Facebook accused of allowing child porn

Social networking giant Facebook has been accused of allowing child pornography to proliferate by allowing the creation of new pages on the site in which users, some of them underaged, are asked to post naked pictures of themselves.

Kate Drury, a member of Australian watchdog group The Watchers, accused Facebook of allowing dissemination of child pornography to go unchecked via a rash of pages using variations on the 'naked selfies' theme.

"These pages started a couple of weeks ago and there are clearly underage children on there," the Age quoted Drury, as saying.

"It's disgusting and it's illegal, and these children need to understand that once it's up there it's up forever," she added.

The paper also quoted cyber safety expert Susan McLean, as saying that all such pages are in contravention of Facebook''s 'no nudity' policy.

"Images such as these immediately breach Facebook 's terms and conditions. They''ve ordered pictures of breastfeeding mothers to be taken down so these are clearly a problem. I guarantee they will be gone very quickly," she said.

According to the report, such pages on the social networking site are often attracting thousands of 'likes' within hours of going live.

The report revealed that there are at least 30 such pages on Facebook, some with almost 100,000 'likes'.