More Facebook Fears

I have a profile on Facebook. I check my timelines regularly and comment two or three times a week. I’m careful to not give away anything too personal.

This so-called “social networking site” is in its 11^th year now, having been launched on 4^th February 2004. Amazingly, as of 2014, it had assets in excess of US$40 billion. Let me write that again: As of 2014, FACEBOOK HAD ASSETS IN EXCESS OF US$40 BILLION.

I’m not knocking it. Used carefully it can be an entertaining and useful tool. It can bring together people who haven’t seen each other for years; I’m sure there’ve been countless school reunions made possible by Facebook groups. It allows celebrities to connect with their fans. What I like best is the way it allows people to share photos from our common past.

My reservations with Facebook come from a problem as old as time. There’s always someone who will seek to abuse it and use it for nefarious purposes. Nowhere is this more clear and chilling than in the tragic case of Ashleigh Hall.

Ashleigh, from Darlington, County Durham, was the oldest of four daughters. She was 17, and in her final year of a child care course when she was raped and murdered by Peter Chapman. Her body was then dumped in a field near a Little Chef restaurant on the outskirts of Sedgefield, County Durham.

Chapman was born in Darlington in 1977. His grandparents raised him in nearby Stockton-on-Tees, where he was first investigated by police aged just 15. Four years later he was sentenced to 7 years in prison for raping two prostitutes at knifepoint.

In 2009, attracted to the bare-chested photos on his profile, Ashleigh “friended” what she thought was a 19 year old named Peter Cartwright. Unfortunately for her, this boy was, in fact, 33 year old Peter Chapman.

He persuaded Ashleigh to meet, and on 25^th October 2009, she left her home for the last time. Chapman arrived at their meeting place claiming to be young Peter’s father, and that he’d been asked to pick her up. What happened next really doesn’t bear thinking about.

I guess it would be easy to say Ashleigh was stupid for getting into that car. After all, her mother, Andrea, raised her not to talk to strangers. But I think that would be unfair on Ashleigh, because one of the most prevalent characteristics of true psychopaths is that they appear just as normal as anybody else, and can be exceptionally persuasive.

I cite this horrifying cautionary tale because it highlights the dangers – not just of Facebook – but of the entire internet. Unless you know them beforehand, you have no idea who that person is you might find yourself talking to online. That’s because online you can be anybody you want to be. For instance, I could create a profile portraying me as an athletic, teenage male model and youth player for Manchester United. Sadly, my reality is that I’m a middle-aged fat man who genuinely gets out of breath walking the ten feet or so to my toilet. But it’s so easy to do. There are no checks carried out on the people creating these profiles, and there’s a plethora of photos online they can upload and claim as their own.

Here’s a true story for you: A friend of mine went on one of those internet dating sites. He came to see me one day, excited about the woman he was exchanging emails with from that site. So excited was he, that he used my computer to log on to the site and show me the photo on her profile. I took absolutely no pleasure in telling him that the picture on that profile was, in fact, an old picture of none other than the singer, Lily Allen. Oh yes – this woman was that stupid.

As my shell-shocked friend looked on, I did a search and showed him the picture in its original home. It showed the young Ms Allen at a music festival.

My friend was furious. How dare she do such a thing? It was like false advertising or something. I then pointed out that, while the picture on his profile was genuine, in all fairness, it was more than 5 years old.

But that’s the way it is. The internet affords us an anonymity we don’t have in everyday social situations, and it allows us to project an image of ourselves that can range from slightly misleading to downright false.

I’ve written about this before. But I’m talking about it again now because there’s been another serious incident connected with Facebook.

This time, it was two sisters; Amy and Nicole Rice, aged 21 and 19 respectively. These girls, from Dublin, met up with two men they had been chatting to on Facebook. The men picked them up from a bus stop and took them to an apartment in Newbridge, County Kildare. Once there, things went bad fairly quickly. The men became aggressive, and when Nicole got up to leave, they pushed her to the ground and kicked her repeatedly in the head. Both sisters were tied up and had rags shoved in their mouths prior to suffering a beating so savage that at one point Nicole passed out; the men panicked, thinking she was dead, and started calling friends, saying they needed to dig holes in the Wicklow mountains because they didn’t know what to do with the girls.

Thankfully, the girls survived this ordeal. The men eventually let them go; threatening to kill them and their family if they reported the incident to the authorities.

So, my point is one that I’ve made before: Be careful about the people you meet online – especially you ladies. The man you’re arranging to meet could be not so much Brad Pitt as cess-pit.