OK, the BBC are starting to piss me off with the biased reporting. This same story could easily be written the other way, something along the lines of "Less than 0.0001% of UK Facebook users use panic button."

Instead, they opt for "more than 200" reports. Seriously? Out of a user base of 23 million? OMG!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10953600

How many of those were seriously founded?

Plus it had to be downloaded. I would have thought that for under 18's the app should have been installed automatically. It is a minimal figure considering the numbers of members. Though the real issue is kids having insufficient guidance to be aware of potential problems on the net.

You seem to have fallen into a classic pitfall of reporting on others' misreporting of statistics, in that there seems to be a quantity / quality confusion here.

These numbers need context, which neither the BBC in their article, nor you in your criticism of it are providing. You have relied on a quantity based analysis of rape murders, which I find implausible.I'm not sure how many teenage murder rapes* this button would need to prevent before it was worth the trivial sounding hassle to create it, but I hope we would all agree on something less than 200, even if that is 0.0001% of total UK Facebook users**.

The BBC has vaguely hinted at a quality based analysis "There have been some very serious allegations", which lacks supporting evidence. It could perhaps be criticized on those grounds, but not, I'm afraid, on the grounds you chose.


* which I presume is only the most extreme kind of crime being tackled (effectively or otherwise) here
** a potentially misleading raw number; I am one of those 28 million, but I have no need for this button as there is no possible way for anyone to do anything bad to me via social networking.

The most vital statistic that is missing is how many reports are actually justified and actioned upon.

Indeed, but that is a value judgment, not a matter of quantity. Thus the quantitative based claim of bias in your original post is clearly not appropriate.

The most vital statistic is surely what proportion of these children were being properly supervised at the time.

Probably zero.