The advertisements did see photos of Rehtaeh Parsons appear, where she happened to be a teen from Canada who committed suicide in April after an image of her rape made its way online. Rehtaeh’s death made international headlines after police did not take any immediate legal action against her alleged rapists as well as cyber bullies, even after the photo did allegedly depict a quartet of boys raping her. The company that placed the ad in Facebook ran under the headline “Find Love in Canada,” and no longer is the website that the ad is linked to online.
Facebook said via a spokesman, “This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image from the internet and using it in their ad campaign. This is a gross violation of our ad policies and we have removed the ad and permanently deleted the advertiser’s account.”