Facebook may sue Daily Mail over paedophile claim

Facebook has threatened to sue the Daily Mail after it wrongly identified the social networking giant in an article about sexually predatory men using the web to contact teenagers.

The article, by criminologist Mark Williams-Thomas, was headlined "I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you" and claimed that Williams-Thomas was approached "within 90 seconds" of visiting the site by a middle-aged man who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front of him.

Williams-Thomas had not in fact signed up to Facebook for his experiment, he later insisted, but a different social networking site – he has not disclosed which one. He says journalists at the newspaper introduced the error and he had not meant to implicate Facebook.

A spokeswoman for Facebook was clear that the events Williams-Thomas described could not have happened on their site. "We have made Facebook much more favourable to the safety of minors – minors under 18 cannot receive messages from somebody over 18," she pointed out.

The Mail published a correction in print the next day, but was slow to change the online version of the original article, though it has now done so. Facebook said they were considering legal action and were looking to see what "brand damage has been done". The two sides were due to meet today to discuss the issue.

The breathlessly prurient article ("Gruesome though it is to hear, the question 'Have you ever touched yourself?' is frequently fired off to young girls.") was presumably prompted by the tragic death of Ashleigh Hall, the 17-year-old raped and murdered by the previously convicted rapist Peter Chapman. Chapman befriended his victim on Facebook, as reported previously on The First Post.

Perhaps it was this connection which led to the error for which the paper has now been forced to apologise. Earlier in the week, senior police officers accused Facebook of providing a safe haven for sexual predators because it has not signed up to a 'Panic Button' scheme to allow users worried about strangers approaching them to contact the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit with a single click. ·