As a sequel to my last post about the 14-year-old who was pushed to suicide after being harassed for months online, I want to discuss the threats made to President Obama recently on Facebook.
Third-party developers -- a subject that will be discussed at length in the future -- are allowed to create applications like games and polls for use on Facebook. In this situation, a user created a poll asking whether President Obama should be killed. In another incident that occured around the same time, a Facebook group was created titled "Kill Obama" as pictured below.
Though it is not clear how long it existed, the group was able to obtain more than 150 members before the Secret Service was informed and Facebook removed the group. Several people have wondered why it existed for so long? And there are rumors that it was actually a few concerned citizens, not Facebook officials who monitor content daily, that contacted the government.
Though it is a federal crime to threaten the President, isn't there also some ethical requirement of these sites to remove this content? What is the case for other social networking content that may not threaten the President, but some other official? Or even another citizen?
The enormous growth of social networking sites in recent years, has made them go from small forums to big businesses. Certainly, I do not expect anyone to infringe on the free speech of others, but as corporations they own all of the content and therefore have a responsibility to make sure it is not doing harm, let alone breaking laws.
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