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The fake Facebook profile industry

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Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#91

Post by srtjstjsj »

djsumdog wrote: post #81
abtom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that could have happened to anyone. Not just because of misplaced trust in an online partner but because it's easy to create fake screenshots of conversations using Photoshop or simply Inspect Element. I'm interested in how you mitigated the damage once the post was published. A good strategy might have been to simply discredit it as being fake/photoshopped along with a small tutorial showing how ea…

The OP probably didn't think about it, but that's really a great idea/strategy. I bet the poster was just so rattled by it he didn't think about just denying it. I can see why the police/fbi can't really do anything. It doesn't seem like there was anything criminal technically. They might be able to go after the person with a civil suit for slander? I don't know though, not a lawyer.

Blackmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackmail is a crime

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#92

Post by duiker101 »

fiatpandas wrote: post #12

This... was an unreadable experience. Gratuitous animations, football field sized paragraph widths, proportional/fluid CSS sizing (thought maximizing my browser on a 1080p screen would allow me to see more), bite sized paragraphs interspersed with information-thin graphic inserts, full width graphics that have a larger height than your browser viewport, text swooshing down the screen while you're scrolling because th…

I quite liked it but there was one annoying thing: occasionally, new sections would open in between the lines, after the part is was reading, stopping me from reading. That was actually quite painful and annoying.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#93

Post by srtjstjsj »

irishbro wrote: post #8

The 2010 documentary catfish, and subsequent mtv series, offers an interesting look behind the curtain at the type of people who create fake facebook profiles. It covers a wide variety of reasons for creating them spanning from people who suffer from low self-esteem and confidence issues to not being able to reveal that they are homo-sexual out of fear of their friends and family finding out, just out of pure malice…

You might also enjoy similar documentaries Cloverfield, The Blair Witch Project, and This is Spinal Tap ;-)

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#94

Post by bluGill »

dannyw wrote: post #3

I find it unbelievable that Facebook doesn't have the fake profile situation under control. Facebook builds an incredibly detailed social graph of every user (and non-user) with a big trail of activity, on and off Facebook. Surely there are signs; surely there are common characteristics, and if this journalist can write such a detailed exposé with only public data, Facebook can do much better.

This morning a guy from high school finally joined Facebook and sent me a friend request. I don't track him in real life, but were have enough of a connection that I'll click yes if that is really him. I honestly do not know for sure if this is him or not: I decided it is, but it wouldn't be hard to social engineer all the data that is on Facebook so I'm not sure. (I decided it is him because his name isn't in my friends list, while all the spam I've seen so far is someone already in my friend list)

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#95

Post by srtjstjsj »

djsumdog wrote: post #31
ensiferum wrote: post #27

Hah, how stupid do you need to be to fall into this obvious trap. Let's see... a random cute girl approaches you online and wants to initiate a sexy chat. The chances of this happening for real and not being a scam are about the same as you being a distant cousin to a Nigerian prince who just passed away and left you millions of dollars of inheritance.

Spam relies on that 1% return, and it comes from either the lowest, the most ignorant, the most uneducated, .. or potentially the most lonely. That's what's probably the most insidious about this particular type of scam, that they target people who may have already made a series of bad decisions, or who are desperate and alone.

> that they target people who may have already made a series of bad decisions, or who are desperate and alone.

like alcohol, casinos+lotteries, and free-to-play games with microtransactions

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#96

Post by throwawaykite »

throwawayfish wrote: post #32

Using a throwaway account to keep things private Last year I was "sex-torted" on Facebook but not by a ring of French criminals. Instead, it was by someone I had chatted with on the internet years ago (while we were both still teenagers) She had recently gotten divorced and contacted me after many years away. We spoke about intimate things (I never shared intimate images, though she did) and were getting closer and c…

Really sorry to hear about your ordeal — I was once wrongly accused by a woman of something heinous and it took me a while to recover from the shock and PTSD.

In particular this part of your post bothers me: “The experience haunts me to this day..”

No - This shouldn’t be the case. You did nothing wrong. While there is no magic wand to “fix” how you feel - and esp low probability that an online post from a stranger would do anything but please consider the following strategies:

1. Try to understand shame. What is it and Why it is there? (evolutionary reasons) It might be liberating.

2. Know quite simply that the past doesn’t exist. Except In our heads.

3. Take inspiration: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37735368

4. Try to research into revenge porn - what happened to you is very common; in some parts of the world with serious consequences for women - understanding that you are not alone (or special) might be oddly liberating.

5. Talk to someone. Maybe even a pro.

Just some strategies that are available to you - hope you heal soon. (I am sure you are already trying to recover - Your message just stuck a cord and I wanted to offer advice)

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#98

Post by zanny »

sddfd wrote: post #90
CaptSpify wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have every incentive to do the opposite though. Fake profiles still count towards ad-revenue because advertisers aren't calling Facebook out on their bullshit.

Sounds like a competitor of Facebook should do it then..

You can't compete with mindshare on that scale. The network effects are ludicrous. People have made generally better products than Facebook for years that all wither because they don't have a billion people and everyone you already know on them.

If Facebook were using an open protocol like Ostatus anyone could make a peer network that is better than Facebook and actually compete, but their userbase is entirely locked into their platform. On purpose, of course, thats why investors value FB so highly. Its entirely against their interests to enable competition.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#99

Post by addicted »

dopamean wrote: post #87
code_duck wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The climate of judging people for private sexual morality is slowly changing in the United States… Same with marijuana smoking. In the 90s, affairs or past pot smoking were considered a big deal. Since then, we have elected Obama and Trump, who would not have passed moral snuff in the 80s.

I know plenty of people who despite really, really disliking Donald Trump were very put off by the public discussion of the "pee tape" stuff. They called it kink shaming and said that on its own it shouldn't matter if that is the kind of stuff the President is into. I tend to agree and I think a lot of other sensible people do too.

That’s a completely different situation. Assuming that such a tape exists, the issue isn’t that Trump has sexual kinks. The issue is that the President is subject to blackmail from a foreign power.

If such a tape existed for anyone else and was in the hands of a foreign government, that person would not be able to get the lowest level of security clearance in the US because the opportunity for blackmail places them at great risk.

In an ideal world Americans would be more like the French and not care about people’s personal consensual sex lives at all, in which case the tape would lose all its blackmailing power, but since the American public does care, the possibility of blackmail is real.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#100

Post by WhitneyLand »

throwawayfish wrote: post #32

Using a throwaway account to keep things private Last year I was "sex-torted" on Facebook but not by a ring of French criminals. Instead, it was by someone I had chatted with on the internet years ago (while we were both still teenagers) She had recently gotten divorced and contacted me after many years away. We spoke about intimate things (I never shared intimate images, though she did) and were getting closer and c…

Do we take people too literally, when they say they care about human suffering and justice? Yes you were a victim, but not a noble victim in the eyes of most people, so that’s why hardly anyone cared.

You hear people say everybody likes sex, but it’s not true. Actually everyone mostly hates sex. What they really mean is, out of one million possible sexual acts, there are 3, 6, or maybe a dozen they love, and 99.9% that they think are disgusting. The only difference between any of us is whether or not we insist that our 6 are better than everyone else’s.

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