James Delahunty
22 Sep 2013 17:28
Facebook apologized this week after it emerged an ad running on the social network was using a photo of a teenager who committed suicide.
Seventeen year old Rehtaeh Parsons took her own life after months of cyber bullying and an alleged sexual assault. A Facebook user noticed an ad for an online dating site was using the girl's picture and grabbed a screenshot of it. After tweeting the screenshot, outrage quickly ensued.
Facebook became aware of the issue and took prompt action to remove the ad and ban the advertiser.
"This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image from the Internet and using it in their ad campaign," a spokeswoman for Facebook said.
"This is a gross violation of our ad policies. We apologize for any harm this has caused."