Social media is great when people use it honestly and ethically, but there always seems to be those people that, for reasons known only to themselves, ruin things through their misuse or abuse, making it rough on the rest of us. Hackers have made computers and the Internet a risk for decades (which is big business for anti-virus companies of course), and now with the popularity of social media, these no-good bad apples are still working their dirty deeds on sites like Facebook.
The amount of fake Facebook pages and non-real “friends” accounts seems to be on the rise (about 14.3 million as reported by CNN a couple of months back), although the company does have a large team in place in an attempt to catch suspicious accounts and activity as much as possible. The New York Times just reported on a case that happened in October, where a small North Carolina hospital all of a sudden found a new, unauthorized page, created as if it represented their establishment. This page began posting derogatory comments about President Obama and Obamacare, and quickly received many likes and garnered enough attention to be written about in the local paper. The hospital filed claims with Facebook to have the page removed, and eleven days later it mysteriously disappeared. Unfortunately, the damage that was done, and the negative comments from it were already public, which could have possibly alienated a section of their clientele who might have seen the page.
I have personally seen a slight rise in fake friend requests than before. Though not a terribly high number, it's been slightly more noticeable in the past year. (Of course, maybe it is just because I have become more aware.) I am not sure if being friends with these accounts is in any way opening a door to hackers, but when I get a request that just looks too suspicious, I ignore it. It makes no sense to me why someone feels the need to waste time abusing a good thing like this, but it continues to happen. I have yet to be shocked by getting a friend request from myself, like Bianca Bosker of the Huffington Post recently encountered, but I have noticed some of the more obvious fake accounts.
Creating and then utilizing fake friend accounts is one way to garner more likes, inflate a page’s numbers and improve perceived popularity, but such tactics are also used for no good. Like the report in June of the UK lady who endured much abuse when others created fake accounts in her name and used them to post explicit comments to damage her reputation. This is basically a form a identify theft. After following all the normal guidelines to report the abuse through Facebook, she ended up having to pursue legal action in order to get the social media giant to reveal the IP addresses of these trolls, so further action can be taken against them once their true identity is discovered. A Facebook spokesman said: "There is no place for harassment on Facebook, but unfortunately a small minority of malicious individuals exist online, just as they do offline. We respect our legal obligations and work with law enforcement to ensure that such people are brought to justice.”
These accounts not only abuse individuals, but also companies, which use analytics for advertising. Fake accounts and artificially increased likes can have a real effect on the pocketbook.
The article from The New York Times also cites Facebook security leader Joe Sullivan, who says that fake accounts are "pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time.” Since August of this year, it is reported that they have added up to 300 staff members to help control the problem. They have also recently joined forces with anti-virus companies to give users extra protection. Yet, when it came to the reported abuse by the fake hospital page, “Facebook declined to comment on the incident, and pointed only to its general Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”
While responses like this have been less than satisfactory, hopefully they will take new measures quickly before these things spiral out of hand and Facebook gets labeled as no longer a “safe” place to play.
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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