Pedophilia on Facebook Increasing?

It's interesting how Facebook has no problem censoring certain types of comments, articles, pictures and messages.  It's interesting how easily Facebook bans people for adding too many friends or chatting too much,  yet somehow, stopping thousands of child predators to interact and trade photos is beyond their capability. In fact, the social networking giant, ordered a mother to take down pictures of her 7-year old son, competing at a local Special Olympics event just because he has Down Syndrome .  

"When she next logged on, she received messages from Facebook's monitoring team, saying that pictures violated its user agreement.

To keep your account active, please remove any photos that contain hate speech, support for violent organizations, or threats to harm others,' the message read.

Ms Cornwell's account was disabled for three days until she took down the photos.

'Every photo was of my son at the Special Olympics Event,' she said.

Nevertheless, pedophiles on Facebook, if anything, are on the increase.  In August of 2010, a Vancouver B.C. high school teacher was amongst eleven people arrested on child pornography charges linked to an alleged international child porn ring that was operating on popular social networking site Facebook.

Currently, Chelsea Schilling is doing a four part series on the dark side of Facebook. Part one deals with pedophilia.

"During the investigation, entire Facebook predator communities were easily spotted. Child pornographers use groups as meet-up points to find others with similar interests. Many of the offenders would list similar interests on their profile pages, including terms such as “Thirteen,” “Lolita,” “Justin Bieber,” “incest” and “PTHC (preteen hard-core pornography).” Their activities might include “Receiving nude pics,” and they subscribe to explicit Facebook fan pages posted in plain sight.

Send a flood of 1st-class mailed postcards to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, members of Facebook’s board and top-level management and staff telling them you want this criminal activity to stop.

In most cases, child-pornography traders and pedophiles have two kinds of friends: 1) sexual deviants who have similar interests and 2) unsuspecting children they’ve found and “friended” on Facebook. Many predators will establish a virtual relationship with a child, convince him or her to send provocative photos and even persuade the child to meet with them in person.

Now, Facebook does have a place where you can report these pages; however, from what people have told me, and reports I've read, Facebook ignores those reports.

Meanwhile, a very wealthy Mark Zuckerberg kicks off Facebook IPO  road show.

Links:

Sign petition to stop child porn on Facebook

Stop Child Porn on Facebook

“The Berlin Turnpike: A True Story of Human Trafficking in America”

“Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have completely changed the game. Enormously popular – and growing every day – these free sites offer very powerful tools for men who are buying sex, pimps who are selling it, and pedophiles trading child pornography. In a brilliantly devious marketing ploy, pimps have used these sites in such a way that men no longer need to look for girls on the street corner or the Internet. Using social networking, the girls will come to them."