aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Why Facebook needs the money
Earlier in the week I posted about a WSJ report that Microsoft is in talks to buy up to a 5% stake in Facebook for $300-500 million. Why would a company anticipating revenues of $150 million and profits need capital?
The New York attorney general has started investigating the safety measures Facebook has put in place, and based on his preliminary investigations, he is not happy. His staff has found sexual predators and a wide variety of pornographic material, including images and videos, prompting him to issue a subpoena.
“My office is concerned that Facebook’s promise of a safe website is not consistent with its performance in policing its site and responding to complaints,” Cuomo said in a press release.
“Parents have a right to know what their children will encounter on a website that is aggressively marketed as safe.” Cuomo is angered by the fact that Facebook has “ignored several — and repeated — complaints from our undercover investigators concerning persons who made inappropriate sexual advances to underage users.”
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but the way it looks to me, Facebook needs money for what is clearly a big crisis facing the company. MySpace, the company the FB-crew used to mock, has already had to deal with a similar mess, both legal and image-wise, which not only proved to be a major disruption to their business but cost a ton of money. And that was without a subpoena.
I was kind of hoping Facebook might defend itself with facts about online youth victimization. I realize that’s crazy in this atmosphere and that it will not happen, but if it were going to happen it would certainly be pricey.
