How Prisoners Are Using Facebook to Harass Victims

[asoneill]

Most of Facebook's 400 million members use the social-networking site to reconnect with long lost pals and keep in touch with friends and family. But dozens of prisoners in Britain have found a more sinister and predatory use for Facebook: after they've been locked up for offenses such as murder and assault, inmates are taunting and terrorizing

Comments

[lied_ohne_worte]

Would this work, though? It's not as if people need to provide their real personal information registering accounts, and you can't start having the sites monitor everything anyone posts anywhere. They need to rely on people reporting wrongdoers. And even if someone is reported, it's really hard to ban them permanently, because pretty much any ban can be circumvented. In my opinion, it's primarily up to prisons to prevent people from accessing these sites. I suppose they could provide the sites with their facilities' IP addresses so they could be globally blocked, but there are ways to get around that.

[condenast]

Nah, the amount of time some douche has change his name to Fredrich Von Asswipe on my news feed is ridic.

[sixdemonhag]

How does this even happen? My workplace doesn't want us getting on facebook, ebay, myspace, etc. So they block it, problem solved.

[sixdemonhag]

Ah, I forgot about proxy servers - my kids used to use them to get around the high school's web blocks. But even so - the prison should block things like crazy, and if they find someone going around them they lose their computer privileges.

[uluviel]

on that basis [the sites] should then self-police

Why is the burden being put on the social networking sites? Just block them from the prison's network, jfc.

[lied_ohne_worte]

Yes, the thought sounds nice, but self-policing like that really is not feasible. Even on LJ, which is "small" compared to other services, it is simply impossible to imagine that all content that is being posted is somehow supervised by someone who checks if it is in any way offensive. Apart from the privacy invasion, the sheer manpower needed would be beyond anyone's imagination. If someone posts something inappropriate, you can report them, but LJ (and any other site that relies on users creating their own content) simply can't prevent people from posting things.

[jslayeruk]

They're not on the prison's network. They're using 3G on smart phones and stuff.

[optimsprm]

Ok, granted I'm by no means an expert (or even an amateur) in British Law, but it has been my understanding that in Brittan there is not the same level of legal protection of speech and all those other little niceties that we have in the US. So, if that is the case I imagine that it would be rather easier for inmates to be restricted from using any internet at all.

Of course, I could be quite and completely bloody wrong here.