Man Wrongly Accused As Serial Killer On Facebook
December 22nd, 2010 | by Jen |A man was forced to flee his home in terror after he was wrongly named on Facebook as a wanted serial killer in the United States.
A vigilante group posted the man’s name and photograph on Facebook and labelled him the “Kensington Strangler”, who is wanted in connection with at least three murders and several sexual assaults in Philadelphia, ABC America reported.
The Facebook group attracted more than 8000 members. A crowd eventually gathered outside the man’s house, forcing him to call the police for help.
He was taken to a police station at his own request and had a DNA test performed, which cleared him of any link to the case.
Police asked the Facebook group’s administrators to take down the photos and remove any reference to the man.
“He is not a suspect, he is not a person that’s connected with this, yet we had to come to his house because crowds gathered outside his home,” Philadelphia police Commissioner Charles Ramsey told the media.
“We don’t need that sort of thing. We can solve this but we can do so protecting the rights of all people.”
The incident is the latest example of the negative potential of social networking websites.
London’s Daily Mail yesterday reported that students of England’s most exclusive private schools were flocking to an interactive gossip website to float rumours about their peers.
LittleGossip.com encourages children to publish anonymous rumours about fellow students and allows other users to rate the tidbits as ‘true’ or ‘false’.
In one post, a student at Emanuel School in Battersea, South London, wrote of another girl at the school: “****** is working her way through the boys, but unfortunately hasn’t made any girl friends along the way, what will she do when she runs out of boys? And who is her next target?”.
In Australia, a 17-year-old is causing a stir by threatening to upload more embarrassing photos of AFL players, despite a court order directing her to stop publishing.