While surfing
the web I noticed that Facebook is facing some controversy this week, as the
image of a deceased rape victim was pulled from a user profile and used for an
online dating site advertisement featured on Facebook.
The would be
seventeen year old, Rehtaeh Parsons is still making news six months after her
death in April of 2013. Rehtaeh, a Canadian teen, was allegedly gang-raped at a
party when she was just fifteen years old. Images from this incident also found
their way onto the Internet and various social media sites, making Rehtaeh a
target for traditional bullying as well as cyber-bullying. Two years after the incident, Rehtaeh was
pushed so hard by the constant bullying that she attempted to take her own life
in April 2013. This attempt put her into
a coma where she then died as she was taken off of life support.
Fast-forwarding
to today, a mere six months after her death, controversy strikes when an
advertisement for an online dating site appearing in the “Facebook Sponsored”
ad section featured an image of Rehtaeh along with the following text: “Find Love in Canada! Meet Canadian
girls and women for friendship, dating or relationships. Sign up now!” When
Rehtaeh’s father caught word of this advertisement he was less than pleased
with the online dating site, Lonechat.com as well as Facebook. Some say that it
was just a very unfortunate coincidence and a terrible misuse of Rehtaeh’s
image.
So
how did Facebook handle this you ask? Well for starters they wanted to let everyone
know that the third party advertising site, Lonechat.com was in “gross
violation” of their ad policies and that the incident was “an extremely unfortunate
example of an advertiser scraping an image and using it in their ad
campaign." In addition to this public statement made about the ad,
Facebook removed the advertisement from their site and they even ban the third party
from advertising on Facebook.
Personally,
I found this to be a very unfortunate coincidence and I can only imagine how
upset the family of the young girl must be by this incident especially after
all they have been through. However I believe that the corrective action taken
by Facebook was well thought out and expertly handled.
Want to know even more?! Check it out: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0918/Facebook-mystery-How-did-Rehtaeh-Parsons-image-end-up-on-dating-ad
I agree with you! It's unfortunate that this girls picture was used, but also not Facebook's fault. It seems to be that Facebook did the best they could responding to situation due to the circumstances, as I'm sure they were not aware of the situation until it was brought forth.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite parts of this assignment is when students find really interesting and/or important things that I had not noticed in my own monitoring of the social media world. And this definitely fits those criteria. What a sad, but unusual and really interesting, story about Facebook third-party players (meaning: advertisers). Thanks, Devon, for bringing this to everyone's attention
ReplyDelete