Mother sues newspapers over Bebo defamation

A mother is suing six national newspapers for defamation and breach of privacy after they ran stories and photos taken from Bebo about a 'drunken party' that turned out to be false, reports the Independent.

On her Bebo page, Jodie Hudson described a riot of sex and wanton damage fuelled by under-age drinking that only ended when the police arrived. Newspapers leapt on the story and published photos from her Bebo site alongside their reports.

But Hudson's lurid description of the party, subsequently carried in a number of national newspapers, turned out to be fantasy. The media stories, and the accompanying pictures taken from Bebo, are now the subject of a landmark legal case that could redraw the boundaries of the use of information published on social networking sites including Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.

Should newspapers be able to access and - if deemed newsworthy enough - publish your photos and writings from social networking sites, without your permission? Surely its a journalist's reponsbility to corroborate stories like this *before* they publish them?