Daily Mail backtracks on Facebook paedophiles

 

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By Hani Megerisi

Posted on 11 Mar 2010 at 10:37

Facebook has vowed to sue the Daily Mail after an article claimed the site was a haven for paedophiles.

The newspaper ran an ‘investigative’ piece in yesterday’s edition, where the writer claimed to have posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook and been approached by a number of men.

"Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl," the article read. "Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me."

We wrongly stated that he 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

However, within hours of the story appearing online, the article’s headline was changed from “I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you” to “I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you”.

The paper issued a correction online at 12:28am this morning, stating: “In an article by a criminologist yesterday, we wrongly stated that he 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.”

Mark Williams-Thomas, the detective and criminologist credited with the piece, has now been drawn into the centre of the row after telling the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones the piece was ghost written on his behalf by the Daily Mail, who ignored his comments that the investigation was not conducted on Facebook.

Facebook claims it contacted Williams-Thomas and confirmed that he had told the Daily Mail, prior to publication, that the social-networking site used was not Facebook. The site's lawyers said in a letter that the Daily Mail had made "false and defamatory statements in the article," the BBC reported.

The social-networking giant has recently been at the centre of a child protection controversy, after a girl was abducted and killed by a man she met on Facebook.