Swirling rumors that pedophiles are behind a viral Facebook campaign are unfounded, according to a company spokesman.
The campaign, which has been actively gaining momentum in the past month, urges users to swap a cartoon character for their usual profile picture and boasts more than 150,000 "likes" among its Facebook pages. The campaign was originally thought to be the work of a children’s advocacy group, but rumors sweeping across the web suggest it's actually a front for pedophiles, said London tabloid The Daily Mail.
Kids are especially vulnerable, since Facebook users can message one another so easily, said Hemanshu Nigam, co-chairman of President Obama's Online Safety Technology Working Group and a member of the board of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
"It would give just another interesting topic for an offender to talk to a young teenager about," he told FoxNews.com.
Whether or not the rumors prove true, an inherent security issue remains, Nigam told FoxNews.com.
"The core of the issue isn’t whether the campaign was created by pedophiles or not. None of that is as significant as the ability to directly message underage children."
I agree with Nigam. The bigger concern is Facebook's ability or willingness to monitor and investigate this kind of activity on their site. We already know there are some pretty bad people and things happening on Facebook. In fact, we've added a new section to this blog entitled Blogs to Watch (just scroll down the right-hand column) highlighting the excellent ongoing work of an amateur FB sluth named Watching Facebook.
Check it out and then re-consider your impulse to dismiss the cartoon hoax as mass hysteria. Everyone should be asking, just who IS watching Facebook??
Read more at FoxNews.com
Watching Facebook
Here's a classic: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001871573779
ReplyDelete"Little Fercho" has put a cartoon character up as his profile picture, but he also lists child porn keywords among his interests. Epic fail.