Facebook’s Safety Renovation
In the aftermath of the murder of Ashleigh Hall (a 17-year-old U.K. girl who was duped by a man who posed as a teenager on Facebook), and the suicide of Pheobe Prince after being subjected to relentless cyber-bullying, Facebook has overhauled its Safety Center. The new Safety Center provides information for teens, parents, law enforcement officials, educators and general users to help protect themselves against sex offenders, scammers, bullies and other delinquents. Still some believe that Facebook needs to do more to keep its users safe.
This Monday, Jim Gamble, the head of Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP) met with Facebook executives in Washington to convince them to embed a “panic button” on every page to enable users to report disturbing contacts with a single click. Currently, Facebook has a “report abuse” button at the bottom left corner of each profile.
However, according to Vicki Barker’s article, Child Safety Group Fights For Facebook ‘Panic Button’, “Facebook . . . says it has experimented with a panic button similar to what the British child protection agency advocates, and found that reports of abuse did not rise but fell.” In fact, “Facebook says its existing monitoring system is constantly reviewed;” and “Incidents of bullying or approaches by pedophiles are extremely rare.” While Facebook has agreed to place a panic button on a page it had already set up for reporting abuse, the CEOP believes it is only effective if it is on every page.
In contrast, Larry Magid, author of Facebook rejects suggested ‘Panic Button’ for pages, questions the necessity and usefulness of putting a panic button on every page. According to Magid, “The number of young people who have been harmed by a stranger they met online is extremely low and, even in those few tragic cases, the victim has always willingly met up with the abuser. The Hall case is evidence of this as she clearly never suspected she was in any danger and therefore would not have used the panic button.
But what about Phoebe Prince and others subjected to the same kind of cyber-bulling? Magid believes that most cases of Internet “abuse” have more to do with problems in relationships than with crimes and are not issues for law enforcement. I have to respectfully disagree. Maybe if Prince had the ability to push a panic button, Facebook could have at least stopped her abusers from bullying her online. Now we will never know.
However, it does seem clear that a “panic button” alone is not going to stop abusers from using the Internet for their own twisted pleasure. Rather, a panic button in conjunction with appropriate supervision and education that teaches children and adults how to protect themselves from online abusers is likely to be the most beneficial for all social media users.
