I posed as a Daily Mail reader online. What followed will sicken you.
It's hard to say exactly what this headline from the increasingly undependable Independent says, but it's clear what the intention is. Peter Chapman was convicted of murdering Ashleigh Hall, a 17-year-old girl who thought that Chapman, 33, was also a teenager, and the Independent then used the fact that he had made contact with Hall via Facebook to cast serious aspersions on the reputation of the social network.
But the murder did not take place on Facebook, so to say "Facebook murder" is every bit as absurd as to say "Independent murder" if a killer were to meet his victim via that particular newspaper. The matter has taken a serious turn now because Facebook is threatening to sue The Daily Mail for damages after it claimed in a piece published on Wednesday that 14-year-old girls who create a profile on the site could be approached "within seconds" by older men who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front of them.
The paper has apologized in print and online for the statement, which the writer, Mark Williams-Thomas, insisted had been introduced by editors at the paper despite being told it was wrong. But Facebook said that although the Mail has changed the headline of the article online — so that it now reads "I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you" — it had not at first changed the title of the article, used by search engines to index content, nor its URL, which is of critical importance in indexing.
The British newspaper business is being transformed by the new technologies, but its more disgusting habits have been ported to the digital world, where they can now do more damage than when they were confined to Fleet Street.
