Facebook in ‘panic button’ U-turn

JUST days after it was forced to tighten its privacy settings, social networking site Facebook is to do a U-turn on its policy of not having “panic buttons” on its web pages.

Facebook had been roundly criticised by anti- bullying bodies and authorities combating child sex predators for not having a button on each section of its site allowing users who felt threatened online to quickly contact organisations such as Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP).

For some time, while sites such as Bebo had acknowledged the problem and installed the CEOP button, Facebook refused saying it had invested large sums of money in its reporting system.