London: Facebook is encouraging ‘grooming’ by offering to teenage girls middle-aged men as ‘friend suggestions.’ Teenage girls, as young as 13-year-olds, who join the social network, are given up to 300 suggestions, as to who they can add as friends, some of which include middle-aged men who are topless in their profile photos, The Telegraph reported late 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. Following the findings, UK-based charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, has called for friend recommendations to be suspended for children on the social networking giant’s platform.
‘‘Groomers are seeking to infiltrate children’s friendship groups on social networks, often with the intention to move children to live streaming or encrypted sites where it is easier for them to commit sexual abuse,” Andy Burrows, NSPCC Associate Head of Child Safety Online, was quoted as saying.
According to Facebook, the company has safeguards to protect children. However, the campaigners warn that the networking giant must do more to stop groomers who use the site to become friendly with children. In October, Facebook had removed 8.7 million user images of child nudity with the help of previously undisclosed machine learning software that automatically flagged such photos during the last quarter.
The company has said that it is also considering rolling out systems for spotting child nudity and grooming to Instagram.
“Grooming is incredibly serious, and we have teams specifically focused on keeping children safe, informed by extensive research and outside experts,” said a spokesman for Facebook.
‘‘We use artificial intelligence 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 and we caution them before making public posts.”