Following on from Tololy’s post earlier this month, Facebook has just taken a tragically darker turn:

A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged.

The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the middle of an online conversation with a man, the al-Arabiya website reported.

The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the “strife” the social networking site is causing in the Islamic nation.

Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki has emerged as the leading critic of Facebook, claiming the network is corrupting the youth of the nation.

“Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food,” he said.

The woman was murdered in August but her death was highlighted following Maliki’s comments.

There are estimated to be more than 30,000 Facebook users in the oil-rich kingdom.

Many Saudi women use nicknames and post comic images or drawings on their pages instead of photographs.

Some Saudi bloggers have dubbed the network “Faceless”.

[Via: Telegraph]

Post-script: I should clarify that in a moment of abject remissness, I implied that Facebook, the company, had taken a darker turn. In fact, I meant the negative fallout surrounding Facebook. Thank you Tololy, Hani, and Yishay for highlighting this discrepancy!