The Net and nothing but the Net

FACEBOOK shut down a politician’s page after receiving complaints it carried an “offensive attack” on indigenous locals.

Dave Tollner, who won the inner Darwin seat of Fong Lim for the Country
Liberal Party at the last election, caused outrage after he wrote on
his page that itinerants were “parasites terrorising innocent citizens”.

He said that he was “sick to death” of them and warned that “the fun will
be over for these parasites on the very day we get a Country Liberal
government in the Territory”.

Many people left angry messages on his page, one going so far as to accuse him of advocating
“genocide”. However, there were just as many messages of support.

Mr Tollner’s Facebook page was suspended for two weeks and has only recently come back online.

However, within minutes of the site functioning again  a left-wing political activist posted a cartoon of a Ku Klux Klansman.

Mr Tollner said that he did not expect such a strong reaction from his
comments, adding: ”Political correctness has never been my strong
point.”

He accused Labor activists of lobbying Facebook to shut down his profile page.

However, the man who posted the Klansman cartoon on the page is a Greens supporter.

Justin Tutty said the cartoon was Patrick Starfish from the Sponge Bob Square
Pants children’s television show drawn as a Klansman.

Read more about Dave Tollner’s Facebook woes at ntnews.com.au.

Read more…Dave Tollner suspended from Facebook over ‘offensive attack’ on Aborigines | Herald Sun

The third party application can covertly collect private data behind the scenes. According to Joe Jim, country lead for e-Corp. there are over 55k external applications on Facebook alone. According to the recently released Sophos Security Thread Report, approximately 57 percent of the folks using social networking sites have been spammed. This is a significant jump from the previous year as it has increased by 70.6 percent.

Read more…The dangers of social networking sites such as Facebook – TECH.BLORGE.com

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.

Read more…I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you | Mail Online

HUMAN brains can only remember up to 150 meaningful relationships, despite the huge amount of Facebook friends some people can gather.

Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University, says that this number has been the same throughout history and among different societies.

“The interesting thing is that you can have 1500 friends (online) but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” Prof Dunbar told the Times Online.

Last year, Facebook’s in-house research scientist Cameron Marlow told The Economist he found that Facebook users only actively communicate with a few of their online friends.

Read more…Human brain can only handle up to 150 Facebook friends – Professor Robin Dunbar | News.com.au

SOCIAL network sites including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace could be scanned for depressed and “at risk” users under a bold new program to combat youth suicide.

The rise in popularity in social networking could allow authorities to spot users at risk and offer help, researchers believe.

Researches from New Zealand’s Victoria University say they have devised a program that scans posts to identify key words that people aged between 18 and 24 are using.

A high proportion of key words could mean that the blogger is at risk of depression, suicide, self-harm or harming others, the researches believe.

“Our technology picks up words or phrases such as ‘depressed’, or ‘I don’t want to live any more’ or ‘I want to kill somebody’,” Dr Tiong-Thye Goh said.

“We analyse the database of phrases and rank them according to frequency of use – if certain key words are used a lot it is likely that the particular person may be emotionally depressed.”

Read more…Suicide prevention for social networks | News | News.com.au