Pedophiles can rejoice. Jay Marshall is no longer policing Facebook, looking for kiddie porn to report.
It is too dangerous, he says.
Marshall is a Brit who teaches in Taiwan. He is also the leader of a ragtag, worldwide group of parents, teachers, retired folks and others that’s been trying for years to remove child pornography from the social-networking site beloved by your children as well as perverts.
It’s been a windmill experience.
I worked with Jay a couple of years back when I began a crusade against Facebook because the company’s leaders found nothing wrong with a page posted by one of its users that was titled “Pedophiles are people too.”
One thing led to another, and I eventually caused a mini-revolt among Facebook advertisers before moving on. Marshall and his group — the Global Alliance against Minor Exploitation (GAME) — never moved on.
In the time since he and I last spoke, GAME had expanded into hunts for cyberbullying — the kind of online harassment that has led to a number of highly publicized suicides by youngsters.
Marshall will continue to patrol the Internet — just not Facebook. The site that we have come to accept as part of ordinary life, Marshall says, isn’t safe anymore for whistle-blowers.
“There’s unbearable harassment from basically the people that we have been trying to expose for abusing Facebook, making extremely obscene posts, mostly targeted at children,” Marshall says.
To its credit, says Marshall, Facebook has been removing offensive kiddie porn quicker than it had been when I was crusading two years ago. All it takes now is a couple of hundred complaints and some negative media attention, and the offensive material gets pulled.
If that doesn’t seem fast enough, two years ago it was nearly impossible to get Facebook’s attention.
But Facebook still comes up short — very short — when someone comes under attack from “trolls” for daring to complain about postings. For instance, one troll recently put up a page aimed at Marshall that simply said “just say sorry and we will leave you alone.”
Another troll’s posting on Facebook said, “We’re going to ruin your life Jay Marshall. We are going to look into your family and friends too. We don’t make idle threats. We make promises. You got attention from the wrong people this time.”
Marshall says trolls have been “making page after page, posting very nasty comments.” And they use fake accounts so Facebook can’t do anything. If Facebook takes down one page, another can be up and running within minutes.
“They can say anything they want about you. They can call you a pedophile, which they did against me,” adds Marshall.
So the trolls and pedophiles and other deviants win — at least in their battle against Jay Marshall.
I don’t care how high Facebook’s stock gets, I’ll stick by my previous prediction. This company won’t be in business very long unless it figures out how to clean up its act.
This just in: April retail sales were lousy. Must have been the weather. Oh wait, April was pretty nice.
Maybe it was too nice and people had better things to do than shop. Or maybe Easter fell at the wrong time. Or maybe…maybe…
Let’s stop the excuses. The real reason retail sales are disappointing is that people just don’t have as much disposable income as they once did. So they aren’t spending.
And you know what? You’ll have to get used to that.
A headline in Wednesday’s paper: “US Backs Off Tight Mortgage Rules.”
A headline for 2016: “US Sorry It Backed Off Tight Mortgage Rules.” The Republicans blame the Democrats and vice versa.
Was Michael Grimm a zapper?
Grimm is the 44-year-old Republican congressman from Staten Island who was indicted recently on 20 different flavors of fraud because of the way he ran a Manhattan fast-food restaurant called Healthalicious.
Among the charges are filing false tax returns and substantially under-reporting “the amount of gross receipts Healthalicious earned.” In all, Grimm is alleged to have under-reported wages and revenues by more than $1 million.
Not that I’ve ever done it, but I understand there are only a couple of ways to under-report revenues. One is to not record a sale and simply pocket the dough during cash transactions — and not give the customer a receipt.
But really, would enough customers in a place like Manhattan stand for cash deals like that without getting a revenue-hurting discount?
And then there are zappers — high-tech cash registers that I’ve written about before. They delete sales to make them look like they never happened. Zappers even adjust inventory levels so it’s difficult for auditors to even catch the fraud.
So was Grimm a zapper? The US Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn would only say that it couldn’t talk about evidence in the Grimm case.
By the way, a zapper conference held in California two weeks ago is getting a lot of follow-up from dozens of states — and the FBI. New York state tax representatives didn’t attend, even after I offered to pay for one night of their hotel costs.