A Facebook page that solicited sexy pictures from teenagers hoping to be named the “The Most Beautiful Teen in the World” has been taken down after it sparked outrage from concerned parents and security experts.
The page violated Facebook’s statement of rights and responsibilities, Facebook said in a statement Wednesday. “We do not tolerate bullying and take action on content reported to us which we categorize as such,” the statement read.
Teens began flooding uploaded pictures of themselves on the “Competition for the Most Beautiful Teenager” page as soon as it was created by an unidentified Facebook.
The often-provocative photos, many showing boys with their shirts off and girls in bikinis, posing in their bedrooms and bathrooms at home, were then judged by other Facebook users in comments for all to see.
“I would not touch with a ten-foot pole,” one comment read.
“Her nose is too big,” read another.
The harsh language and the concept of such a competition were too much for Marcy Kemp-Rank, whose 15-year-old daughter, Amy, introduced her to the site after submitting her own photos to be judged.
“She read them [the comments] to me, several of them, and I couldn’t handle hearing them because it just made me very upset and angry,” Kemp-Rank told
ABC News. “I think that was a good thing they took it down. I think it was a way of bullying.”
The “Competition for the Most Beautiful Teenager” page, and the many like it still available to teens on other websites, also raised red flags, security experts say, about online predators.
The page shut down by Facebook was open to anyone, meaning it did not require users to “friend” the publisher, or “like” the page in order to log on and see the thousands of pictures of young boys and girls.
“It is an absolute pool for people that like this sort of thing for the absolute wrong reason,” John Abell, New York bureau chief for Wired.com, told ABC News.
