Ok, pick yourself up off the floor, it wasn't meant to be THAT funny.
More pertinently, co-regulation of social networking raised its European head, and one of Mme Reding's last acts as INFSO Commissioner featured the Safer Social Networking Principles with a signing ceremony in Luxembourg.
Now co-regulation normally means legislation, which she is threatening to inflict on Facebook: “If it’s not done by self-regulation, then regulation has to come in,” Reding said in an interview in her office in Brussels. “I wouldn’t like to do it; I will do it if necessary.”
In the case of the Principles - which are mainly about stopping cyberbullying and the proliferation of kids on Facebook, the Commission did not introduce legislation but softer measures - a Taskforce and its position as broker.
Which brings me to my beef about Facelessbook - which I shall reproduce in the vain hope that they actually employ customer services people:
'Dear sirs
Last Thursday my Facebook account was disabled for breaking terms of use - particularly ironic as I was sending a message to a friend who has just joined Facebook, when I realized his 9-year-old son had an account with 70 friends. Pasting your terms of use into the message resulted in it being flagged for abuse - I suspect a child had rather cleverly flagged your exact warnings about under-age users as abuse! I am interested to see whether any of these email addresses produces an answer as the email I first used resulted in no response over this 5-day period, no matter which account I emailed from. Sincerely...'
I think I'll have to contact Richard Allan, formerly MP for Sheffield Hallam, then at Cisco, now Facebook Europe - who is definitely one of the good guys in public policy for the Internet. Richard also spent time at the Oxford Internet Institute when I was there in 2004. Richard reported on Facebook's policies to the EC recently.
P.S. It gets worse - 6 weeks and no answer from a human (1 automated email asking if I had solved the problem!), and Facebook's delightful founder's ethics come fully into the spotlight.
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