In the early hours of this morning, the Daily Mail published an astonishing attack on Facebook under the title “I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.”

Here’s the opener:

Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.

I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I’d never before communicated.

So I wasn’t surprised that a vulnerable teenager, Ashleigh Hall, was groomed on Facebook before being brutally raped and killed.

The article is written by Mark Williams-Thomas. Here’s his biog:

Mark is a former police detective who has far-reaching experience of working at the centre of high profile investigations. During Mark’s police service, he specialised in child protection and major crime and he is renowned throughout the UK’s police forces as well as the national media for his expertise in these areas.

It’s an odd story. Facebook isn’t really a chat site – and it’s certainly not Chatroulette, where there are plenty of men ready and waiting to jack off in front of you (sfw). Presumably Williams-Thomas set his privacy settings to zero and befriended loads of strangers. But how did those strangers find him (her) so quickly?

Fast forward twelve hours and the online version of Williams-Thomas’s article has undergone some editing. New title: I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you. And new text, with Facebook replaced with an unnamed ’social networking site’.

Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on a social networking site posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.

The url, though, has not been changed: I-posed-girl-14-Facebook-What-followed-sicken-you.html

So what gives? If it was Facebook that Williams-Thomas was using, then why turn so coy? And if it wasn’t, how on earth could the Mail have pretended it was?

Update: Via Twitter, I asked Williams-Thomas for clarification. Here’s his reply:

So why was Facebook named in the first place?

Update 2: Apparently the story – with Facebook named – was a front page splash in the print edition, and then a double page spread inside.

Update 3: Just had a call from Facebook – they’re incandescent and say that:

• Williams-Thomas claims that he was 100% clear that his social network experiment had not involved Facebook.
• When the Mail sent him a first draft of the story with Facebook named, he asked for them to make a correction.
• Even so, they went ahead and published a story their own expert had warned them was untrue.

When Facebook protested, the Mail corrected the online story, but not the printed version, which had already hit the news stands. Their online retraction failed to include any apology or explanation of their mistake.

Facebook says that legal action against the Mail is pending. What an extraordinary piece of negligence and/or malice from the paper!

Update 4: The Mail appended a fairly mealy mouthed correction last night:

In an earlier version of this article, we wrongly stated that the criminologist had conducted an experiment into social networking sites by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set the record straight.

Will they be happy to pay damages to Facebook too? Another version here, which begins: “In an article by a criminologist yesterday, we wrongly stated…” – half-maintaining the fiction that Williams-Thomas actually wrote the piece…

Update 5: From last year, another great Daily Mail headline: “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.”

Update 6: Instead of retreating to lick her wounds, Mail journo, Laura Topham has doubled down with another article on Internet safety – again using the Facebook killer as a hook and with the same oddly prurient image from yesterday’s story.

Before her Facebook howler, Topham’s main claim to fame was dating 100 men and writing about it…

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This image shows NOAA modelling of the tsunami that followed Chile’s earthquake – which proved to be highly accurate.  Yale Environment 360 explains how to decipher the map:

Researchers used seismic information, wave measurements collected from buoy-based equipment, and computer modeling technology to predict the maximum wave amplitude, wave arrival time, and the extent of wave inundation. The colors illustrate the maximum computed tsunami amplitude in centimeters during the 24 hours after the quake, with the highest waves in purple and red and smaller waves in orange and yellow. The red triangles represent buoys.

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With David Miliband’s enthusiasm for a G3, we’re left with robust cross-party consensus on Europe’s role as a foreign policy actor (whether it can fulfil this role is another matter).

I’m reminded of how Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham reacted when asked, shortly after the new Tory government took office, to write a report on how the government could build public support for the European Community.

According to Robert Harris, Ingam wrote that:

A community of 250 million could achieve more than a ‘debilitated nation of 55 million, however much the latter may trade on past imperial glory‘.

Government publicity should stress this, ‘with all the instruments of the orchestra, not only central Government, reading the same score, playing the same tune and coming in on cue.’

True in 1980. Even more so thirty years’ later.

(Photo from Iain Dale.)

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(H/t Icanhascheezburger’s sister site, Ihasahotdog.com.)

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I take his point. After six weeks in Guinea-Bissau (plus a lot of background research), I felt I had a fairly good grasp of how the society worked, why things are as they are, and what the prospects are going forward. But after six weeks in Sierra Leone, my mind is full of confusion, as chaotic as Freetown’s deranged street markets. I can only hope that a few weeks of quiet reflection somewhere sane like Burkina Faso will help me sort through the jumble of impressions, fears, questions and competing explanations that are clattering around my head.

One of the questions I’m grappling with is whether Sierra Leone is knitting itself together after Siaka Stevens’ ruinous dictatorship and the even more damaging civil war, or if in fact the country is in danger of slipping back into conflict.

Tony Blair, who visited Freetown last year, believes Sierra Leone is “thriving.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on the other hand, which was set up to investigate the causes of the war, argues that the same levels of poverty, corruption and youth alienation pertain today as prevailed twenty years ago, before the war started. As Paul Collier showed in The Bottom Billion, moreover, most countries that go through one civil war endure another within a decade or two.

Blair’s view is buttressed by the fact that the country has been at peace for nine years, that it held uneventful elections in 2007 which were widely judged to be fair, and that dangerous neighbours like the Liberian thug Charles Taylor are off the scene. Exiles are returning, drawn by peace and the still-tantalising prospect of mineral riches. And many Sierra Leoneans have told me their compatriots have learned their lesson from the war and are extremely reluctant to go down that road again.

Not everyone is so sanguine, however. While the wealthy are generally quite optimistic about the future, the poor remain disgruntled, railing against the corruption of the rich and the ineffectiveness of government. “The poor don’t love their country,” says Joseph, a young Freetonian working with Amnesty International. Edward, an old man in a Freetown slum, says the poor have no reason to be patriotic. Most young people I’ve met have asked me to help them acquire visas for Britain.

Society, rent apart by the war, still seems deeply fractured. Just as the poor bemoan the greed of the rich, so the latter berate the lower classes for laziness, dishonesty and incompetence. In cities and villages, angry arguments in the street are nerve-gratingly regular. In an eastern village, a young teacher complains that “people don’t understand how to resolve disputes by dialogue: they always want to use violence.” Many of the secret societies that held rural communities together through slavery and colonialism, moreover, were destroyed by the civil war, in which rebel soldiers deliberately targeted the chiefs and elders who were the repositories of traditional knowledge.

The insurance and savings schemes of the dollar boys and market traders are all too rare examples of social capital being rebuilt (albeit by groups working illegally), as are village cleansing ceremonies for women abducted and raped in the war. Nestor’s Women’s Movement, on the other hand, used to have thousands of members but now has only ten. He can’t find a woman to take it over: “Joining this movement would require having ideals,” he explains plaintively, “but today people only think about their personal gain. They can’t see beyond themselves to issues.” Tales of efforts by jealous neighbours, friends or relatives to use witchcraft to prevent others attaining wealth, success, or happiness, meanwhile, are frighteningly common.

Nestor believes corruption and selfishness worked their way down to all levels of society from the highest echelons of Siaka Stevens’ government. They even infected the one significant social movement of the last thirty years – the Revolutionary United Front militia, which began as a justifiable response to inequality and venality but ended by causing terrible and wanton carnage.

There are a number of potential flashpoints that could precipitate a return to conflict. War in neighbouring Guinea could have serious repercussions for Sierra Leone, which is ill equipped to house a flood of refugees, or to root out combatants who base themselves in its border areas or target its diamond fields. The 2012 elections are an even greater threat: the SLPP ceded power peacefully in 2007, but may not have gone so quietly had its leader not been retiring. The APC may not yield so willingly in 2012, and there are rumours that it is preparing for possible defeat by training its own militias. And the pressures of Sierra Leone’s demography are unrelenting: huge numbers of young people, few jobs, little in the way of public services, and limited youth representation in power make for a potentially explosive cocktail, particularly in the chaotic, crowded capital.

In this judderingly unstable part of the world, other threats to stability may yet emerge – as one angry young dollar boy warned me with foreboding recently, “When there’s a pool of oil on the ground, you don’t know where the spark that sets fire to it will come from.”

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- Writing in Der Spiegel, Sascha Müller-Kraenner and Martin Kremer assess how the new European External Action Service (EEAS) might help the EU exert greater influence over climate governance post-Copenhagen. The new diplomatic corps will offer “a unique opportunity to increase analytical capacity and to design the right instruments and institutions for confronting climate change”, they suggest. Reuters meanwhile reports on the failure of EU member states to meet their commitments on development aid, and the implications for climate funding.

- Over at World Politics Review, Frida Ghitis explores how natural disasters can shape the national political narrative, with last weekend’s Chilean earthquake proving only the most recent example.

“No matter where disaster strikes”, she argues, “the script opens with shock, heartbreak and compassion. Then, it inexorably moves towards a cold political calculus about the performance of political leaders responsible for managing the aftermath.”

- Finally, in the midst of ongoing nuclear negotiations and two months before the crucial NPT Review Conference, the Moscow Times assesses the Kremlin’s “stubborn” approach to talks. British Ambassador John Duncan offers his perspective on UK-Russian nuclear cooperation here.

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