Mafioso On Facebook

© 2009 Associated Press (Photo: Labruzzo)

by Caroline Trudeau

This week, The New York Times has revealed that many Facebook pages have been created in honor of Mafioso, including a page named “Fans of Toto Riina, a Misunderstood Man” dedicated to Salvatore Riina, the boss of bosses, arrested in 1993 and now serving multiple life sentences.

Those pages have raised a lot of indignation in Italy, where anti-mafia groups were created on Facebook, asking the network website to remove all pro-mafia pages. Some people have even compared those pages to sites honoring Hitler or Nazism. Senator Gianpiero D’Alia, senator of an anti-mafia commission, also asked Facebook to remove the pages, arguing in a phone interview with The New York Times that “we can’t accept in virtual reality what we don’t accept in real reality.” 

Facebook has already taken down some pages based on the fact that they were violating the site’s terms of use. Those rules ban any content deemed as “harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnical or otherwise objectionable.”

In Italy, an investigation is ongoing to determine if those pages might be a new way to send coded messages between the members of the Mafia, or only unthreatening messages from fans.

• What should be the standard or "test" used by Facebook about those kind of groups?
• Like discussed in the Google's article, where is the limit between free speech and hate speech?
• If authorities demonstrate those pages can be dangerous for the security of Italy, should Facebook take down the pages?