Facebook Apologizes For Using Photo of 17-Year-Old Girl Who Committed Suicide in Dating Ad

Killed herself after being bullied online

Facebook has apologised for publishing a dating ad featuring a photo of a 17-year-old who had killed herself after complaining of being cyber-bullied.

Canadian Rehtaeh Parsons took her own life in April having been severely bullied after a separate photo, showing her alleged rape by four boys, was circulated online, her mother has said.

Her father said on Wednesday that he had been "disgusted" by the advert.

Comments

[Killazontherun]

Of the millions of pictures they have access to and rights to use, they pick the one that would result in the most possible PR damage? Internal sabotage?

[Malvolio]

Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

[Robert]

Obviously somebody goofed trying to cheap out & grab a pic of a pretty young lady without paying stock photo charges. Somebody did a quick search, this picture was in the news, didn't look at the story, and figured that it was free for commercial use.

But the story also said:

Two 18-year-old men have since appeared in court charged with child pornography offences.

WTF? No explanation of what that had to do with this. Clearly the photo used, a head shot, was not pornographic. Maybe it had to do with some other porn that was somehow connected to this person's harassment.

[johnl]

She was very pretty so FB used her picture in an advertisement. There is no malice there. Her family says that someone else assaulted her and someone else still published photos of the assault. That's bad but FB didn't do it. The lawsuit is a shameless attempt to pimp out a corpse by a family that obviously had no affection for the victim. Stupidity doesn't explain this.