Lesley says the social media site is starting to seem like the kind of friend who talks a good game but runs away at the first sign of trouble.
- 06:00, 12 MAR 2017
- Updated19:52, 12 MAR 2017
NewsOpinion
And, sadly for him, that means he’s still banned, a stance only enforced by last week’s revelations about the social network.
Claiming that dozens of sexualised images of children do not breach its standards, refusing to remove the pictures even when they’ve been flagged up as inappropriate, approving “provocative” photos of teenagers that had been stolen from unsuspecting users – this is not the way we’ve come to expect our friend Facebook to behave.
In fact, I fear Facebook and I are about to have a major falling out unless it changes its ways.
And I thought we’d grown to trust one another over the years.
It’s almost like Facebook cares. But somewhere amid all the fuzzy-wuzzy warm feelings it engenders, we seem to have forgotten Facebook is now a corporate giant. It made £8.1billion profit last year, incidentally, a whopping leap of 117 per cent on the previous year.
Every one of the UK’s estimated 31.6million users is worth around £37.63 a year to the company. For that kind of cash, surely we can expect proper protection from the creeps and perverts who use it for their own disgusting means?
BBC investigators have revealed that when they used the network’s own reporting system to highlight 100 sexualised images of children, only 18 of them were removed by the site’s moderators.
Some of the images were pictures of under age teenagers, posing like teenagers love to do – showing off while in states of undress or while still in school uniform.
Perfectly acceptable if kept to themselves. No doubt they never thought for a moment some sick-in-the-head might swipe them and share them on their depraved platforms accompanied by obscene commentary.
Young teens don’t think like that, do they? Certainly, my 13-year-old doesn’t.
Really, Facebook, you’re starting to seem like the kind of friend who talks a good game but runs away at the first sign of trouble.
No one’s saying it’s easy to police 1.23billion users every day but it’s still incumbent on Facebook to get it right.
If it’s going to be everyone’s favourite social network, it needs to accept the heavy social responsibility.
And when alarm bells are rung – in fact, when warning klaxons are blasted into the ears – it has to react swiftly and effectively.
Facebook founder, 32-year-old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, seems to be a chap with his heart in the right place.
He announced last year he’d be donating $3billion to fight disease worldwide.
His wife, Dr Priscilla Chan, said they were inspired by their baby daughter Maxima.
“We want to dramatically improve every life in Max’s generation and make sure we don’t miss a single soul,” she said. A laudable goal but they shouldn’t forget the souls who made them wealthy in the first place.
In the meantime, my boy is stuck without a Facebook presence, which is soooo unfair. He may have to make real friends in the real world and learn how to express himself without using emoticons. Is there a symbol for ‘you’ll thank me one day, son’?
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