Report: FB coaxing teen girls to befriend middle-aged men

LONDON: Facebook is encouraging grooming by offering teenage girls middle-aged men as ‘friend suggestions’, the media reported.

Teenage girls, as young as 13-year-olds, who join the social network are given up to 300 suggestions for who they can add as friends, some of which include middle-aged men who are topless in their profile photos, The Telegraph reported on Saturday.

Facebook has said that was not a typical experience for teenagers for signing up for the service and that it has safeguards built into its recommendation system.

UK-based charity National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has called for friend recommendations to be suspended for kids on Facebook.

“Social media algorithms risk making it easier for groomers to find and contact children and ‘friend of friend’ or ‘new follower’ recommendations can add legitimacy to their requests, which is why we are calling for these features to be blocked for children,” Andy Burrows, NSPCC associate head of child safety online, was quoted as saying.

“We have teams... focused on keeping children safe,” said a spokesman for Facebook, the Daily Mail said on Saturday. “We use AI to proactively identify cases of inappropriate interactions with minors and we refer potential abuse to law enforcement... We limit how children can be found in search, we remind them to only accept friend requests from people they know.”