The increase in web pages promoting violence in Limerick on the social network Bebo has prompted calls in the city for their removal.

Several pages on Bebo, which boasts one million accounts in Ireland alone, have been set up by gangs of youths in Limerick city promoting territorial violence and drug dealing.

A blogger at Limerickblogger.org has alerted Bebo to a number of websites promoting gang violence in Weston and elsewhere in the city.

Some of the pages have been removed but Bebo have been criticised for their slowness to do so; instead of taking down the websites, the network has instead advised that users should block the pages from their account.

Bebo only removed certain pages which promoted violence and also contained death threats when repeatedly asked.

Last year, Bebo responded to similar concerns saying they would send a representative from the company to Limerick to meet with locals and learn gang slang in order to recognise which pages were promoting violence. A representative was not sent, however, and Bebo would not respond to questions about whether they were still planning to become involved on the ground in Limerick.

Local councillor Noreen Ryan has called on Bebo to take immediate action and remove the websites. "Obviously it's not right," she said, "anything that glamorises violence is clearly wrong. Most of the people accessing Bebo are under 30, many of them are impressionable. Anything that glamorises violence should be removed – the appropriate authorities should move in to remove that."

The Weston Thugs page was removed, but has now been replaced with another page with the tag line "Weston thugs for life".

Several other pages, including one run by Limerick rapper Nailerz, were also taken down but most have since been replaced with variants of the original pages.

The blogger who fought for the removal of some of the websites, known as Squid, told the Sunday Tribune, "At first they said there was nothing they could do and to ignore them. But I kept pestering them and they deleted them in the end. They should have local moderators to get a better handle on it."

Bebo has been criticised in the past regarding its lax approach to moderation and for failing to identify and remove incidents of cyber bullying.