Daily Mail’s article, which can (in edited form) be found here, was written by a former police detective Mark Williams-Thomas, and had originally been titled “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.” It contained the account of the author posing as a minor on Facebook, which, according to him, attracted sexual predators right away.
The problem? He wasn’t really using Facebook to conduct the experiment, he used a “different social networking site,” as explained in today’s update to the article, added at the bottom by Daily Mail staff. The full text of the update is as follows:
“In an earlier version of this article, we wrongly stated that the criminologist had conducted an experiment into social networking sites by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set the record straight.”
Needless to say, this caused a strong response from Facebook, which is still referenced throughout the article. According to the Guardian, a UK spokeswoman for Facebook said that the company was considering legal action due to the “brand damage that has been done.” “If you were a Middle England reader and your child was on Facebook, this sort of thing would have a very serious effect on what you thought of us,” she said.
Facebook has a point here; besides the obvious erroneous reporting, the article details how someone posing as a 14-year-old girl would get messages from older men (more accurately, users whose Facebook profile indicates they’re over 18 years old), which cannot be done on Facebook. Therefore, Facebook can argue it has measures in place to prevent exactly the kind of behavior the article describes, unlike the unnamed social network the experiment was conducted on.
We’ve contacted Facebook’s UK PR representative on this matter but have yet to hear back.