In late 2012, a 5-year-old girl named April Jones was abducted and murdered in Wales.
April’s life was memorialized on Facebook with a page that contained flowers, best wishes and, before her body was found, hope — the sort of sentiment that makes people remember the good times in a little girl’s life.
More than 230,000 people — nearly twice the number of folks who live in Powys County, where the blond-haired girl lived — viewed the page.
Then, early this month, someone hacked April’s page and put photos of half-naked women in place of the flowers. In one photo a woman is grabbing the breasts of another woman, although the breasts aren’t exposed.
In another picture, a woman is bending over to milk a cow. She’s dressed in skimpy lingerie.
Despite a torrent of complaints, including a number from April’s family, it took Facebook about 10 days to remove the hacked page from its website. There wasn’t, I suppose, any real nudity that would violate Facebook rules.
And then there’s a Facebook page of a guy who claims to be a US Marine stationed in Okinawa, Japan. He was looking to “friend” girls between the ages of 4 and 16.
And in case these potential friends missed the point, this guy wrote: “Sex is a sensation that starts with a temptation where the boy puts his location in a girls [sic] destination…”
I called the Marines last Friday to confirm that this guy was really one of them and, if so, to see if the Corps had done anything about him. The Marines haven’t gotten back to me because budget cuts are slowing their response time.
The supposed Marine’s page was only recently pulled off Facebook after days of complaints.
I could go on and on.
Recently, on a dare from me, a vigilante group of pedophile hunters produced the names of 200 people with Facebook pages who also appear to be registered sex offenders.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) yesterday announced that it had busted 255 suspects in nine countries who used the Internet to prey on children. The operation took a month. It was one of the biggest takedowns of Web-stalking pedophiles ever and shows that at least someone is looking out for our kids.
Other law-enforcement types don’t seem as excited. I offered the names of the 200 to the FBI and got the cold shoulder.
Facebook, meanwhile, is either uninterested or incapable of monitoring the nearly billion people on its website, unless an advertiser complains that its ad has been placed alongside inappropriate material.
I’m not a prude when it comes to adult entertainment (stress the word “adult”). But I wonder if parents know what kind of stuff is easily available on Facebook and how their kids can be harmed.
More important, do companies that advertise through Facebook know what they could be getting themselves into? If an ad comes up when I view one of these horrifying pages — and an image of the page, ads and all, gets passed around — what’s that going to do for the advertiser’s business?
And what about investors who buy Facebook shares?
If socially conscious investors shun tobacco stocks and the shares of companies that pollute, what should they think about Facebook when it pollutes its network with sex offenders?
All I can say is, I’m glad my kids are grown.
***
Okay, it’s summer. And the economy is failing again — just like I said it would.
Wall Street firms are rapidly reducing their estimate on economic growth in the second quarter that ended last month. The consensus now seems to be growth of just 1 percent, which is less than that of the first three pathetic months of the year.
And yesterday retail sales for June came in light of expectations, especially when cars and gasoline are factored out.
There are still a few more weeks before the next employment report is released, but I predict that’ll be disappointing, too.
So what gives? It’s the same thing that’s been happening over and over again since the financial crisis. Seasonal adjustments make the springs look better than they really are (and they really aren’t that great to begin with). And then the adjustments reverse themselves and make summer look terrible.
When will the economy start to get better? At the rate we are going, never.
***
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke prides himself on transparency, which the public sometimes mistakes for accuracy.
Transparency only means that Bernanke isn’t going to be evasive like his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who should have been held in contempt of Congress for the way he used to give gobbledygook testimony to our elected officials.
Bernanke may be transparent, but his messages are contradictory. One day he’s tapering off his dangerous monetary policy, called quantitative easing (QE); the next day he’s not.
Why the mixed messages? I gotta figure it’s because Big Ben is just so darned scared of what will happen when QE ends. The economy is now weakening again, so (as I said in recent columns) Bernanke isn’t actually going to be able to taper even if he wants to.