Facebook has asked the Government for access to data from the sex offenders’ list so it can make sure that no registered sex offenders are on the site.

The safety of young people on the social network has been under the spotlight this week following the jailing of known sex offender Peter Chapman, who used Facebook to meet a 17-year-old girl before raping and murdering her.

Facebook is urging the Government to create a way for information on registered sex offenders to be securely shared with public chat sites and social networks, so they can remove them.

A Facebook spokeswoman said, “If we can get this data from authorities we commit to removing registered sex offfenders from Facebook within days.”

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre this week called for all social networks to adopt its online abuse reporting button. Some major social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are yet to implement the button on their site (nma.co.uk 9 March 2010).

Facebook said that it hadn’t adopted the button because its own system was robust (nma.co.uk 11 March 2010).