Bullies going online with Facebook posts (With Video)

By ERIC S. SMITH
esmith@journalregister.com

Facebook has become a breeding ground for nasty comments and embarrassing stories for kids to post about each other, according to five female Great Valley High School students.

Students comment on pictures, calling a person names, or make comments and accusations on someone’s Facebook page that are sexual in nature, said the girls, who asked to remain anonymous. They said there are fights on Facebook where students will bring up an embarrassing event at school, accuse someone of having a sexually transmitted disease or begin a rumor that two students had sex, the girls said.

“Nothing’s ever a secret,” one girl said during an interview at the Exton Square Mall.

The girls’ stories show how Facebook has become a primary tool for cyberbullies. With more than 750 million users, according to Facebook itself, it is the most popular social networking website in the world.

On a local level, bullying reported at West Chester Henderson High School has consistently risen in the last two to three years because of Facebook, according to Koreem Bell, a guidance counselor at the school.

“We can curb bullying during the school day, but students are sharing information at night (with Facebook),” Bell said in a recent interview.

Kathleen Conn, a professor at Neumann University and an expert on cyberbullying, said students spend an average of 7.5 hours per day using electronic devices and of that, two hours is spent on social networking sites.

According to Delaware County Assistant District Attorney Joseph Lesniak, the average teen has 100 friends on Facebook. He considers any harassing comments made on the site to be cyberbullying, because multiple people can read it.

While Facebook can create the kind of rumor spreading and arguments that the five Great Valley students described, that information can also move from the Internet to the real world and lead to more traditional forms of bullying.

Conn said when she was a principal at an elementary school in the West Chester Area School District, she had a fifth-grade student who had a Facebook page. The girl had arranged a fight through Facebook, so Conn brought her in the office and asked her to pull up her page. While the original fight never occurred, Conn found video of a fight between another student and a student teacher at different elementary school in the district.

“The child had no idea (what she was doing),” Conn said.

Facebook is well aware of the problem of the cyberbullying that occurs on its site and has made some changes to help prevent it. Most of its changes have been to the privacy settings for individual users.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote an open letter to Facebook users telling them they now have more direct control over who can view their information. Users can place limits on their profiles so the only their names can be seen by the general public. Also, posted information can be available to everyone, friends of friends or just the user’s friends, he said.

Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s product manager for privacy, said that privacy settings for minors are more restrictive than for everyone else. When a minor shares a post or any information with everyone, it is shared with friends of friends at the most, she said. The information of a minor never really gets into the public, she said.

“Settings for minors will continue to be more restrictive than those for adults,” Sanghvi said in a written statement.

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Judge: Paul Ceglia must turn over more devices to Facebook

Facebook has charged that Paul Ceglia, a man that claims he owns half of the company, has been withholding electronic devices from the court. The company last week asked US Magistrate Judge Leslie Foschio to force Ceglia to turn computers, files, and emails. Once they are in Facebook’s possession, it will have 30 days to review the materials.

Foschio has agreed, giving Ceglia until August 29 to produce more documents and other items as part of his case, according to an official court order (PDF, via Wired). Ceglia has already turned over his computers as part of the lawsuit but Facebook says key items are missing. The judge says Ceglia must either to produce them or explain why he can’t.

Two weeks ago, Facebook said it found “smoking-gun evidence that the purported contract at the heart of this case is a fabrication.” When Facebook’s lawyers asked for a resubmittal of a document to the court due to improper redaction, it turned out the blacked out text referred to an “authentic contract” and “storage devices” that Facebook says Ceglia is intentionally hiding from the company, in violation of a court order.

Facebook said it found the original “authentic contract” between Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Ceglia. Facebook then produced said contract, noting it doesn’t even mention Facebook at all. Not only did the social networking giant reportedly find this allegedly genuine contract on Ceglia’s computer but on the email servers of a Chicago-based law firm, Sidley Austin as well. Facebook alleges that Ceglia emailed the original contract to Sidely Austin back in 2004.

Foschio said Ceglia must allow Facebook’s experts to examine his Web-based email accounts, which he said he used to communicate with Zuckerberg in 2003 and 2004 and later saved on floppy disks. Only then will Zuckerberg be required to turn over 175 emails from his Harvard University account. Ceglia and his team have been waiting for those emails for weeks and once again they have hit a setback: they must wait until five days after Ceglia hands over his electronic material.

Originally, Ceglia’s lawyers said the “authentic contract” is shielded from use in the lawsuit because it is designated as “confidential” under the rules of an agreement between the two parties. As a result, Facebook asked Foschio to overrule that designation; he agreed and ordered Ceglia to hand over documents Facebook says proves he forged the 2003 contract.

As for the “storage devices,” Facebook said that forensic data shows evidence of six USB devices, which it argues were likely used to modify the authentic contract. The company’s lawyers say at least one of those devices includes a folder called “Facebook Files” and an image called “Zuckerberg Contract page1.tif.” Facebook believes that image is the page of the contract that was forged to include mention of an investment in the social network.

In an exclusive interview with ZDNet, Ceglia told me the original “authentic contract” Facebook says it found is really just a Photoshopped image the company planted on his computer. He says he and his lawyers reportedly knew about it for some time and willingly handed it over to Facebook. He told ZDNet that his team will prove the image in question “has no authenticating properties whatsoever.”

Ceglia speculates it could have been Zuckerberg himself, or the US law firm Orrick, Herrington Sutcliffe that may have done the alleged dirty work. Ceglia called Zuckerberg “an admitted forger and an admitted hacker” and explained that Zuckerberg, or someone representing him, carelessly wrote his home address on the allegedly forged document that he didn’t know about or move to until more than a year after the document was supposedly written.

Last but certainly not least, Ceglia says he has conclusive proof that Zuckerberg is lying. He said that anyone with some legal expertise or technical expertise willing to help “nail him down for good” is welcome to join at PaulsCase.com, which requires registration. Via the PaulsCase wiki, Ceglia is trying to open source his lawsuit. His current lawyer is on an interim basis and Ceglia is looking for a more “collaborative” law firm to work with him.

Facebook acknowledges that Ceglia hired Zuckerberg to work for his StreetFax company in April 2003 while Zuckerberg was a freshman at Harvard. Ceglia first legally attacked Facebook in July 2010, saying the contract also included $1,000 initial funding for Facebook, and that he’s entitled to more than half of the social networking giant. That last part Facebook is obviously disputing.

Facebook insists Ceglia is a known con artist. Ceglia, as has been well-documented, has a history of forgery. Since he first filed suit, Ceglia has been dropped by at least four law firms. He is now reportedly living in Galway, Ireland, but the lawsuit is continuing. Ceglia, who called ZDNet from Ireland, maintains that he has been unfairly painted as a con artist.

See also:

• Facebook: Paul Ceglia sent original contract to law firm in 2004
• Exclusive: Paul Ceglia says Facebook is doing the forgery
• Facebook: Ceglia’s contract doesn’t even mention Facebook
• Paul Ceglia moves to Ireland, but Facebook lawsuit will continue
• Facebook: we have proof Ceglia’s contract is a forgery
• Paul Ceglia vs. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Here’s the complaint and it’s a good read
• Facebook: Ceglia claims ‘brazen and outrageous fraud’; Read the response
• Facebook, Zuckerberg open fire on Ceglia: Emails forged by ‘professional con artist’

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