

Sexual predators have been using social media to target children and teens for years. But did you know that Facebook actually has software in place to monitor and stop it? And that it's deliberately ineffective?

Here's a striking bit about Facebook from Reuters' deep look into how social networks try to protect kids:

"We've never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it's really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate," [Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan] said. In addition, Facebook doesn't probe deeply into what it thinks are pre-existing relationships.






It's hard to mandate that the transcript reads wouldn't be used irresponsibly—people are generally stupid and cruel, after all—but it's just as hard to ignore that chilling estimate. Check out the rest of the story, which does feature a few wins, thankfully, at [Reuters].

Pedobear image credit: Jim Cooke at Gawker; original image from Richard Laschon/Shutterstock