Facebook has apologized and banned a dating company from advertising on its website after an ad featured a photo of Rehtaeh Parsons, a Halifax teen who died in April after a suicide attempt.

“This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image from the Internet and using it in their ad campaign,” Facebook said in a statement emailed to the Star.

The company said it removed the ad and permanently deleted the account of Ionechat.com.

“We apologize for any harm this has caused,” the Facebook statement said.

The ad featured a photo of Parsons with the caption: “Find Love in Canada! Meet Canadian girls and women for friendship, dating or relationships.” Ionechat.com could not immediately be reached for comment.

Andrew Ennals, a Toronto copy writer, was browsing Facebook late Tuesday afternoon from work and did a double take when saw the image of Parsons.

“It kind of caught my eye because it’s a photo that we’ve all seen a lot,” he said. “I was like wait a minute, is that...?”

A Google search confirmed it was indeed the widely-circulated photo of Parsons.

“I was stunned at how inappropriate it was,” said Ennals, who took a screen shot and shared it on Twitter.

The advertisement was gone less than two hours later, he said.

Parsons was taken off life support in April after a suicide attempt, which her parents said was an act of desperation following an alleged sexual assault when she was 15 and intense cyberbullying that authorities failed to adequately investigate.

Two 18-year-old men were arrested in August and face child pornography charges in connection with the case.

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The late teen’s father, Glen Canning, expressed shock and disbelief about the ad on his website Tuesday.

“I am completely bewildered and disgusted by this,” he said. “This is my daughter, Rehtaeh. They have her in an ad for meeting singles. I don’t even know what to say.”

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