Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide empire is such that he has very little time to devote to the daily running of his beloved british tabloid. The Sun, however, affords plenty of time in promoting the rest of News Corp’s many and varied interests.
Since News Corp’s acquistion of MySpace in July 2005 for half a billion dollars, the website has been fighting a losing battle with competitor Facebook for top dog supremacy of the social network website market.
But Murdoch’s empire is not accustomed to settling for second place and the empire has unleashed its pitbull against its rival.
On 17/04/08 the Sun dedicated a double page spread, adorned with the headline “Off their facebook”, to highlight the Facebook groups that encourage members to over indulge in cocaine.
It presented two case studies, casual drug users in the past, who were transformed into out-of-control coke-mountain hoovers after joining the groups.
Dean from Clapham claimed that the groups had a “feeling of camaraderie” and “it felt like we were bonding over a shared experience.”
The site, Dean claimed, taught him how cheap he could get his charlie, where to find a dealer and what drugs to mix with his coke. He’s now calling for a ban or age restriction on the groups.
Heather was similarly dragged down into a drug hell because of Facebook. She said groups celebrating drug use made her feel “accepted and cool”.
She was goaded into taking more and more drugs until she realised that she “didn’t even know these people, and had succumbed to a world where taking drugs seemed the norm when, really, it wasn’t.”
Thankfully, under pressure from the Sun, Facebook have promised to shut down these portals into chemical hell.
This Facebook expose followed hot on the heels of an article on 02/04/08 about the dangers of social network websites, how they encourage promiscuriy and celebrate booze fuelled behaviour.
Mentions of MySpace, the second most popular of such sites, were thin on the ground.
But the article featured an incredible thirteen mentions of Facebook in the double page spread which explained how one user had bedded 50 men through Facebook and showed how another Facebookee could only remember her boozy nights out from photos placed on the site.
Of course, the fact that the Sun’s accusing digits are pointed squarely at Facebook has nothing to do with the fact that it has surged past the Murdoch owned Myspace in popularity.
