ACCORDING TO A REPORT at the Guardian, Facebook threatened to sue the Daily Mail 'newspaper' over an article in which it claimed that teenage girls were targetted by sexual predators within seconds of creating a Facebook account.

At issue is a story published under the headline, "I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you."

Following a complaint from Facebook, the Daily Wail has since changed this to, "I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you." Contrary to common expectations, it is not the style of the piece or its tone that is sickening, but the contents.

A Daily Mail writer called Mark Williams-Thomas created an account on an specified social networking site and then sat back and waiting for the predators to turn up. And, turn up they did, "I spent just five minutes on a social networking site posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me. I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I'd never before communicated," he wrote.

Williams-Thomas has in the past penned other non-sensational pieces, including the sensitively toned, "How safe is your daughter? Paedophiles using the web to trap girls are often middle-class and married. And the police are struggling to cope." But it appears that the mention of Facebook in the title of this latest piece was a little too much for its lawyers. Worse still, it was added in by meddlesome editors.

The Mail has changed the name and URL for the piece, and the latter also included the Facebook references. This appears to have appeased lawyers on both sides of the divide.

"In an earlier version of this article, we wrongly stated that the criminologist had conducted an experiment into social networking sites by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set the record straight," reads a statement on the newspaper's revised story.

Parents of young girls, meanwhile, are thought to still be in a panicked state all over middle England. µ