Facebook Rules Out Installing 'Panic Button'

Facebook says it will not install a "panic button" on its main pages for users to report suspected paedophiles, but will develop its existing system.

The company says it will have links to organizations including the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) center on its reporting pages.

But the director of Ceop says there should be a button on every page. The conviction of Peter Chapman for the murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall led to renewed calls for a "panic button". The convicted sex offender lured the teenager to her death using Facebook.

Earlier, the Home Secretary said Facebook executives had told him they had "no objection in principle" to installing the safety button.

Alan Johnson said he and the site's executives had had a "frank exchange of views" during the meeting, following calls for Facebook to link to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) center.

Complaints procedure

But Richard Allan, director of policy for Facebook Europe, made clear the company was not considering including the button on its main site. He said the Ceop button might be effective in principle, but only "for other sites", and not Facebook.

Jim Gamble, head of Ceop, said the button needed to be on the front page of every Facebook profile page.

"So that children are reassured and empowered, so are their parents, and offenders are deterred. That's the key.

"Facebook is a great environment, they are experts on advertising and engaging with young people in those areas where you can get click-through. But they're not experts on child protection."

Emma-Jane Cross, head of Beatbullying, welcomed Facebook's proposed change to its reporting function, saying it was crucial people who felt they had been bullied online could get help quickly.

"That's why Beatbullying is pleased that Facebook are taking the right steps by working with third sector organizations like us and referring their users to a safe environment where they can get the correct support and advice they need," she said.

Speaking about the meeting, Mr Johnson said: "I emphasized that including the Ceop abuse reporting button on their site has the potential to transform child protection - and that the company should put this above all other considerations."

He said a high-level meeting would be held between Facebook and Ceop officials in Washington on 12 April to discuss it further.

Facebook 'deeply saddened'

Defending Facebook's current set-up, a spokesman said they had been pleased to provide Mr Johnson with further details about their "robust reporting system".

"This innovative system has been developed by analyzing millions of reports submitted over the years and testing ways to continually improve our system.

"The system effectively handles all manner of potential abuse we see on the site, ranging from the common minor breaking of the rules, such as embarrassing pictures, to the extremely rare serious matters that are quickly escalated to law enforcement."

He said they had gone on to explain that the website was "exploring ways to improve safety", which included adding links to more organizations, including Ceop and Beatbullying, on Facebook's reporting pages.

"We will also explore adding the Ceop button to our safety center," he added.

Peter Chapman, 33, was jailed for at least 35 years this month for killing Ashleigh Hall last October.

She was raped, suffocated and her body dumped in a field near Sedgefield, County Durham, after agreeing to meet Chapman. Earlier that month, she had been attracted by a picture of a young, bare-chested man that Chapman - calling himself Peter Cartwright - had posted on Facebook.

Facebook said it was "deeply saddened by the tragic death".

Notes & Analysis:

The "panic button" that Facebook is being asked to adopt is already used by other websites, including Bebo. Clicking on it takes people to a site that details how to handle cyberbullying, hacking, viruses, distressing material and inappropriate sexual behaviour.

By putting the button on sites, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) hopes to make it easy for children to find and get help. Ceop says that currently children make about 500 reports a month by clicking on the button. Of those, four a day are from a child in immediate danger, it claims.

Facebook is under pressure to adopt the button because it is a huge source of problems, according to Ceop. Ceop estimates that in January about 75% of reports it received were about incidents on Facebook.

Wired; Wall Street Journal; Reuters.

It's The Truth! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You

“On the Internet,” one dog tells another in a classic New Yorker cartoon, “nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The internet is notorious for its digital dens of deception. But on Facebook, what you see tends to be what you get — at least in one study of tailless, two-legged young adults.

College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealized versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.

“Online social networks are so popular and so likely to reveal people’s actual personalities because they allow for social interactions that feel real in many ways,” Back says.

Back’s team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.

The subjects — who ranged in age from 17 to 22 — took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.

Then, undergraduate research assistants — nine in the United States and 10 in Germany — rated volunteers’ personalities after looking at their online profiles. Those ratings matched volunteers’ actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.

Facebook is so true to life, Back claims, that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, going by the results of previous studies.

Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, calls the new findings “compelling” but incomplete. College students on Facebook and other online social networks often augment what they regard as their best personal qualities, Manago holds. In her view, these characteristics aren’t plumbed by broad personality measures like the ones measured in Back’s study. And students’ actual personality descriptions may have included enhancements of their real characteristics, thus inflating the correlation between observers’ ratings and students’ real personalities, Manago notes.

“Online profiles showcase an enhanced reflection of who the user really is,” Manago proposes. In a 2008 study, she and her colleagues found that 23 college students sometimes used another online social networking site, MySpace, to enhance their images, say by Photoshopping acne out of a picture or posting a video of themselves driving a sports car at high speeds.

Still, the new findings make sense, remarks psychologist Sandra Calvert of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She emphasizes that social-networking sites have fostered a new type of communication among teens and young adults, in which one person can create personal content that gets broadcast to a multitude of friends.

In a 2009 study of Facebook use among 92 college students, Calvert’s team found that young women reported a whopping average of 401 online friends, while young men reported an average of 269.

Science News; Psychological Science; Wired; Facebook