A Facebook page called “Beaver County Hoez” was quickly removed, but not before causing a stir of counter-pages and mayhem in Beaver County; 25 students in all were maligned on the page, which contained a photograph of eachof the girls along with false description of their alleged sexual proclivities.
Pennsylvania state police troopers opened a cyber-bullying investigation into the page, which was pulled when investigators contacted Facebook security department inorder to identify who posted it.
Before the page disappeared, over 3,500 people “liked” it. The page also spawned its own rap song and video on YouTube (although that also got pulled after media reports) as the controversy rocked Beaver County. Local officials in charge of the cyber-bullying investigation say that they will prosecute who ever is responsible for the page — as well as anyone who posted negatively on the page.
“It’s only a matter of time before we find out who it is, and when we do, we will certainly prosecute,” Sargeant Kelly Hogan of Beaver Police told Pennsylvania’s Channel 11 News.
Although it’s tempting to call Facebook’s compliance with investigators a bit ironic, given that before starting the social network during his sophomore year at Harvard, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg had created a website called Facemash that invited people to vote on the attractiveness of female students, the younger age of the girls featured on the Beaver County age makes a big difference. If the page’s creator turned out to be someone older than high school age, that would make things weirder and more deserving of punishment.
What can Facebook and the people who use the site do to prevent this sort of thing from recurring?
Source: All Facebook
Thursday, February 24, 2011