Fox News: Pedophiles Find a Home for Social Networking -- on Facebook

Last week I was lambasted by a purported Facebook employee who said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's donation of $100 million to schools in NJ proves that child wellfare is extremely important to Facebook and that I was pretty much full of crap as a critic.

Today an article by Fox News reports that a national association for pedophiles - NAMBLA (yes, believe it or not there is one) uses Facebook as their primary source for communication.  Read the article here (it's definitely a must read).  Pornographic pictures of minors are exchanged, meetings with minors are arranged, and the so called "rights" of pedophiles are evangelized.  Preliminary reports show that this group has used Facebook for at least two years and possibly more without incident (meaning Facebook has not shut them down).

Facebook's response to the article by Fox News was this statement: "We take safety very seriously and have a strict policy against the posting of child exploitive content or content that supports child exploitive groups.  Facebook is highly self-regulating, and users can and do report content that they find questionable or offensive. Our team of investigations professionals reviews these reports, removes content that violates our policies, and escalates to law enforcement as necessary.” 

If this statement were true, why is it that Fox News investigators found not only NAMBLA's disgusting site, but over 80 affiliated group sites and over 100 links from other group sites to the NAMBLA site?  80 groups don't pop up overnight.  If Facebook made any effort at all to investigate as they say they do, they would have surely stumbled onto one of these sites (which should have lead them to others).  The Fox News article reports that a simple search on "man/boy love" revealed many of the sites.

So I would very much like the Facebook employee who keeps sending me hate mail to comment on this article and their supposed commitment to child safety on their social network.  And I would also very much like all those parents out there that let their children run amok on Facebook unsupervised to rethink that policy.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/09/28/pedophiles-find-home-social-networking-facebook/

UPDATE:  Mary Kay Hoal of  Yoursphere.com and Yoursphereforparents.com took the ball and ran with it even further.  Be sure to read her article for even more information on Facebook and NAMBLA.  Good stuff Mary Kay!

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Because of Fox New's outstanding report, Facebook is finally dismantling the NAMBLA organization and their chapters sites.  Read about it here.  Thank you Fox News!