Crudele: Trolls and perverts hound a reformer off Facebook

[mountaineer]

Trolls and perverts hound a reformer off Facebook
By John Crudele
May 14, 2014 | 10:32pm
New York Post

Pedophiles can rejoice. Jay Marshall is no longer policing Facebook, looking for kiddie porn to report.

It is too dangerous, he says.

Marshall is a Brit who teaches in Taiwan. He is also the leader of a ragtag, worldwide group of parents, teachers, retired folks and others that’s been trying for years to remove child pornography from the social-networking site beloved by your children as well as perverts.

It’s been a windmill experience.

I worked with Jay a couple of years back when I began a crusade against Facebook because the company’s leaders found nothing wrong with a page posted by one of its users that was titled “Pedophiles are people too.”

One thing led to another, and I eventually caused a mini-revolt among Facebook advertisers before moving on. Marshall and his group — the Global Alliance against Minor Exploitation (GAME) — never moved on.

In the time since he and I last spoke, GAME had expanded into hunts for cyberbullying — the kind of online harassment that has led to a number of highly publicized suicides by youngsters.

Marshall will continue to patrol the Internet — just not Facebook. The site that we have come to accept as part of ordinary life, Marshall says, isn’t safe anymore for whistle-blowers.

“There’s unbearable harassment from basically the people that we have been trying to expose for abusing Facebook, making extremely obscene posts, mostly targeted at children,” Marshall says.

To its credit, says Marshall, Facebook has been removing offensive kiddie porn quicker than it had been when I was crusading two years ago. All it takes now is a couple of hundred complaints and some negative media attention, and the offensive material gets pulled.

If that doesn’t seem fast enough, two years ago it was nearly impossible to get Facebook’s attention.

But Facebook still comes up short — very short — when someone comes under attack from “trolls” for daring to complain about postings. For instance, one troll recently put up a page aimed at Marshall that simply said “just say sorry and we will leave you alone.”

Another troll’s posting on Facebook said, “We’re going to ruin your life Jay Marshall. We are going to look into your family and friends too. We don’t make idle threats. We make promises. You got attention from the wrong people this time.”

Marshall says trolls have been “making page after page, posting very nasty comments.” And they use fake accounts so Facebook can’t do anything. If Facebook takes down one page, another can be up and running within minutes.

“They can say anything they want about you. They can call you a pedophile, which they did against me,” adds Marshall.

So the trolls and pedophiles and other deviants win — at least in their battle against Jay Marshall.

I don’t care how high Facebook’s stock gets, I’ll stick by my previous prediction. This company won’t be in business very long unless it figures out how to clean up its act.

Funny how Facebook is so quick to ban conservatives, though.

[mountaineer]

In related news:

Google has received fresh takedown requests after a European court ruled that an individual could force it to remove "irrelevant and outdated" search results, the BBC has learned.

An ex-politician seeking re-election has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed.

A man convicted of possessing child abuse images has requested links to pages about his conviction to be wiped.

And a doctor wants negative reviews from patients removed from the results.

Google itself has not commented on the so-called right-to-be-forgotten ruling since it described the the European Court of Justice judgement as being "disappointing".

Nor has it released any figures about the number of takedown requests received since Tuesday.

The original case was brought by a Spanish man who complained that an auction notice of his repossessed home on Google's search results had infringed his privacy.

The ruling surprised many because it contradicted the advice of the European Union's advocate general who said last year that search engines were not obliged to honour such requests.

EU Commissioner Viviane Reding described the decision as "a clear victory for the protection of personal data of Europeans" but others are concerned about the consequences that it will have for free speech.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has criticised the ruling, calling it "astonishing" while free speech advocates at The Index on Censorship said the court's ruling "should send chills down the spine of everyone in the European Union who believes in the crucial importance of free expression and freedom of information".

"The court has said that an individual's desires outweigh society's interest in the complete facts around incidents," it added.

Marc Dautlich, a lawyer at Pinsent Masons, said that search engines might find the new rules hard to implement.

"If they get an appreciable volume of requests what are they going to do? Set up an entire industry sifting through the paperwork?" he asked.

"I can't say what they will do but if I was them I would say no and tell the individual to contact the Information Commissioner's Office."

Although the judgement refers specifically to search engines and states that only the links to information, rather than the information itself, be removed from the net, some news organisations have seen a rise in the number of people asking to have articles removed since the ruling.