I’m not new to Social Media, I started to use Facebook a few years ago when my daughter went to live in France. She’s been there nearly 3 years now and I still miss her very much.

Facebook is a great way for us to keep in touch. If I don’t receive a call or a text from her every couple of days, I start to wonder if she is alright. A quick look at her Facebook page will tell me what I need to know:- She is working very hard and very tired, or she is burning the candle at both ends, with the same result, very tired!

Having said this, my children were well into their teens before they started to use the internet and initially it was just for homework, eventually progressing to MSN. Even then, they were never allowed to have computers in their rooms, if they were chatting online to their pals, I would often lean over their shoulders and ask outright who they were talking to. I wasn’t being an over protective parent, I simply wanted to make sure my children were safe. And therein lies the problem.

The Government appear to be attempting to assume the role of guardian of our little ones and whilst I am fully aware that some children need protection, for me, the protection should start at home. Any parent, who allows a young child to open a Facebook/Bebo/Badoo/Hi5/Myspace account, needs to have a serious look at their parenting skills.

Alan Johnson shouldn’t be going cap in hand to the officials of Facebook and asking them to install panic buttons! He should be asking questions of the parents who allow their little ones to spend hours at the computer screen with little idea of who is on the “other side of the screen”, Mr Johnson should be finding out why those parents no longer sit around the dinner table with their children, why they don’t read books anymore, why they don’t play board games once in a while, the list goes on.

As for Alan Johnson and his panic over Facebook, he needs to rethink his strategy.

If children are being left to their own devices on such sites, who is actually going to press the panic button?

I agree with both posts, indeed, I said as much in my blog that people will use whatever means is available to them, this is nothing new.

I also didn’t suggest Facebook should be banned, just as Tesco shouldn’t be banned for selling kitchen knives which are the single most ‘popular’ weapon quoted in calls to police.

However, what Facebook doesn’t do well is regulate its own terms & conditions. Putting adequate safeguards to protect its users costs money, Facebook appears to do less than other social networking media.

I accept that Facebook has the most users by a long margin (some 400,000,000) but Facebook accounts for a far higher proportion of complaints than all the other sites out together than it’s proportion of the market would suggest.

MySpace, for instance, has a third (130m) of the amount of users yet has a fraction of complaints to police.
Bebo has a 10th of the amount of users (40m) I can’t personally recall any complaints involving Bebo, etc etc.

My point is that facebook really has to do more to protect its customers.

No more idiot language and inanities. (That was just me)

Unfortunatly every new form of communication will be abused by criminals and arseholes, its human nature. I am sure there could be as many posative stories written about people meeting on facebook. But they are not as sensationalist as the negative ones. People who rape/murder for pleasure will do so no matter what, they are selfish evil bastards. To blame facebook is akin to blaming a kitchen store where the murder bought the knife.

Safeguards must be put in place you are right but these things are here to stay. We have to just adapt our policies to cope as we’ve had to do with 100’s of other things.

Newspapers began to mean something to the middle and lower classes- it didnt take long for serial killers like Henri Désiré Landru to place lonely heart messages to lure his victims to their deaths.

Aileen Wuornos- used the telephone to arrange her victims place and time of death…

Since people began killing for their own gratification- they have sought to use whatever technology is at hand to facilitate this desire.

The internet (and sites like Face-ache-twit) is just another tool in the bully/pervert/killers arsenal – as post-telephone- etc before it…

Now- we didnt seek to end telephone calls, post or newspapers eh?

Like it or not… the internet is here to stay- full stop.

We need to adapt and find new ways to deal with this issue- take a lesson from history- those that dont adapt… go the way of the dinosaur- no matter how successful…

just my opinion…