Hilarie: Taking Facebook more seriously

Oct 31 2009 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

The Girl hardly ever speaks to her friends on the phone. All our worries about massive phone bills have been for nought. She now spends a good part of every evening Facebooking or on what she refers to as ‘the forum’. This is the place where she ‘speaks’ to her schoolfriends, most of whom she sees every day. When we finally call her away from the computer she transfers her attention to her mobile phone, which is lit up like a Christmas tree as text messages fly backwards and forwards.

Because she is mostly a sensible girl I don’t worry too much about the Facebooking and texting.

But as we all now know, social networking can be a risky business.

This week a 17-year-old girl from County Durham was lured to her death by a 32-year-old man who had been posing as a teenager on Facebook.

The fact is that anyone can claim to be anything on Facebook. The Girl has proved this by opening an account for her father and riddling it with false information – of the humorous variety (humorous to her, anyway).

Young people are often vulnerable, inexperienced and naive. While it might suit parents to have their children ‘safely’ at home instead of standing on street corners, we ought to know what they’re doing instead.

The time has come, I think, for me to take Facebook a little more seriously.