Hi again Gabgab, We forwarded your post to Facebook and here is their response:

"Facebook takes the safety and security of our users very seriously. We work with groups like Connect Safely because we believe strongly in the work that they do, and we reference them on the safety pages of our Help Center so that others may benefit from their educational resources.

"Facebook does not condone cyber-bullying, and when users register on our site, they agree to our Terms of Use which state that they cannot intimidate or harass other users. We will disable accounts that are found to be intimidating others in any way.

"Similar policies apply to platform applications. Applications cannot contain content that promotes hate speech against individuals or groups, or contain content that defames, libels, or slanders others. We encourage users to report content that may violate these policies directly to the application developers, and we require developers to display accurate contact information so that users can easily report potential violations. We also specify in our policies that developers must respond to user reports in a timely manner.

"Despite these stringent guidelines, if we find that an application is in violation of our policies, we will take action to bring it into compliance. There are also cases where we may remove it entirely from Facebook. In fact, we recently disabled one of the applications mentioned below for policy violations and subsequently re-enabled it after the developer agreed to police the application more effectively going forward.

"We encourage users who are concerned about a particular application not to use it, and we provide a mechanism for users to “block” applications just as they would other individuals on Facebook. Once an application is blocked, it can’t access any of their information or send them any more requests."

Thanks again, Gabgab, for bringing your concerns to our attention.

All the best,
Maureen

--
Maureen Kochan
ConnectSafely community manager

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. The fact that a company provides support for ConnectSafely does not mean that we endorse everything it does but it does mean that we engage in a dialog with the company to try to get them to do all they can to assure a safe and comfortable environment for their members. We have had many discussions with people at Facebook about a variety of issues pertaining to safety and privacy and I am pleased to report that Facebook has made adjustments to its policies based on feedback from us and others.

The issues you raise need to be looked at and we will bring this to the attention of our high-level contacts at Facebook. Obviously as one of the non-profits they support, we have influence but we can't guarantee the outcome of our query.

I think it's important to realize that the social web is still relatively new and that companies are still trying to find their way. We have found Facebook to be extremely responsive to safety concerns and, on balance, feel good about their efforts. This isn't to say that there aren't still some concerns, but that the company takes this type of feedback seriously. We will make sure that your comments are conveyed to Facebook executives.

Thanks for writing.


Larry Magid
co-director
ConnectSafely.org