Facebook may sue Daily Mail over paedophile claim

Posted on 11 Mar 2010 at 13:01

Facebook may sue The Daily Mail over the paper's claims that a 14 year old girl could be approached by a paedophile within five minutes of logging on to the popular social networking website.

The Daily Mail published an article by criminologist and former policeman Mark Williams-Thomas. In the article, Williams-Thomas claims that when he posed as a 14-year old girl on a social networking website, he was approached by padeophiles intent on grooming him within five minutes of logging on.

The Mail originally claimed that this occurred on Facebook, until challenged by the popular social networking site who pointed out that over-18s cannot send private messages to under-18s with whom they aren't already friends.

The Mail has since issued a correction, but Facebook may still sue the newspaper over the damage done to its reputation according to a report in The Guardian.

In an intriguing development, Williams-Thomas stated via Twitter that his original, unedited article made no mention of which social networking website he used. If true, this implies that someone at The Mail deliberately edited the article to implicate Facebook.

Author: Alan Lu

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