Dive summary:
- An unfortunate incident involving dating website ionechat.com and Facebook ads underscores the importance of doing research before running self-serve ads.
- The dating site ran two separate Facebook ads with two different photos of Canadian teen Rehtaeh Parsons who committed suicide in April after a photo of four guys allegedly raping her at a party surfaced online.
- Ionechat.com was banned from using the site and was apparently a fly-by-night operation, that launching on Aug. 3 and now offline, emphasizing the dangers of a self-serve Facebook ad system that assumes certain competence in its users.
Supreme bad taste: a dating site's Facebook ad is using a picture of Rehteah Parsons. pic.twitter.com/nbYhRFr5Mc
— Andrew Ennals (@andrewennals) September 17, 2013
From the article:
"Ionechat.com has gone offline. Registration records show that the ionechat.com URL was only created on August 3; the administrator named on the account is Dung Nguyen of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (I've emailed him for comment and will update if I hear back). The presumably clueless use of Rehtaeh Parsons' photos by such a fly-by-night operation underscores the hazards of Facebook's self-serve advertising business, which assumes a certain level of competence among its users that was obviously lacking in this case."
