The Daily Mail recently ran an article that claiming that 14-year-old girls who create aprofile on Facebook could be approached "withinseconds" by older men who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front ofthem.
Facebook is now threatening to sue the Daily Mail for damages claiming that their reputation may be permanently damaged.
The paper called the article's content an error (they claim it was another social networking site--not Facebook that should have been referenced in the article), and has apologized.
But Facebook said that although the Mail has changed the headline of the article online – so that it now reads "I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you" – it had not at first changed the page title of the article online, used by internet search engines to index content, nor the URL of the piece, which is also a factor in search-engine indexing.
According to the UK Guardian, the company is concerned that the article may have done permanent harm to its reputation in the UK. "If you were a Middle England reader and your child was on Facebook, this sort of thing would have a very serious effect on what you thought of us," said the Facebook spokeswoman.
