Friday, March 12, 2010:
Seems an all-out war has broken out between tech giants and publishers these days! Two days after Apple's run-in with a German publisher regarding its iPhone apps, social networking giant Facebook has been embroiled in an ugly confrontation with the Daily Mail. It is thinking of suing the tabloid for damages after the paper falsely said on Wednesday that 14-year-old girls who make a profile on Facebook could be approached "within seconds" by older men who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front of them, says the Guardian.
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Though the paper tendered an apology in print yesterday, the reporter of the piece, Mark Williams-Thomas, said the error had been cleared by editors despite being told it was wrong. In fact, Williams-Thomas – a former cop now employed as a criminologist – had been using some other social networking site.
But Facebook, with 23 million users in the UK, said that although the Mail has amended the article's headline online, it had not earlier changed the page title of the article online, nor the URL of the piece, which assists in search-engine indexing. A British spokesperson for Facebook commented that the site was still considering legal action and trying to assess the "brand damage that has been done".
Ashish Joshi, EFYTIMES News Network
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