Vernal police investigating offensive comments on Facebook yard sale page

Vernal police investigating offensive comments on Facebook yard sale page

(Geoff Liesik/KSL-TV)


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VERNAL — Police are investigating reports from "many citizens" about offensive material that has been posted on a Facebook yard sale page with more than 12,600 members.

Typically, the Vernal Yard Sale page is a place to pick up used video games, sell a car or buy baby clothes. In the past week, though, the posts on the page have taken an entirely different tone.

"They really started personally attacking people, probably I'd say, Friday," said Erin Larson, a member of the Vernal Yard Sale page who refers to the people behind the posts as "trolls."

Some of the posts include images that depict animal cruelty while others are sexually explicit. There are also posts with pictures taken from other people's Facebook pages and then paired with words meant to demean, embarrass or otherwise hurt the person in the photo or their family members.

Larson said that's what happened to her after she tried to defend her cousin, who was targeted by a malicious post on the yard sale page last week.

"I was sent a private (Facebook) message by a woman, with a picture of my 3-year-old daughter, telling me she was going to sell (my daughter) on all of her sites," Larson said.

The anonymous woman was able to grab the picture, even though Larson has her privacy settings dialed down as tight as possible because Larson had used the image as her cover photo on her Facebook page. Shortly after the picture was posted on the yard sale page, other "trolls" started commenting about the little girl in the photo, Larson said.


I was sent a private (Facebook) message by a woman, with a picture of my 3-year-old daughter, telling me she was going to sell (my daughter) on all of her sites.

–Erin Larson, group member


"They said that my daughter was buried in a backyard or she was in their trunk," the Vernal woman said. "They made multiple comments about her, not just about her being dead, but sexual comments about her."

The Vernal Yard Sale page no longer has an administrator, so Larson said she reported the problem to Facebook. She said that got her nowhere.

"I reported every single one of them — and not just the photos — I reported the people, as well as the group. I reported the comments that they made, and Facebook continually told me that it was within their community standards," Larson said. "It's really frustrating."

Larson isn't alone in her frustration with the social media giant. On Monday, a Duchesne County woman sent a KSL-TV reporter a Facebook message with 28 screenshots of individual Vernal Yard Sale posts that contain sexually explicit content, images of animal cruelty, and examples of what some people have labeled cyberbullying.

The woman said she reported the posts to Facebook but was told they didn't violate the site's community standards. KSL received the same response when it notified Facebook about an image on the yard sale page that advocated the sexual abuse of a girl with Down Syndrome. The image has since been removed from the page.

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In a statement issued Monday, a spokesman for Facebook said the company seeks to find "the right balance between giving people a place to express themselves and promoting a welcoming and safe environment for our diverse, global community."

"Not all disagreeable or disturbing content violates our community standards," the statement continued. "For this reason, we offer people the ability to customize and control what they see by unfollowing, blocking and hiding the posts, people, pages and applications they don’t want to see and we encourage people to use these controls to better personalize their experience."

In a post on its own Facebook page, the Vernal Police Department said investigators are looking into the posts on the Vernal Yard Sale page and "will hopefully get this situation under control."

Larson has chosen to openly challenge the people she believes are behind the posts, going after them on the yard sale page. She has also re-evaluated her own use of social media.

"They're going after families who have dead relatives — anything that they can get," she said, referring to the people behind the posts. "I don't see how that's morally or socially acceptable."

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