the site in question wasn’t Facebook after all but a (still-unnamed) “different social networking website”.
It didn’t take long for politicians to jump on the bandwagon in this election year.
Alan Johnson, the home secretary, on Thursday met Facebook in London to take it to task for not using the standard “panic button” developed by the UK-based Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), which is used by Bebo and MSN but not by Facebook or MySpace.
“He had a very clear and particular point of view,” Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of European public policy, told the FT. “We both care about internet child safety. He made it clear that he felt that the CEOP reporting abuse button was an important part of the child safety picture.”
The home secretary’s visit has elicited a small concession from Facebook, which now says it will include the button in its central “safety centre” – but not across the whole site. Facebook will also introduce links to a variety of sites providing additional safety information, including CEOP, when its users make a report, aiming to provide the most relevant information for the user’s country and type of complaint.
“We wanted to be very clear that substituting the [CEOP] button for our reporting system was something that we felt would be counterproductive rather than helpful,” Mr Allan said. “For lots of websites out there who have no reporting system of their own the [CEOP] button is a very good solution.”
Facebook’s message seems to be that it can do a better job of protecting its users than a well-meaning public-sector organisation.
Although some in the advertising world say that the whole sorry affair “may give clients pause for thought” about marketing on the site, most would say – complain, even – that Facebook still puts users’ interests ahead of commercial concerns.
“We haven’t had one client raise any serious concerns over this,” said Norm Johnston, global digital leader at Mindshare Worldwide, a WPP agency. “Facebook have gone out of their way to protect their users even if it’s detrimental to their business.”
In many ways, the volume of press coverage and criticism that Facebook has faced reflects not its child safety record but its significance in our collective culture.
With 400m members, enough of the world is represented that, alas, some of humanity’s less appealing traits will inevitably appear. Now that it is one of the world’s biggest sites, it will have to get used to the same scrutiny to which tabloid newspapers subject the world’s biggest celebrities. After all, most of their journalists are already on the site – it’s a fabulous tool for gleaning showbiz gossip.
