14 DAY TRIAL // Raoul Moat has become somewhat of a household name in the UK for the past few weeks after going on a shooting spree and evading the police for a week. He shot and wounded his ex-girlfriend, killed her new boyfriend and shot a police officer. He was eventually cornered by the police and shot himself to avoid capture.
Surprising or not, he actually had quite a lot of people rooting for him and, as is the norm these days, they set up a Facebook group titled "R.I.P. Raoul Moat You Legend!," which the social network has refused to take down, despite critics.
As in the past, Facebook is reluctant to act as the moral police of the web and won’t take down pages or groups that some may find offending unless they are clearly breaking the law or violate its terms of use. This is a common stance for Facebook and one that has been criticized before.
But now, event the British Prime Minister is getting involved. David Cameron, who had a very collegial talk with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just the other week, has now come out against the social network, albeit not directly.
Talking in Parliament yesterday he commented: “As far as I can see, it is absolutely clear that Raoul Moat was a callous murderer-full stop, end of story-and I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims, and for the havoc he wreaked in that community; there should be no sympathy for him.”
Later there was talk about the government asking Facebook to remove the page. This hasn’t been confirmed, but Facebook decided to make the first move and defend its position.
“Facebook is a place where people can express their views and discuss things in an open way as they can and do in many other places, and as such we sometimes find people discussing topics others may find distasteful, however that is not a reason in itself to stop a debate from happening,” the company said in a statement.
“[I]n contrast to the pub or the phone, Facebook offers tools for people to report material easily, so that we can quickly review and remove from the service anything that is against our terms,” it added. This is in line with what the social network has done before and it should be interesting to see if the discussions escalate beyond this point or if people just move on.