Phony Facebook Page Spreads Quickly

From:
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2011/02/post_96.html

 Saturday, February 26, 2011

This week, someone in Pennsylvania created a page on the popular social media site and titled it “Beaver County Hoez.” It included about two dozen photos of girls ages 13 to college age taken from their Facebook photo collections. 

The photos themselves were fairly innocent. A few girls were in cheerleading uniforms. Another young woman was hugging her boyfriend. A few others were just smiling — the kind of pictures many people use as their “profile photos.” But the creator of “Beaver County Hoez” took the seemingly innocuous photos and put captions underneath them with sexually explicit references and wild stories.

In a matter of hours, people started commenting on the photos. From there, it all went downhill. The page received more than 3,000 views before Facebook took it down and state police started an investigation. The damage was done.

The young women, many of whom are in high school and college, became objects of school gossip even though the stories about them were false.

By now, most Facebook and social media users are smart enough to know not to post outlandish photos of themselves — ones of excessive partying or anything else that might bring unwelcome attention or harm a college or job application.

But how do you protect against something akin to the Beaver County incident?

Some might say security settings. Facebook does give users the ability to restrict their profiles so that only selected people can view images (or anything else) on their pages. The trouble is the Beaver County page appears to have been an “inside job.” The photos could easily have been pulled by someone who was a “friend.”

It would be almost impossible to protect yourself entirely from a similar situation unless there are no photos of you online — that includes on Facebook, LinkedIn, your business site or in media.

Sites such as Facebook have people who monitor for inappropriate material. It’s just that it took Facebook a few days to pick up on this one. The creator of Beaver County Hoez clearly knew how to go around the basic word screens sites use. Too often online, something can explode before an administrative team can catch it.

Given the nature of the Internet, this kind of behavior is impossible to stop entirely, but I am leaning to the conclusion that the legal system has to allow for easier prosecution of libel online. Ideally whoever created the Facebook page will be held accountable. The tricky part is finding the name of the person who did it.

The creator listed him or herself only as “Beaver County Hoez.” To set up a Facebook page, it takes only a functioning e-mail address. The rest of the information could be falsified. It’s similar on many social interaction sites. 

Heather Long

There’s certainly no verification of identity from an e-mail address, especially ones such as “crazyguy1107” that can be created on Yahoo or Gmail. Police, however, have been tracking the computers used to create the page.

The only other option I see is to start holding host sites at least marginally responsible. In case law so far, that has not happened. Media websites — think New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Twitter, PennLive — are not held accountable for libel done by third party posters. They are protected under the Communications Decency Act.

“The idea behind the Act is to have enough protection to facilitate public comment,” says Melissa Melewsky, counsel at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association.

Most of these sites (PennLive included) don’t abuse that leeway. They have policies of taking down inappropriate posts and blocking problem users.

But time can make all the difference online. What is particularly terrifying in the Beaver County case is the shrewdness of the person who created the page. He or she understood the ins and outs of monitoring and security settings as well as how to escape repercussions (thus far).

While I understand that platforms such as Facebook cannot stop every “bad” webpage, there should be a requirement that sites must respond to any user (or police) warnings about inappropriate content within a reasonable time frame.

On the Internet, that reasonable time frame has to be hours, not days. Just ask the girls from Beaver County whose lives are shattered from something posted for a few days.