FACEBOOK ‘IS NOT SAFE FOR ANYONE’
As social media giant insists it is doing enough to protect children from paedophiles, and the public from fake users, one TD’s furious claim...
THE world’s most powerful social media giant was yesterday savaged over its alleged failure to protect children, tackle grooming or shut down fake user accounts.
Oireachtas committee members lambasted Facebook over what they see as its failure to address concerns, particularly regarding child protection.
One TD, Sinn Féin’s Kathleen Funchion,
told the company, bluntly: ‘I wouldn’t, under any circumstances, allow my children use it because of my experiences.’
She said: ‘Your forum is not a safe forum for anybody, including children. I feel very, very strongly about this.’
Deputy Funchion also scornfully dismissed Facebook’s claim that every user on the website had to use their real name. She said: ‘In relation to people not using their real names, I mean there are loads of profiles and it’s so obvious it’s not their real names.
‘There are no pictures of the person and it’s so obvious it’s a fake profile, and yet when you report it to Facebook they come back and say “thank you, you did the right thing”, but that this doesn’t violate your community standards. How many times does a page have to be reported to Facebook for you to act on it?’
Representatives from Facebook were quizzed by TDs and senators on the Oireachtas Committee for Children and Youth Affairs, amid deep concerns about the alarming rise in online intimidation and grooming.
Critics have long been cononline. cerned at how web bullies use fake names to hurl vile abuse, but yesterday Siobhán Cummiskey, Content Policy Manager at Facebook Ireland, told the Oireachtas Committee on Children that the sites ‘authentic identity’ policy ensures users can only use their real names.
This led to a fiery rebuke from Ms Funchion, who said there were countless examples of fake accounts, that Facebook was aware of many of them and that it had failed to remove them.
Fine Gael Senator Catherine Noone asked if Facebook thought it was acceptable for anyone to say online that they hoped someone would be raped.
In a check by the Irish Daily Mail yesterday, our reporter failed to create a Facebook account with the absurd name ‘Boaty McBoatface’, however, the fake name Anna Murphy was accepted.
Ms Cummiskey told the committee: ‘If you use Facebook, you must do so using the name that you use in real life. What we find is that makes people much more responsible and much more accountable for what they do When you have to “out” your real name beside it, you tend to be much more careful.’ But Ms Funchion told her: ‘The Facebook you are describing is not my experience of Facebook and not of most people I know.’
There is increased concern over online child groomers by people who create fake social media or chatroom profiles, generating the illusion they are children.
Last month, RTÉ producer Kieran Creavan was arrested in England and charged with trying to meet a girl under 16 years after grooming. He is alleged to have been in communication with a young girl using a Facebook account.
Niamh Sweeney, head of public policy at Facebook, said that ‘enforcement is difficult’ in this area and sometimes Facebook ‘gets it wrong’. She said: ‘If somebody reports it [a fake account] and it looks suspicious to us, then we will checkpoint that account, ask the person to provide identification and if they can’t provide it, they will lose access to the account.’ Comment and Tom Leonard – Page 14 catherine.fegan@dailymail.ie