Facebook has threatened to sue the Daily Mail for damages after the paper wrongly claimed in a piece published on Wednesday that 14-year-old girls who create a profile on the social networking site could be approached "within seconds" by older men who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front of them.

Facebook is now threatening to sue the Daily Mail, after an article was published in the newspaper, which suggested that children who create a profile on the popular networking site could be approached by pedophiles "within seconds".

The article, which found its way both, in print and on the official Daily Mail website on 10 March, gave description of how Mark Williams-Thomas, the journalist in question, and who also happens to run a child protection consultancy, posed as a 14-year-old girl in a fake profile, which became the basis of his article.

The article read, "Even after 15 years in police detection I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl".

"Within 90 seconds a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me. I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I'd never before communicated".

But now, Williams-Thomas has refuted the findings of his article. He recently tweeted, "I made it very clear in final copy to the Mail that the experiment was conducted on a SNS [social networking site] no mention of Facebook". When asked to specify which social networking service he did use, Williams-Thomas did not respond.