Oops. Facebook had another little PR snafu this week when it was discovered that an ad being promoted on the site by an online dating concern featured the image of a dead girl. The girl, Rehtaeh Parsons, made headlines earlier this year when she killed herself in her home of Halifax, Nova Scotia after being bullied and raped. The ad, unfortunately, said, "Find love in Canada!"
Parsons was 17 when she killed herself in April in a tragic situation that came as a result of images that boys had circulated of her in an alleged gang rape 17 months prior, when she was 15. The boys were never charged in the assault.
The culprit here was a company called Lonechat.com which had a sponsored ad on Facebook featuring Parsons' image which was spotted by a Toronto journalist. He then tweeted about the "supreme bad taste of it," leading Facebook ultimately to ban ads from Lonechat altogether.
Facebook's official response:
This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image from the internet and using it in their ad campaign. This is a gross violation of our ad policies and we have removed the ad and permanently deleted the advertiser's account.
We're thinking Lonechat, whose website has gone black, might want to rebrand.
