Is the Daily Mail publishing child porn?

it was 2007 when the media first really discovered the power of Facebook. When a disgruntled student shot 32 people and himself at Virgina Tech, journalists around the world suddenly added themselves to the university's Facebook network, allowing them to view the profiles and (crucially) photographs of the victims. A picture of a "pretty" female victim wearing a revealing toga at fancy-dress party was used over and over again, the post-massacre equivalent of A-level results day.

Ever since then I've had a nagging fear that, if I die in some tragic or unusual manner, picture editors will plunder my Facebook profile for pictures and that the world will remember me looking absolutely hammered as I sit on the floor of a nightclub with a bottle of tequila in each hand. It's the 21st century version of your mum worrying that you won't be wearing clean underpants if you get run over.

The Daily Mail hates social networking sites generally and Facebook in particular, but isn't shy of exploiting it when it serves a purpose. Such as when a suddenly famous woman has sold her story to a rival paper and you need to dish some dirt on her and, crucially, track down some photos.

Our case study for today is Jennifer Thompson, best-known for sleeping with Wayne Rooney. One recent story on the Mail website included a staggering 19 photos of the woman, including fairly innocent shots of her in a bikini while apparently on holiday, many of which appear to have been lifted from her Facebook profile.

Which is interesting, as earlier this week the Mail quoted one "friend" from her schooldays who said Ms Thompson:

"...Craved attention and used to put pictures of herself in the bath and in tiny bikinis on her Bebo and Facebook sites. The boys at school used to laugh at them."

The paper also notes that when she was 17 Miss Thompson slept with footballer El Hadji Diouf, and posted pictures of the two together on her Bebo page. One of the photos used in the 19-picture epic shows a fresh-faced Thompson with the Bolton spit-machine / striker. I'm guessing this is a lift of the Bebo picutre; if so, experience tells me that many of the other pictures will have come from Thompson's social media pages too. The paper states that the Hadji Diouf pic was taken when Thompson was only 17 - do you think the Mail carefully checked all the bikini pictures to make sure they were taken after she turned 18, or has the paper been publishing revealing shots of children again?

I say "again" because of their well-documented coverage of various other children in states of undress.