Facebook sued for $1 billion over Intifada page - Should social networking sites be banned?

The news article can be found here (warning: the link may be broken after some time): http://sg.news.yahoo.com/facebook-sued-1-billion-over-intifada-page-20110401-165835-801.html Facebook and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg had been hit with a lawsuit of over $1 billion in damages over a page called "Third Intifada" which was against Israel. Facebook shut down the page this week, which had almost 500,000 fans. The lawsuit filed in court claims that the social networking site "showed negligence" by not quikly responding to appeals to remove the page. Facebook said that the page was intially tolerated because it "began as a peaceful protest", but direct calls of violence began to appear on the page and the page was removed because it was against Facebook policies.

Now I would like to pose a question: Should social networking sites be banned?

As technology advances, social networking sites are now more easily accessible (through portable laptops and iPhones/Andriods) and becoming more and more popular, especially among teenagers, as an easy way to communicate.

In this case, Facebook was exploited and used a a platform for people to hurt others. The new generation of bullying is cyber-bullying. It is becoming increasingly common nowadays. There are children as young as 9 that have Facebook accounts. This promotes cyber-bullying. People who create false accounts assume a false identity and this makes it easy to prey on their victims. Surely, the developers of Facebook did not create Facebook for such a reason. This leads us back to the question again. Should social networking sites be banned? Having that many negative points, we need to consider if social networking sites are actually helpful. Despite the negative points, I believe that Facebook is also useful in many ways. In the recent Japan earthquake, the news reported that a lady had used Facebook to assure her friends that she was all right, as she was around the region at the time of the earthquake. Additionally, there was another who posted a status message, trying to find her missing family member, sure enough, after a week, someone responded to her post. The person reassured her that her family member was safe and sound at a rescue camp. Also, Twitter is constantly used by people to update others on certain things, which provides stress relief and entertainment. These are all examples of social networking sites being useful to us. In conclusion, I believe that if everyone plays a part in keeping social networking sites a positive social platform (not exploiting them), social networking sites can be relatively safe and good to use.