German officials are demanding that Facebook-organized parties should become a thing of the past due to
Two parties in Hamburg, Germany last month ended in violence, injuries and arrests The invites were sent out via Facebook and both hosts forgot to limit the events’ visibility to private, which resulted in pure bedlam.
The first incident involved a sweet 16 party for a young girl who slipped up, did not make her invitations private and a total of about 1,500 revellers showed up to help celebrate her special day. A phalanx of about 100 law enforcement officers were immediately summoned to try and bring order to the chaotic scene. There were aggravated battery arrests, property damage and injuries.
Later in June, another Facebook invite faux pas in the German town of Wuppertal resulted in a drunken slugfest that involved 41 arrests, 16 injuries and an obscene amount of property damage, costing upwards of about $170,000 of taxpayer money.
Facebook is one of Germany’s most popular social networking sites with upwards of 19 million account holders. The site’s most engaged users are teenagers, students and young adults.
Now not only theologians but political officials like Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Uwe Schünemann are calling for a Facebook party ban due to the potential for public disorder that they are claiming the events could bring. Schünemann told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, “If public safety and order are endangered, then Facebook parties will have to be banned beforehand. If these sorts of mass gatherings are already taking place, then they should be broken up.”
In addition to a possible ban of the social network’s invitations for events system, Schünemann is also recommending that schools should implement into their curriculum a kind of Internet driver’s license that would help young people understand the potential for danger, the pitfalls of utilizing Facebook. “Young people often don’t realize what they are getting into,” he said to the newspaper.
Now, if one local government were to outlaw Facebook’s events feature, what’s to stop another municipality from following suit?
Government officials like Schünemann are also demanding that parents flip the bill for any calamitous end results that occur from Facebook-invite-gone-wild situations and that includes police involvement, property damage and cleanup.
That seems more reasonable than trying to ban the use of the social network for planning events, but we’ll let you tell us what you think. Readers, is it unfair to ban the use of Facebook to distribute invitations to events?
Source: All Facebook
Tuesday, July 5, 2011